Just got offstage at National Underground. Awesome show. Our friend Joe brought a ton of people out from a campus station uptown and the place was rammed, really small venue, so the show was great, really energetic. Peter and I have been playing as a duo the past little while and arranging songs with minimal instrumentation, so this was a good test drive for the new stuff. For my first show in New York you couldn’t really ask for more.

Yesterday we went to the MOMA. Here’s Peter and I hanging out with our buddy Jackson. At one point I went to take a picture of Peter in front of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe and accidentally left the flash on. The glares that were shot my way could have put holes in the walls. Felt like a total bonehead. I did enjoy the “provocative” Viennese Actionism which put me in the “liveliest” mood…

Then we met up with our friends Roz and Lee who are in town to see Mission of Burma. We partied at Pianos and then went over to the Cake Shop where we rocked out to a really good “fast-paced indie rock” band, as they would put it. Then Lee and Roz let us crash at their hotel which apparently was designed by Julian Schnabel. Needless to say the place was a tad “ritzy.”

Tomorrow we leave for Toronto and we’ll get in around midnight. New York was pretty good to me, not going to lie. Can’t wait to get back.

More photos and videos to come.

Cheers,
Eamon

Happy Dec. 25th everyone. In the past few days I recorded a new batch of songs and as a holiday gift for everyone I’m posting the album here.

Eamon McGrath – “London Stalling”

1. Teardrop on the Sun
2. Sweetheart of the Moon
3. I’m A King
4. Forget About Your Grievances
5. Land of the Midnight Hotel
6. All the Roads You Walk On Lead You Home
7. Saturday (Sparklehorse)
8. Young Men
9. Eternal Highway

http://www.sendspace.com/file/rpm9u8

Merry Christmas,
Cheers,
Eamon

Here’s Lee, with palace. Haha. Lee’s Palace.

That’s a fort we built to lighten the mood at the Heathrow (Deathrow?) airport a few days ago. That thing was a stronghold. Until it was kicked to pieces by British Airways authorities the next morning who were all hustling people into standby lines. Danny was the first to fly, unfortunately to Halifax; your name is essentially picked from a hat and they put you on the closest flight to your final destination. Peter and Lee stand in line for hours and get a nice flight to Calgary. I’m left with all the bags, all alone in Heathrow Airport, because Ryder went to go to some hotel somewhere.

By today, Heathrow was the perfect analogy for Dante’s Divine Comedy. The sky is like Paradiso, the altitude of airplanes akin to the spheres of heaven approaching the infinite…the final eternal ultimate goal!!! Then you have the Purgatorial second floor of Terminal 3 where everybody sleeps, eats, and of course, waits. And waits and waits and waits. Below, the bustling first floor of Terminal 3 is like Inferno, a churning mass of bodies, desperation and sin; the clerks behind the standby booths are like Satan in his eternally frozen pool of ice, gnawing patiently on the souls of Brutus and Judas, looking out across a kingdom of torrential pain….OR, maybe I’m just losin’ it.

But everybody here is losin’ it. Yesterday a dude who was missing his four front teeth and holding a coat full of those little airliner bottles of rye stumbled over to us and told us this crazy story of how he’d survived electric shock therapy as a teenager. His female sidekick then started drawing his portrait a couple times. Today a bunch of people got in a fight over these little foamy mattresses that were being handed out to a queue via a freight car in the elevator. Another poor chap was shivering with his pants down underneath a foamy saying “I’m okay….I’m okay……I’m okay…….”

The real lunatic clincher comes when they round up everybody and throw them in this big tent outside. First there’s nowhere to piss and nothing to eat. Then the Salvation Army rolls in and everybody tells us that we can either go to Arrivals to use the can or use the porta-potties, the doors of which are always locked. A mate of mine jokes that there’s a big PA with a sound effects on repeat blasting out the sound of planes taking off and landing just to keep the crowd at bay. I suggest that maybe there’s no one even on the planes; they’re just taking off and landing in some weird Albert Camus existentialist nightmare/wet dream. Everybody at this point thinks that they’re stuck in this tent forever. And then, salvation arrives in the form of Air Canada as they add something like three or four flights to the schedule and manage to squeeze everybody on!!!

So here I am, back at home, the official end of another tour. The whole experience at Heathrow was pretty nuts. I’m not sure what was driving me more crazy: the constant crushing of any glimmer of hope, staring at the snow-less runways everyday, dealing with an unruly mob, OR, dealing with a bunch of rich Brits who I know were comparing their experience to being in fucking Somalia or something. Get over yourselves people, the water won’t give you HIV, you have a bed to go to if you really want it, and you’re going to get home!!! Everybody’s just got to stop whining over a little bit of snow.

