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andi and i days
Back
in the states, we played a few songs here and there for church, work functions,
and to amuse our ferrets. We inadvertently became what is now andi and i when we
went to test out a new sound system for a friend. The friend was Darcy Greder,
and she was starting up the Blue Moon Coffeehouse at Illinois Wesleyan
University, our alma mater. Darcy gave us our first real gig, during the Blue
Moon’s first season. That
first performance was almost all covers of other people’s songs, with two that
Al wrote. The show went well enough that the audience demanded an encore. This
was a problem because we’d played all the songs we’d learned. As Darcy
hollered, “I don’t care if you repeat a song, you’ve got to come back out. This
is pandemonium!” we decided we could pull off Randy Stonehill’s “Weight of the
Sky.” Great song, a capella, and a nice ending to the evening. It was quite a
first gig. We
continued performing around the Bloomington-Normal area, but moved to Chicago
in 1995, partly to pursue music more intentionally. It was a difficult
transition at first. Al recollects, “Once we got booked in a few places, we
were greeted not by the hundreds or even dozens of attentive concert goers from
our early days, but by a handful of people trying to talk about last night’s
date or playing Jenga. We’d play our little hearts out, standing in front of
the pastry display and periodically getting drowned out by the milk steamer. It
was brutal . . . but we did get a good song out of it eventually.” These
experiences sharpened our music and Al’s songwriting. Having learned that
people in the city don’t consider you worth their attention just because you
play a guitar and stand in front of a microphone, Al concluded that we needed
to give folks a reason to listen to us. His writing became more aggressive; our
arrangements, tighter. And sometimes, according to Al, we became dangerous: “So
we were playing at this fairly small, very loud coffeehouse, and we had a
number of folks interested in what we were doing. But as often happens, there
was a couple sitting right in front of us talking as loud as they could through
our whole set. We were doing some song that required audience participation,
and something just came over Andi. She took her mic out of her stand, stepped
over to the table with the talky couple, and just WHAPPED Miss Gabby in the
head. She apologized of course, and played it off like she was just bringing
the mic down for the woman to sing into, but it made a terrific sound (and on
the beat, too – i was proud). The audience seemed more attentive after that.” We
recorded our first CD, Days Like This, in the fall/winter of 1996. By
this time, we had had the opportunity to work with some very talented
musicians, but we decided that our first CD should capture the sound we began
with. All the songs on Days Like This were recorded in one (long) day at
a Methodist church in Evanston, IL, chosen for its acoustics and beauty. The
project was completed in time for November CD released at the Garden in
Evanston and the Blue Moon Coffeehouse in Bloomington, IL.
Andi’s pre-Al days |