We would all like to extend a heartfelt thanks to everyone who hosted, assisted, and played with us on this tour, and of course to all of those who came out and watched us do our thing. To everyone at 1427 and Jacob’s Porch in Columbus, thank you so much for your hospitality, enthusiasm, and kindness. It was an awesome way to start out the tour. Reva, Dave, Scott, and Matt, thanks for making this Al’s Bar show the best yet. Brianna, your incredible voice and songs soothed our tired selves in Newport and were perfectly suited to the beautiful Southgate House Revival.

Words do not do justice to the kindness of our friends in the northern midwest. The Daredevil Christopher Wright is the best band in the world made up of some of the best people in the world. One day we will be one giant Voltron-like love machine. Phox is tight as hell and also wonderously hospitable and generous – they welcomed us into their home as if we were family and showed us an incredible time in Madison. You are all so, so much fun and we can’t wait to see you in New York City sometime soon. A special thanks to Sam Brown for making the Mid West Music Fest happen and for being an irrepressible source of enthusiasm and good vibes. You are the man, Sam, and we hope to come back to Winona soon. Thanks also to our host Claire for welcoming us into your spacious digs.

This is our basement setup.

The last handful of shows on our tour afforded us the opportunity to get to know Joey Molinaro and Bullshit, and it was a true pleasure. Joey’s music is, in many ways, very different from ours, but he’s a total badass and we loved each other’s music without reservation. J & B were always extremely encouraging, and we got to play some pretty unusual (for us) venues as a result of this collaboration. Jordan and Dan of Chicago’s Comfort Station, thank you so much for providing such a warm, welcoming, and well-located place to present music, and big ups to Patrick for making the Totally Awesome Fest a totally awesome place to be for a gorgeous afternoon in Ypsi.

TAF 2013 was idyllic.

Thank you Darien and Sandy (and your beautiful cats) for putting us up in Cleveland. Thank you Maggie for housing us and cooking for us all with Shane’s assistance in Eau Claire. Thank you Josh Kent and family for your basement, your positive energy, and your delicious harissa. Thank you enormously Mr. Eric Seligman, Lincoln Park UBF, and the transcendent Fleur de Lune for a cozy concert, places to stay, and an awesome hang. Thank you Foam City folks in Lafayette for a really, really fun concert and, once again, an awesome hang. Thank you John and company from Strawberry Heritage for a fun concert and lots of good vibrations in Grand Rapids. It was awesome to see you again after the good times at Lamplight. It was also awesome to see our good old friend Elden Kelly, who brings the same unbridled positivity to the table on every occasion and who treated us to an impromptu storefront concert that warmed our souls.

Joey Molinaro annihilated at Mahall’s in Lakewood, OH.

We had a radio interview.

We are so lucky to be supported by so many great people. We feel the love and it nourishes us. Come to NYC and Philly and we will bring the love all over again.

Forever yours,
Cuddle Magic

We’re back in the midwest again – big hugs, cats, no seltzer, lots of cheese. We just recorded some music and video for Wood Room Sessions, met up with our good friends The Daredevil Christopher Wright, and ate some delicious cheese curds. Yes. Very good. Phox has a cat named Hottie.

This is a moldy beer in a Columbus basement.

These are the pedals for the vibraphone, with some nice lighting and a wood floor.

I have to go. Thanks for getting this far. Here, as a reward, is another kitty:

This cat is very friendly.

The sun is setting outside Batavia, Iowa. It is cold outside, and getting colder, and the wide open skies are gently dappled with clouds. Some of us are sleeping, some of us are driving, some are playing chess, and others are blogging, but through these fingers course the collective thoughts of the ensemble.

To all of those on the east coast, including our friends and family, we are thinking of you as Sandy hits the coast this evening. Stay safe.

Tonight is our first concert with The DCW since the spring, when we played with them and Anais Mitchell in Minneapolis. We can’t wait to bring back a little of the magic of that show tonight, albeit in a slightly more refined atmosphere. Cafe Paradiso was one of our stops on that same tour, and it is a welcoming place permeated with rich coffee scents and attentive, smiling faces. There are high levels of consciousness at work.

Thank you so much, Debra, for the delicious breakfast and hospitality, and Alex, for your guest house and wonderful conversation. Also, thank you so much to David Moss and The Blue Hit for their awesome job chaperoning us on our first Texas fling. The tacos were good, the YMCA was nice, the Halloween parties are long and colorful – we will surely return.

Baby monitors?

