The Longest Soundcheck Ever!!

Josh Preston @ 169 Bar, New York, NY

(Written 12/18/08)

It has been an incredible couple of days!! The show at 169 Bar was absolutely incredible! It was so amazing to see so many friends and the fact they came out in the middle of a blizzard was just awesome. Thank you so much and it really made the trip to see all of you!!

We left New Jersey at around 10am on Wednesday and got to my sister's house at around 7pm last night. Most of the trip was really straight ahead but the last few hours got super hairy. It actually got so cold our windshield wipers froze and the cars and trucks were slinging freezing sleet onto our windshield.

Check out this great article in the Bangor Daily News about the tour and Me and the Machine Records!!

:: Bangor Daily News - Musician from Maine wants to make most of visit home ::

(Written 1/8/09)

Wow. That was a long sound check...haha. I started writing this post just before my sound check in Portland @ the North Star Music Cafe and just never got back to it until now. The show at the North Star was great except for the fact that I broke a string during my first tune! Luckily, I was only a few bars in, I stopped the show, changed the string with the agility of a NASCAR tire changer and dove back into the set. Everyone was incredibly receptive and the food there was incredible!!

Mike Prescott and I performing @ Mountain Valley High School, Rumford, ME

The final performance of the tour was in Rumford, Maine @ Mountain Valley High School with my great friend and brilliant teacher Mike Prescott. We closed out his Christmas concert by playing my tune "Please Tell Me You'll Be Home For Christmas". It was a really special way to close out the tour and Mike's students are amazing. I was shocked by some of the tunes they played.

I spent the remainder of the week with family and Bean and I drove back on Saturday the 27th of December as well as that Sunday. It's a 24 hour drive from my folk's house back to Nashville.

So, I'm back in Nashville and enjoying the warmth. I'm adding new dates now for 2009 and I can't wait to see all of you again very soon. Thanks to everyone that let Bean and I couch-surf over the few weeks we were traveling!!

A recap of the goings on thus far!!

Hey everyone! I think the last time I had a chance to sit and post was Saturday in Huntington, WV at Java Joint. I've been posting little bits on Twitter throughout the run but it's nice to be able to sit and recap using more than 140 characters.

So after the Java Joint show, Bean and I hung out with Nick's friend Russ at his place for the afternoon. We were pretty damn tired from the lack of good sleep from the night before so we just watched TV and Nick told us the story about his snake Lamar from college. Really good stuff.

Nick Shelton @ Shamrock's Pub, Huntington, WV

We left Russ's around 8pm for load in and then just hung out in the club. When we first got there it was cold as hell in the back but they had this thing that looked like a flame-throwing canon that they fired up for about 45 minutes and it warmed up really fast. The performance space at Shamrock's Pub was incredible and the sound was awesome. Nick started playing a short time after 11pm and I think I went on around midnight or so. I was really floored by the response of the crowd and it was the perfect way to kick things off.

Josh Preston @ Shamrock's Pub, Huntington, WV

After the show, Bean and I loaded up the car and drove through the hills of WV. We pulled off the highway around 3am (so help me god, I still have no idea where we were) and crashed until they kicked us out at 11am. Being as tired as we were we really didn't sleep at all.

We finished the second half of the trip to DC and pulled in around 4pm. Along the way, we kept telling ourselves that as soon as we saw a Starbucks, we'd pull off and grab coffee. I'm pretty sure that we found the only 200+ mile stretch of road in the universe where there wasn't a Starbucks.

Josh Preston @ The Wonderland Ballroom, Washington, DC

We stayed with our friends Para and Emily in DC. They turned us on to all kinds of incredible stuff like royal jelly and raw chocolate and goji berries. The show in DC was at The Wonderland Ballroom which was really close to their place. The room was packed!! It was our first time in DC apart from layovers at the airport and it was cooler than we could have ever imagined. In our typical turbo-tourist fashion, we blazed by all of big ticket items and headed for NYC.

We arrived in NYC in mid-afternoon and spent a much-needed day of relaxation with Fabrice. Their place in Jersey City is gorgeous and when Jerry arrived home from work we ordered some of the best damn Chinese food I've had since Bean and I moved to Nashville four years ago and checked out pics and videos from their recent trip to Venice. I laughed so hard it hurt. They should have their own travel show. Really, really funny shit.

