Okay, first I have to confess that I didn’t get as good a look at Saskatoon as I ordinarily would have because of that damn road game where you have to find words on signs with the letters of the alphabet. The whole way into town I was feverishly reading everything in sight looking for “Q". It seems like a pretty nice town, though; I got a good vibe from it.

Marcus had an interview scheduled at CFCR, and we thought we pulled up right on time only to discover that Saskatchewan doesn’t use daylight savings time, so we were there an hour early. We hung out at the station for a while, caught up on email, and then Marcus did a few songs and an interview on air. From there we headed over to Lydia’s to load in and settle in in the band room. To our surprise, there were some familiar faces waiting for us - Trina Nestibo, a solo singer/songwriter from Brandon who is also touring right now. Her tour manager, Joelle May (ModMay Promotions) is our publicist from Calgary. Last week we found ourselves all at the Railway in Vancouver on the same night, when Trina played an early show before our tour kickoff show. As it happens, she had played Lydia’s the night before, and was sticking around another day to open for us. Small country, isn’t it?

Lydia’s is a nice place with a really nice stage. Rob had to set up in the corner, which was optimized for drums. That meant I had to be in the middle, since Marcus is left-handed and if I am on his right, there is a very good chance we will smash our guitar headstocks into each other and bad things will happen. Joey worked with the house soundman, Ian, to get things fine-tuned, and everything sounded great both on and off the stage.

We were initially competing with a few bigger shows down the road, but by the time we went on there was a decent crowd of drinkers ready to roll. When we started, a girl sitting next to the merch table grabbed our display t-shirt and put it on over her own to dance alone in front of us. There was a fair bit of happy cheering and hooting between songs. Marcus decided to do the raffle this time by asking who was from the furthest north, and rewarded a girl from Nunavut with a package of Insta-Snow powder - it’s the kind you mix up with some water and then it turns into fluffy snow-like stuff that doesn’t melt. Unfortunately she was a little too drunk to handle her Insta-Snow, opened it up and sprayed the powder all over the stage, so I’m still picking the damn stuff out of my keyboard and laptop. Thanks.

Anyways, we had a fantastic night. We played through all of our material (except Launching Pad, a little too mellow) and had a good crowd of people dancing, so when they all went on a mass smoke break, we took a quick break to wait for them, then hopped back on stage to give them the extended dance remix version of You Coming Down. We weren’t done until almost 2:00.

We packed up and headed up to the band room, which is a pretty crazy little place. The bathroom has been done up as an homage to Jagermeister (apparently Lydia’s is the top Jager consumer of the country). Really a photo will do it better justice than I can with words:

I was wiped and headed off for some sleep but the more resilient folks hung out for a while with some beer and what was apparently the most overpriced pizza in history.

Today we’ve got a day off, and we’re headed towards Brandon because we’ve got some friends playing at the Western Canadian Music Awards and want to go say hi. Bye Saskatchewan, hello Manitoba!