Cheers,
Eamon

OH MY GOD!!! What the hell is going on. My head is on a swivel and the fulcrum is going to snap. (Q: Did I just say “fulcrum”??? A: I think so.)

We spent the past few days travelling from Switzerland. Two nights ago we ended up in Brussels at our great friend Phil’s bar Madame Moustache and crashed the show; Peter and I played an acoustic set with an amazing band called Hold Your Horses and slayed the place, allegedly. Stayed up until the bar closed (6 a.m.) and went to sleep. Got up the next morning in a maelstrom of snow and got to Calais in France by 9 p.m., then to London to drop off the gear and van, then somehow got in a minicab to get to where we are today…..

As of right now I’m stranded in Heathrow Airport for the next SIX DAYS because planes are grounded due to a light dusting of a tiny skiff of snow. You could go to the driving range in this weather, maybe even a mini-golf course with the wife and kids, and have a cup of tea to heat your lukewarm hands to boot. Maybe even talk about the weather for awhile, or the upcoming Cricket match, (tally-ho) admiring the light mist of breath “illuminating” off your lightly bittered words in the uncomfortable UK winter…

Showed up at Heathrow last night at 3 a.m. to make sure that we weren’t victims to our own naivete; heard that planes were grounded, heard that flights had been cancelled, heard that people’s christmas hopes and traditions had been ruined en route to their families, girlfriends, business partners, drinking buddies, colleagues, *sob* *sob* *sob*….

And we show up and there’s hundreds of palettes of Evian which looked like they’ve fallen out of the sky on some bizarre desperate UN rescue mission to save the richest parts of the world from themselves; along with thousands of Brits who are curled up in these hoity-toity bizarro Tinfoil blankets, as though they’re used more to keep away the messages from the “Masters of the Universe” than the *chilly* London cold. Brrrrr.

We unload our gear and sleep in front of the Air Canada gate, when we’re woken up at 5 a.m. by an angry mob who inform us that drunks in the airport have started riots and lit bonfires outside of the terminal somewhere. Terminals are closed!!! Chaos ensues!!! Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” is pouring off the page into reality!!!….no, wait, actually, it’s just a bunch of blokes whose fleecies won’t button up. “Oh, Frederic,” (said in biting upper-class English accent….) “….would you please pass me my macchiato???? The schools are closed. Pip, pip!!!”

But either way we end up hours later in a queue of people who lead us in the direction of absolute and unexplainable disappointment. From the intensity and desperation in the voices of everyone around us and the tears in everybody’s eyes you’d think this was some kind of rehearsal for a scene from “Passchendale.” Instead, it’s just a six-day jaunt in Heathrow Airport; we’ve re-booked our cancelled flights for BOXING DAY. That’s seven days from now, sleeping on the floor of an airport, missing Christmas, hopefully flying home to our girlfriends who’ll all take pity on us, let us curl up in their beds, pet our hair like wounded kittens, feed us a home-cooked meal, yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda….

In any case we’re trying to figure out clever ways to pass the time. We might steal a bunch of tinfoil blankets and make soccer balls, start a soccer pool, and throw each match so that we’re always the winner. Maybe we could make boxing gloves out of those tinfoil blankets and have the Eamon McGrath/Mohawk Lodge equivalent of cockfights. Maybe we can find a way to sneak over to the Duty Free and bribe some luggage handler to pass us some Wild Turkey every night this week. Maybe we’ll just make a fort and pretend we’re on the set of “Malcolm in the Middle.” Probably, though, we’ll all just wake up at 5 a.m. and try and get on a standby flight, and not spend Christmas in some airport in London somewhere.

In any case, as always, we’ll see how this all plays out.

The above photo is proof for all of our moms that we’re not thirsty and we’re looking after ourselves.

Cheers,
Eamon

Now it’s off to what’s been called by a few people on this trip “the most vandalized city in the world.” It’s a 7 hour drive so we’re up and at ‘em at 7 so we can get to the city and actually see it before we have to load in. Our friend Otto put us up in Groningen last night and cooked us this totally insane meal. Nothing exciting here, just a night to recharge so we can really take Berlin by storm. That’s the plan, anyway…

We’ll see what kind of trouble we get ourselves into. See you at Checkpoint Charlie….

Cheers,
Eamon

Yes, the above picture is pretty much where our heads are at right now.

