Why Sound Show with Dawn & Hawkes

Not gonna lie, we were extremely excited to get the call to ask us to open for this duo that made a name for themselves on the NBC show The Voice.  Such talent!  Since they were coming from Austin, TX to do a show at USU with TED talks series, they booked this show for the night before.  As always, our friends came to support us and they wore their AI shirts and glow stick bracelets and cheered and danced as they always do!  Of course the "BAM!" at the end of our set is always fun too!!!  We loved watching Dawn & Hawkes perform, they are such a down-to-earth, sweet and talented couple.  They invited us to come play in Austin, we'll have to set that up! The entire night was perfect!  Here are some of the pics:

 

Cache Valley Gardener's Market

Playing at the Cache Valley Gardener's Market in October meant that it was too cold, then too hot so we had to tune instruments several times, but honestly, the experience was amazing!!!  The crowd there is warm and friendly!  There were dancers of every age.  Some fun things that happened; we were invited to play for Taylorsville Days next summer, given a bag of apples and a bag of carmels as a tip, and someone said to Kelda, "they are going to make it BIG". 

We played a four hour set, and enjoyed the company of several family and friends in the audience.  We had a ton of help hauling equipment and selling merch, our friends are the BEST!  There are a lot of pictures in this blog, including a couple from our trip to the Scare House with our friends then out for hot cocoa.  Life is good!

Cindy's Birthday, a Corn Maze, a Garage Band and Trevor's Haunted House!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to our Cindy, we celebrated with raspberry tarts!

Then we decided to gather the kids, some of our friends and get lost in a corn maze! 

Yes, this is a lot of kids, and they all belong to the members of the band, however we were missing three of our kids.  We managed to stay together in the corn maze thanks to Ava's map and Tristan's big flashlight!

So we all crawled into this tube...

Trevor and I with our friends Rex, Denise and Shawn!

Kelda and I spent some time organizing merchandise, or "merch", or "memorabilia" as Cindy prefers to call it ;) then we decided we really needed to play in the leaves!

We didn't load all the equipment down Trevor's stairs after our last gig, and we'd have to load it back up the stairs on Saturday... so instead we opted to practice in his garage!  The sound was very different and we're not sure the neighbors appreciated it, but it was way fun!!!

Kelda has been working with Cindy on new parts for some of the songs.  This is her very first practice playing with the band.  Go Kelda!

Okay, this is such a cute story...Trevor's son was teasing Emeline by hiding behind the door, then opening and closing the door when she asked the door to do it, she'd jokingly tell us that the house was haunted.  Someone suggested we ask the door to be even more impressive and bake us some cookies.  A few moments later, this note came out from under the door!  We all laughed so hard!

Cindy and Trevor are just so dang cool! Bam!

Todd's 50th Birthday Party in Mendon, UT

 

WOW!  What a night!  Todd Oswald and his sweet wife Nikki have been my friends for most of my life.  When Todd asked us to play for his 50th birthday party I was thrilled!  We played a long set under the gorgeous patio lights.  Fire pits were going, and the crowd, who was full of some of my dearest friends, was almost 100 people!

 

 

Glow sticks on and ready to party...put down the nachos for the picture Trevor!

 Cindy broke another string during the show but kept going!  Trevor said that his fingers were freezing so he ran to the firepits every chance he got.  Do they make tiny finger gloves for guitar players?

This was my first gig playing on the drum set.  It was a blast!!!  I love being right next to Em, we keep each other right on beat.

 Okay, this picture looks pretty cool!  Thanks for taking photos Todd, Kelda and Chris!

This is Todd's son Tyson Oswald.  He has been a singer/songwriter for years.  He played several songs and Cindy jumped in and played drums with him. Awesome job you guys!

 

 Here are my friend Todd and Nikki, they were beaming all night long!  The party was that GOOD!

 Another cool shot, the smoke actually went away from us when we played.  We were not caught up in a huge smoke cloud!

 My friend Todd is a huge fan of Fleetwood Mac, so after the entire crowd sang Happy Birthday (thanks Bronco) and Todd gave an awesome speech, I sang the song "Landslide" while Todd & Nikki slow danced.  I have the coolest friends!

An interesting angle thanks to Chris Flavel.  I want to do the entire night over again. 

Lightsabers and Band Practice

I walked into band practice in time to join a lightsaber battle with Trevor and Emeline.  What a blast!  We enjoy being together, there is always plenty of joking, laughing, and random conversation between us.  We managed to go through 20 songs during this practice.  Our set list keeps growing!  Cindy is fully enraptured with the music and plays pretty aggressively, she broke a string and just kept playing the song until we finished.  I love it!  At one point I switched places with Cindy and played guitar while she played the drum set.  My girls came to practice with me (it's not usual for us to have kids at practice...there are 16 kids between us all!) so we asked Ammoriah to video us while we played a new song.  When reviewed later she only caught the last 5 seconds of the song, OOPS!  Hey, those 5 seconds sound amazing considering it's only the second time we ran through the song! :D 

Our next gig is this Friday, playing for a private Birthday party for a dear friend of mine and I cannot wait!