We drove over to Williamsburg for the Pete's Candy Store show around 9pm and we had a chance to check out our old neighborhood. Architecturally, the changes that have occurred in that part of the world in the last 4 years is nothing short of miraculous. Our old apartment building was still there but next to it in what used to be an abandoned lot was this gorgeous new modern building. While it was pretty shocking, it's really great to see how much attention is being paid to building design in this area.

The show at Pete's was fun as hell and equally as hot as seen in the picture below. Pete's was the first room I ever attempted to do the "guy w/ acoustic guitar" thing in so it was really special to play there again last night.

A wildly gross and sweaty post-show Josh Preston @ Pete's Candy Store, Brooklyn, NY

I guess that's it for now and I'll have another post very soon. Thanks to all the friends that have let us crash on their couches and all of the venues that have let me yell into their microphones for 30-45 minutes. See ya tonight at the 169 Bar in NYC!!

Night One and Show One: Check

Wow. It's been a lively 24 hours. We pulled into Huntington around midnight or so I guess. The roads were really starting to get slick but we avoided the bulk of the snow. Ok, boring. Moving on.

Before we left Nashville, Bean and I bought zero-degree sleeping bags for our trip. Very brave and rustic and whatnot, I know. We had this romanticized picture of the trip in our minds of maybe sleeping in the car in a Walmart parking lot and just being hippies and subsist on the granola we bought at Target. Real American Pioneers.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that that probably wouldn't work out given we are in a Toyota. We clearly mismanaged the leg room situation and the sever lack of television. We really gave it a shot though. We managed to find a Walmart after Willis (our GPS thingy) struck out on the first set of directions we plugged in. We got into our sleeping bags and tried like hell to sleep but it simply wasn't happening. Around 2am we peeled our sleeping bags off and hit the Quality Inn down the street which was across the street from two gentlemen's clubs. I had no idea the demand was that high in this down economy.

Let's just say the the word "Quality" in Quality Inn at this particular franchise was nothing short of completely misleading. We ate our vitamins, caught a little Law & Order and slept in our clothes.

Ok, show one is done and we're off to see the town. Thanks to the folks that hung out and listened and we'll see ya in a few hours at Shamrock's Pub up the street.

MATM Artist Pics from Edgehill Studios Cafe (12.10.08)

(From Me and the Machine Records)

This post is the first of many posts to come in the next few days. Tomorrow, Friday December 12th, Josh Preston hits the road with Lisa for a string of shows up the coast. Don't forget to check the "Tour" section of meandthemachine.com and/or joshpreston.com and if you're in the vicinity of any of these locations, please pop out and say hello!! MATM would like to extend a special thanks to I Am Pazuzu and Adam Burrows for playing with The New Whole Usuals and Josh Preston at Edgehill Studios Cafe on December 10th. Check out the pictures below!!


Here's a pic of Andrew from The New Whole Usuals parting the seas and blowing the minds of the curious onlookers.


Here's a pic of Josh Preston playing and singing with the laptop firing on all cylinders.

"A Most Pleasant Apocalypse" and other fun facts...

Image by ucumari via Flickr

First, this picture has nothing to do with this song. Well, on second thought, maybe it does. I'm not saying seals are the reason for the impending apocalypse but we should keep our eye on them. I'm just saying...

I wrote a new song a few nights back and I remembered it the next day so I figured it was worthy of recording. It already has a few different names depending on where you're listening to it but for the purposes of this post it's called "A Most Pleasant Apocalypse". There's an mp3 below for your listening pleasure and remember, don't trust the seals. They're up to something...


:: Josh Preston - "A Most Pleasant Apocalypse" mp3 ::

New Video for "Counting Backwards"!!

Josh Preston - Counting Backwards from meandthemachine on Vimeo.

This week's video was finished about 45 minutes ago!! It's a video compiled by MATM Creative for "Counting Backwards" which can be found exclusively on joshpreston.com for free download and for purchase in the "Music" section!! Enjoy!!