There were pretty songs

Apart from the walk down to the local sunkhak to buy pizza, I haven't moved more than ten feet from the couch today. Last night was fairly subdued, but we didn't get to bed until two thirty, and I feel the lack of sleep. So, a string of episodes of Spaced, and fatty foods, in the company of two excellent friends. My kind of day.

The anticipation last night was brutal. I've been a fan of Wintersleep since 2003, when I read a review at ThePRP and then found a fragment of an mp3 of “Orca”, that we listened to over and over and over. Since I'm the CD buying type, I tried finding the CD, but it was impossible. The only place I found it only shipped within Canada.

An email to the band led to contact with then bassist Jud, who was kind enough to send me the CD. Now that there is concern for a fan. We emailed a bit, and Mah Girl and I translated their bio to Swedish, since they had for some reason decided to have it in as many languages as possible on their homepage.

When their second CD came out, I ordered it, a tee and a few other CDs directly from their label, which was run by the band. The package took weeks to arrive, traveling as it did by boat across the Atlantic (and quite possibly sherpa and llama before that from the depths of Canada's wilderness). When the package arrived, there was a tire track straight across it. No kidding, an actual tire track. I can understand a package being dropped, but dropped and then run over? Unlikely.

A few CD cases were damaged, and the disc from the singer's other band, Kary, was broken. The email explaining it all was met with a short “Dude, that's harsh. New stuff is in the mail”. This time via air mail. So now I have two copies of the second Wintersleep CD; one in a damaged case, the second one still wrapped in plastic.

The third CD, I sort of missed. It was released last year, and I didn't get it until a few months ago. There's no reasonable explanation for it, it just sort of happened. Which is weird, since I love the first two. Whatever. By that point I had given up on seeing the band in Sweden. They'd been in Europe a few times, but never close enough to just go see.

So last night was the culmination of a six year long wait. Seeing a band I love live is as close to a religious experience as I can ever get, and there have been many extreme highlights over the years. Wintersleep didn't rank among the best, for a few reasons (too short a gig, not enough songs from the older albums, kind of an anticlimax at the end, and the vocals were too low in the mix at times), but it was still a great show.

As we walked out, a few of the band members were outside, smoking. I walked over, told them what a great show it was and explained I was the guy who translated their bio. They were mildly surprised, to say the least.

So. Full circle. Now they need to come here again and play for two hours, and play more old songs. I'm such a fan boy.