the jokers

i like to think of myself as the daffodils band secretary.  i not only play drums for our live shows, i do lots of other jobs too.  i run our interweb band pages, i organize shows, i make t-shirts...you get the idea.  today, i set up an official bandcamp page for the band, which will soon contain the three albums worth of material that james has officially recorded to date. i work for the band because i love the music.  i work for the music, and i work for james, because i believe in the magic of his songwriting.

back when i first met james, after our first hungover breakfast date at the horseshoe cafe, he gave me the tiniest burned cd i had ever seen, denoted with a little sharpie star on the top.  it was no more than four inches in diameter, containing three of his songs under the moniker clamdust.  those songs melted my hard little heart and i listened to them over and over again.  i'm so tired of lookin out the window at the yard, growin flowers for the girls, cuz i know i'm never gonna pick em out.  from that point on, i couldn't get him out of my head.  i guess you can say in some ways it's the music that brought us together. 

before the daffodils were a three-piece band of best friends, we were just an idea, a name to attach to the music that james wrote and recorded the basement of a tiny house in northeast portland, the dingy dark basement fondly named "lelkoland", after our honorary knob spinner, brian lelko.  before we moved to portland, james and tom lived together in that famous sinking bellingham house called "jersey street" and played music together almost nightly, usually after stumbling home from an evening of jokery and libations.  when they played shows out on the town under the moniker language arts, i wasn't sure if i liked their music or their witty antics more.  those boys, inseparable, always smokin and jokin.  tonight, practicing for our show tomorrow night, the same still holds true.  i guess that's what makes it work: we can still have fun together, we've been through a lot together, and miraculously, we still like to hang out.