Lost in a whirlwind of sleeplessness, insomnia, lack of sunlight, hangovers, and the shrill scream of a Telecaster through a Fender Deluxe day in and day out, sometimes you lose your fucking mind. Back in the Netherlands today, where we met up with our good friend Otto who got us a show outside of Groningen in a town called Zuidbroek and another show a few hours later at a pub down the road.

Ryder and I did some acoustic songs at an Elliot Smith tribute show and only ended up playing one Elliot Smith song; the others followed a similar “uplifting” theme of death, loneliness, and doin’ yerself in. (“Saturday” by Sparklehorse, “Dress Sexy at My Funeral” by Smog, etc.) Not a lot of people in the audience got the joke.

We haven’t slept in two days and tomorrow we go to Berlin. We’re off at 7 a.m. to go to one of the most vandalized cities in the world.

See you on the other side of tomorrow.

Cheers,
Eamon

We had the night from hell.

Stuck in a Frankfurt snowstorm, a semi-trailer veers off the road and crashes into a tiny Volkswagen…or that’s the word from the lineup of thousands of cars backed up for hundreds of miles on the Autobahn. We’re stuck on the highway in the freezing cold for 7 hours. We leave Amsterdam at 2 p.m. to get to Frankfurt, which Google says is a 4 hour drive. Little did we know we’d spend the next 13 hours of our lives inside the van.

Earlier that day in Amsterdam, Peter and I were loading the gear and getting the van and we drove past a woman crying on the middle of the median on the Amsterdam ring road…a highway that circles the city, cars on either side speeding by her at 100 km/h. She looked like she was going to run into traffic in a hysterical fit. Peter and I look at each other in disbelief and decide to turn around and double-check to make sure nothing goes wrong. Luckily the police stop in the shoulder to try and see what the hell is going on. Weird start to a weird day.

Last night we decided to head west and drive to Kassel, where we’re playing tonight at Kunstochschule Underground, a crazy venue in the basement of an art school that’s put on the last three shows I’ve done here. We get to Kassel at around 7:30 a.m. and try and find our buddy’s place. Germany’s covered in snow but the weather’s getting better and tonight everybody’s going to forget about the cold.

Cheers,
Eamon

Here’s the video from the Brixton Village show. First of all, Brixton Village is a crazy semi open-air marketplace that’s full of pubs, Jamaican grocers, fish merchants, coffee houses, musicians, artists, crazy post-apocalyptic graffiti, dope fiends, etc etc etc. Insane. I actually probably shouldn’t try and describe the place because words don’t really do it justice. Check it out:

By the way, today in Amsterdam I found one of my favourite records, which I thought I would never even see, let alone buy. Can’t believe I actually own this sucker.

Cheers,
Eamon

We finally made it to Europe safe and sound. Sorry about not being as on-the-ball with posts as we were there for awhile…got some videos up, made another one of our last UK date in Brixton. Here’s one of us in Liverpool, the stripped-down show we did at an art gallery called Lark Lane Atelier:

The last two days have been totally insane. Got up in Bristol two days ago and drove all the way to the port at Dover. Got on a ferry. Had a sleep and a few beers on the way to Calais. Danny bought 48 beers at the duty free. Drove all the way to Amsterdam and got to the city at 2:00 a.m. Loooooong day.

The next morning we woke up and went to Amsterdam FM on the 4th floor of the library. A beautiful grand piano is in the studio so I played six songs on that thing. Then we went to the venue Skek where we played another stripped-down show, a lot like the one in the above video. The crowd goes wild and me and Lee go to a cafe and buy some “white widow.” We pass out at a nice girl’s house and wake up and repeat. Right now I’m outside the venue and we’re waiting to go onstage…we’re all saying a prayer for Ryder’s voice.

Coming up in a few minutes is a video of our last UK show in Brixton Village in London.

Cheers,
Eamon

Well we were back in Bristol last night for another wild trip through Banksy’s hometown. Feeling pretty exhausted and insane from an eight-hour stint in the van because of ridiculously slow-moving London traffic we get to Bristol with minutes to spare before our set, load in and play another stripped-down show. When Danny plays just a floor tom and tambo, and we all turn down and sit when we play we kind of sound like our buddies The Wilderness of Manitoba…

Now we’re getting ready to hop on the chunnel to Amsterdam. Next time we meet we’ll be on the European continent in the land of international criminal courts, legal marijuana, extreme social tolerance and gazillions of regional dialects. Woo-hoo, party time.

Cheers,
Eamon