Our reason for returning to Boston is that we have been invited to perform with The Boston Pops, which is quite an amazing thing for a little skiffle band from Toronto. I know that to some classical music officiandos, The Pops mandate (to bring light classical music to the masses) is looked upon as a gross and crude debasement of the form. But it is hard to ignore The Pops tradition that spans back over 100 years. It is also a chance for us to play in one of America’s great halls (Symphony Hall) and with a 90 piece orchestra that comprises some of the top musicians on the planet….so you purists can stick in your ear for all we care….

We arrived Friday morning and had a couple of hours to recover from the long sleepless night spent on I-95 (man, that road is brutal). Then it was off to Symphony Hall where, along with the conductor and arranger, we ran through the repertoire that we will be performing on Saturday and Sunday night with the orchestra.

We will be playing for one hour each night (nine songs), with five songs (Brand New World; Spiral Down; Miles From Our Home; Follower 2; Sweet Jane) being performed with the orchestra. The tricky part about this performance is that in a normal live situation we have lots of leeway with how any song is presented on any given night. Even the most structured of our songs can be re-jigged on the fly, with a simple look or nod, if someone makes a mistake or loses where they are in the song. The endings and beginnings of songs are very lose and open to interpretation every time we play them. When you are performing with a 90 piece orchestra, a wink and a nod, isn’t going to get the job done. Every single bar of music is scored and written out and if you stray from that score, even the slightest bit, like inserting a single bar, then a train wreck is not far behind. So our meeting on Friday was to go over the structure of the songs and to make sure that we were all on the same page. Release the butterflies.

Saturday morning we had an early morning soundcheck and rehearsal with the full orchestra. It was a little unnerving. It’s a very odd sensation to hear ninety instruments swell up behind you in the middle of a song. We got through it all ok and with reassurances from friends and family in the audience that it sounded good, we steeled ourselves for the real thing. I spent the rest of the day wandering through downtown Boston. A perfect Summers day spent in the heart of one of my favourite cities.

To say that we weren’t nervous for the performance would be a lie so I won’t even try to pretend that our twenty plus years of stage work has made us immune to nerves. I haven’t been this nervous since I threw-up before a show at the Dominion Theatre in London way back in the late 80’s (one of our first major shows, in a major city at a major venue).

I’d like to report that all went swimmingly but there were a couple of hic-ups. We opened with Brand New World. We quickly found out that orchestras are like any band and that they don’t give it their all in soundcheck. So our first panic was that our monitors were way too quiet, when the orchestra kicked in we could barely hear each other. The result was that Margo got a little lost in the middle section of the song and like a professional rock group we adjusted to her. Unfortunately, we forgot about the ninety instruments behind us who were reading off of the score and had no way of making the same adjustment and so for about thirty seconds, band and orchestra, weren’t exactly on the same page (literally).

We eventually made our way back to them, but, man, talk about a moment of panic/terror/helplessness. We also had a bit of a fuck-up at the end of Miles. Pete and Al missed my single to end the song and so the ending was a bit improvised which doesn’t translate well in the world of orchestras. Despite all that, I think it sounded pretty darn good. And, yes, it was a lot of fun. I’m not even sure if the vast majority of the people in the audience would have noticed the deviance in Brand New World, there is just so much going on. And speaking of the audience, they were amazing. We would have loved to have played more for them but strict union rules prevented it, so instead, we took two bows…..very classical.

We had all of today (Sunday) off, to lick our wounds. Tonight we had a chance to redeem ourselves, but in the meantime no more rehearsals, and the opportunity to enjoy another beautiful New England day. When we arrived here on Friday I was very excited to discover that there is an Edward Hopper retrospective going on at The Museum of Fine Art. Today I took it in.

Hopper is considered one of the Masters of 20th century American art. His paintings have never failed to inspire me, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen more than two or three on display at any one time. This exhibit was overwhelming (in a good way). I could stare at a Hopper painting for, well, a lifetime and never get bored of it or completely understand it. Ones appreciation of a Hopper canvas continually changes with the time you spend with it and with the life experiences that you bring to it: much like great literature and great music. He is not only a master of light and colour, but more importantly his subject matter, small glimpses into the life of the ordinary, and the way he composes those snapshots, leaves one with a feeling of longing to understand and learn more about the people and places in the paintings, which in turn leads to a yearning to discover more about oneself and ones own relationship to the great incomprehensible swirl that is ones own life.

I suppose, “inspiring”, would be the word used to describe this exhibit. But that doesn’t really seem to do it justice. It left me with this anxious feeling in my gut, this feeling that I need to do more with my own talents and life, dig further, deeper. Hopper’s work is everything that today’s culture is not; subtle, nuanced, textured, dark, intelligent, unfathomably deep and unimaginably beautiful….TWO THUMBS WAY UP!!

The butterflies were still there tonight, but for different reasons. We felt that tonight there could be no excuses, we knew what to expect and this was our last chance to nail it….and nail it we did.

We go home for a few days feeling a little bit victorious.