We’re on our way to Nashville after a warm and welcoming evening of music with Jesse Harper at The Garden in Charlottesville last night and a rambunctious concert on Sunday night at Paperhaus. It’s kind of a long drive, but the weather is perfect and we’re busying ourselves with country rock hits (“Truck Yeah”) and highlights of last night’s debate.

Our new split 7″ with The Daredevil Christopher Wright is now a reality. We’ll have the vinyl in our sweaty palms in Eau Claire, WI, and it will soon be available from other sources. The tracks were featured on npr.com and Paste Magazine are now available on iTunes, but you’ll have to get one for your turntable to appreciate the awesomeness of this vinyl release.

In other news, we played some great shows recently with Jocie Adams and Alec K. Redfearn & The Eyesores (note the awesomely empty website) around Rhode Island over the past couple of months. Our show at Music at Lily Pads was particularly awesome thanks to David and all of the wonderful people working sound and the door and everything else. Thank you!

We all joined Instagram. We have new hoodies (available on the website soon!) and tons of nuts and jerky. Don’t forget to vote!

We played some songs at Daytrotter’s studios in Rock Island this past April, and they posted the session online today. We played old favorites and some newer, unrecorded songs. You’ll have to register in order to check it out, but it gives you a month of free access to tons of great music.

If you’re in New York City on Thursday, come to The Bowery Electric to hear some more new music from us. The Collectable Few, Indigo Street’s Shy Hunters, and Shoshin will be joining us. It starts at 8.

Here are a couple of photos from recent performances. The image on the left depicts our instruments readying themselves for sets by ourselves and some of the gentlemen from Love Cannon. The image on the right captures Ben and Dave reuniting with the inimitable string section of Lucy Railton and Max Haft for a Cuddle Magic UK performance. They’re all over all of our albums and we’ll get them back to the United States sooner or later. In the meantime, we played this little set in front of a bunch of other musicians at tiny little Jamboree.

Cuddle Magic at Jamboree in London

Instruments at Random Row Books

Hope to see you soon.

The Rushad sandwiches were sublime. Rushad began each evening with a hilarious, free-wheeling solo set and ended it with a earth-shaking Tornado Rider experience. In San Francisco, Tornado Rider literally rocked the audience to exhaustion until 2 in the morning before closing things off with their signature tune, “I’m a Falcon”. Vicious bird, vicious bird, powerful bird. Thank you, Rushad, Scott, and Graham!

Rushad Solo

Marquee at Catalyst in Santa Cruz

Then we drove down 101 to Isla Vista, CA, a small community right in the heart of UC Santa Barbara and almost entirely populated by UCSB students. After the hectic energy of San Francisco (and all the late nights dealing with our trailer), Isla Vista, full of besotted college students roaming in packs through the mild night air, was laid-back and carefree. Biko Garage, a DIY, donation-based venue attached to a commune of artists and activists, was also quite a sea change after bars and ticketed concert venues. Haroula Rose played a beautiful set of originals and covers, and we were followed by a group of cycling shadow-puppeteers.

Saturday night at Echo Country Outpost was tons of fun – old and new friends hanging out in what must be the most laid-back venue in Los Angeles. It’s more than a venue, really – it’s playing some music in Chris and Erica’s dope pad (with free PBR, ping-pong, and pup tents) and inviting the whole neighborhood. Leslie Stevens and John Elliot played brilliant solo sets, and John was very helpful in assisting with what might have been Ben’s finest trailer back-up yet.

Kristin, Cole, Ben in Isla Vista, CA

California Tracks and Pacific Ocean

We finished up the weekend playing an early set at The Lost Leaf in Phoenix and enjoying some crepes. On an unassuming street full of houses converted into small businesses, The Lost Leaf is an awesome little bar and venue with outdoor seating, good beer, and a tasty coffee and crepes joint next door. Ben has been overcoming a slight cold, so we called in an early night and crashed in our first motel rooms since Idaho.

As we ascend into the crisp mountain air of Flagstaff, Arizona, we bid farewell to the west coast and head back to spring on the east coast.

The open stretches of farmland and dramatic vistas of mountain passes have given way to more and more malls, subdivisions, and noise walls. It is, however, still beautiful and sunny and completely different than our northeastern homelands, and suburban California is still occasionally giving way to sparsely populated valleys.

Pascale Haft, mother of our occasional and much esteemed violinist Max Haft, presented us with some pozole upon our arrival in Sacramento, which is the second time on this tour that we’ve been fed this delicious Mexican soup dish. Fresh and plentiful avocados are clearly one of the great joys of the west coast.

