I've been home for a week or so and I'll be going back out again with Matt Nathanson this weekend.  The tour page will have all of the upcoming shows.  I am also playing a show at Joe's Pub with Tracy Bonham!  It will be Tracy on violin and guitar, me, Nicole Federici on viola, Dan Cho on cello and  Matt Beck on guitar.  We had a rehearsal today and it'll be a fun show.  Then in June, I'll be out with Matt Nathanson again doing acoustic shows opening for The Indigo Girls.  We play Central Park Summer Stage on June 16th!
 
I did get to take a tour of the Gretsch factory.  It was amazing and I got to see the machines that made my Gretsch drums from the 70s and 80s!!  Paul, the Production Manager, took me around himself.  It was quite an honor for me and I got to meet.......wait for it.....wait........Mr. Fred Gretsch!  I put some pictures up just to prove it.  Mr. Gretsch can be seen signing a custom snare drum.

The past several months have been jam packed!  I am out on the road right now with Matt Nathanson and we are doing shows with Jack's Mannequin and Erin McCarley.  We played last night in West Palm Beach for SunFest and our front house engineer took it too seriously and got pretty sunburned.  I ran around the grounds looking for some aloe gel, but there was none to be found.  It's SunFest and no one sells anything for the sun?.....crazy!!!!  I woke up early this morning, so I thought I would update the site a bit.  Traveling on the bus has been great- no driving for me!  We have a night off tonight and I am going to the Gretsch drum factory to geek out.  There are only 2 more weeks of this tour and then we have a bunch on one-off dates over the summer including Central Park Summer Stage and...........MADISON SQUARE GARDEN!!!.  We are opening for OAR.  I am extremely excited about these shows.  We are also working on the new record.  We did a week in San Francisco a few months ago and we go back in for another round in June.  The current album, Some Mad Hope, is still going strong with another single, Falling Apart, being played more and more.  These Matt tours are a blast to do!
 
SXSW was great this year.  I got to see alot of friends and hear some cool stuff.  I played a handful of shows with The Silos- who are in the middle of recording a new album.  I also played with Clarence Bucaro.  He is such an awesome singer!
 
In other news, the Clarence Bucaro album, 'Til Spring, came out and sounds wonderful.  I played Mountain Stage with him and it should air sometime in June...at least we recorded the show in spring.
 
I did a little recording on the new Tracy Bonham record which is being mixed by Tchad Blake right now.
 
The Oxygen Ponies record, Harmony Handgrenade, gets officially released on May 19th.  This record was produced by the amazing Don Piper and it is always a joy to record with Don.  He is truly THE MAN!  Some songs from this record were played on Bob Harris' show on BBC Radio 2.  The dude is a legend.  He said "I think this music is amazing".  YES!!!
 
I also played a show with group that I have been a fan of for a long time, Spottiswoode and His Enemies.  Jonathan Spottiswoode wrote a musical and we did a staged reading of it at Joe's Pub in NYC to a sold out room.  There were 7 actors and 6 musicians all crammed up on that tiny stage and we had a blast.  It went great and I'm hoping that it can get fully produced at some point.
 
Look for an upcoming album from Ed Rogers of The Bedsit Poets too.
 
Well, I am going to get to my morning yogurt and granola now.