LIVE ON GROTT ONES
released MAY 23, 2023
RELEASE 129
Live recording by the 2022-2023 full band lineup. This was the first time I brought a tablet on stage instead of sheets of paper for the lyrics. I'm not very good at memorizing my own lyrics, a side effect of the role of lyric-writing in my creative process, so either I have something to make singing easier, or it's not gonna be a good show. The full performance is on YouTube, as well as a sort of Hot Ones episode where the 4 of us answer questions. None of the sauces were very hot, so 3 of us had a nice chill time. Our bass player was less fortunate. I don't necessarily think of this as an important document of anything, but there aren't a lot of soundboard recordings of HW shows so this has to at least count for that. "Great Ideas" has more life in it than the album version. It's probably just the tempo, but really that makes a huge difference. "No Victories" is pretty different from the album version. I think I talked about this when posting about an earlier live album from this era, but when I brought this to the band at practice, I didn't teach it to them. I just said "this song has 2 chords" and played the song. It instantly became this monster that it hadn't been previously. It worked for what we were doing. This was the last time we ever did "Witness". We liked the 7-minute wall of noise that it had became, but we thought it was more important to play the new songs we had been working on. Maybe the highlight of the whole thing is at the very end, where you can faintly hear our bass player say "now that I've thoroughly fucking deaf, holy shit!"