Tonight will be the first of two Rushad Eggleston sandwiches (Rushad solo, Cuddle Magic, Tornado Rider). He’s is a volcano of funky energy, and these performances will certainly be all that and a bag of chips.

Here are some pictures from our brief sprint through Wyoming:

Colin's Colorado Vista

Rawlins, WY at Day's End

See you soon.

We’ve been all over the map these past two-and-a-half weeks. We’ve stopped in Fredrick, MD, where we’re always greeted warmly at Café NOLA; in Lewisburg, WV at historic Carnegie Hall (Kristin is excited to add this venue to her artistic bio) and in Charleston, West Virginia, where the Kanawha and the Elk meet; in Lexington, KY, where Ben Sollee put together a wonderful evening of music and some of our members performed on Woodsongs; in Bloomington, with the incomparably gracious mead-making extraordinaire Rick Deitz; in Columbus, with the similarly incomparable Wesley Buckwalter; in Ann Arbor, where played at The Ark, a beautiful, intimate room, and ate fantabulous late-night food at Frita Batido; in Chicago, where we enjoyed some of Sean Decker’s fine homebrews; and in Madison, where we were serenaded by a tuba choir while looking out over Lake Mendota.

Here are a couple of photographs from the first leg of our journey:

The Quarrier Diner in Charleston, West Virginia

Gilberto Serna Plays Our Deagan ElectraVibes at Century Mallet

Extreme Wind Gusts Force a Pit Stop in Wyoming

Cole Practices

After having a bit of trouble with our Deagan ElectraVibe on the first leg of our tour, we had a chance to meet the vibraphone’s maker and have it serviced. The great Gilberto Serna of Century Mallet and his wonderful children were able to squeeze us in on very short notice and do a thorough once-over on the vibraharp. He worked for Mr. Deagan at the Deagan Factory in Chicago until 1980, during which time he built this instrument and customized it for Harry Sheppard. Mr. Serna is pictured above with the instrument: “The black bars look really, really nice.”

We are beginning to become acquainted with the rhythms of touring. Dave dons goggles for a lap swim every other morning, or whenever he can find a local YMCA. Ben, with his semi-weekly half-marathons, has finally shamed Alec into breaking out his 7-year old running shoes. Though we lost our first frisbee atop the roof of Mockingbird in Staunton, VA, our back-up disc comes out once a day at the first available scenic overlook.

Further west, we travelled to Rock Island, IA, where we recorded an awesome session for Daytrotter, and to Fairfield, IA, where there is, surprisingly to us, a strong contingent of followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his world of transcendental meditation. In Fairfield, we sadly had to say goodbye to Anais Mitchell and her Young Man Band, with whom we’d been touring for two weeks. In Kearney, NE, on our way to Denver, we incurred a flat tire, and subsequently had an awesome unexpected stay at a Ramada Inn that featured a sweet tiki bar. The show Denver was loud and fun, and we met some great new fans and old friends alike.

Now we’re finally on the west coast. We’re currently heading south from Portland to stay with friends in Williams, Oregon, about halfway to our gig tomorrow in Sacramento. We were very warmly welcomed by the McGoverns in Seattle, and our Portland show last night at The Side Door was intimate and invigorating. The northwest has been every bit as green and rainy as we could have hoped. We’ll be back soon. California, here we come!

We’re wrapping up this run of wintry concerts with a house show in Philadelphia this evening and a concert at SUNY Purchase with Nat Baldwin, Woodspider, and Whale Whale Whale. Everyone has been amazingly welcoming and generous everywhere we’ve gone, feeding us, sheltering us, wrapping us with snakes and buying our records.

At Nashville's GemsOnVHS with Natalie Prass and Many Others

Ben Gives Mogwai the Gift of Flight

We love dogs. Kristin really loves dogs. If you are a dog and you’re interested in joining the band, and perhaps even doubling as a roadie, please contact us with the phrase “Inquiry About Tour Dog Position” in the subject line. We are especially interested in dogs with experience in live sound. Thank you.

It is unseasonably warm here in Philadelphia, and I hope that this bodes well for our upcoming shows in New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. We’ll have Bridget with us for the first handful of shows, which means awesome times and some new arrangements.

Here are some little ditties that Ben and I put together on iPhone GarageBand on our tour last fall. That’s Alec Spiegelman singing background vocals on “My Song”.

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Keep an eye on our Twitter account for updates to our tour and other exciting goings-on.

See you soon,
Dave (and Cuddle Magic)