Check of my picks of the week.  If you get a chance follow me on blip.  I will be adding my own material to the site very soon.  For now it is fun to put songs that I am listening to at the moment.  Enjoy!

Steve

Satori Live In Boston

It’s 4 AM and I’m driving a supposedly eco-friendly school bus through the dark hills of some northeastern state.

Is it Maine? Massachusetts? New York?

We roll at a steady 20 miles-per-hour, maybe 30 or 40 if we hit a downward slope. There’s really no way of knowing our speed without a working speedometer, or the luxury of other cars to provide relative movement. It’s just us and this endless road, occasionally illuminated in the flicker of unnecessary hazard lights.

My ears are teased by the faint hint of a David Bazan song I’ve heard countless times since that moment before dawn when Steve first played it for me on one of these late-night drives. Does this shitty bus have shitty speakers, or is its half-hearted roar actually loud enough to drown out my last resort of entertainment?

Glancing upwards toward the all-seeing, all-knowing mirror, seeing the depth of this monstrosity, I know now how the bus drivers of my early days felt. The sheer size of the thing presses the weight of responsibility into your gut and fills your head with the drunken illusion of power. I control the fate of these limbs and guitars, these bodies and basses. Look at them sleeping, dreaming. Or am I dreaming? I see Jesse’s feet stretched across the aisle, which makes up the center of his bed for these few, but long-awaited hours of rest. Has he slept at all these past few days? Are these the first moments he’s had away from the giant wheel of this beast? I notice his dreadlocks strewn about the seat, and for a moment they begin to morph into snakes, slipping and sliding up the walls and out the windows.

Looking back at the road, I chuckle at my twilight delirium, before remembering I’m not alone.

“So, what do you want to hear next?” Steve says, bringing me back.

“You decide. Play me something I haven’t heard.”

Steve is a quiet companion, but a companion nonetheless, and while every other late-night passenger promises to stay awake, he’s the only one who manages to follow through. Within the grand spectrum of our lives, Steve and I really haven’t spent all that much time together. Despite this, I still call him one of my good friends, and I still feel that even if I didn’t see him for another month, another year, another decade, I would still feel this way the next time he came around.

Satori is much the same way. I’d be hard-pressed to count more than 20 shows I’ve played with Satori, if even that many, and yet I feel forever a part of it. When I think back on the time I’ve spent with the band, it’s less a period of time than a series of moments, both onstage and offstage, in which I was completely at home, and happy. Even driving that bus, when my body wanted nothing more than to be asleep, when the heat from the engine was nearly unbearable, when my leg was cramping up from being consistently forced down upon the seemingly inoperative gas pedal, even then was a moment in which I was exactly where I wanted to be.

Satori is and it isn’t Steve. It is Steve, because it represents how he lives his life, as something he holds dear in his hands and yet longs to share with the world. It isn’t Steve, because it is everyone else he has welcomed into its folds. Whether they were in Satori for a day or a month, they are in it now.

I look forward to my next Satori show, whenever that may be, and I hope that in my life I’m able to stay true to the things I love so deeply, as Steve has done and continues to do.

-Kevin

Kevin Verni On Guitar

My Girl (Satori UK)

I sent out an email to all of the people who have been involved in the Satori project for the past 6 years, asking them to send me a picture from a Satori tour/recording and a story about thier experience.  The first email I got was from Mikkel Szlavik.  Mikkel lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.  Here is what Mikkel wrote:

First time I met Steve I didn’t even notice it. My band was warming up for RX Bandits in Copenhagen and Steve saw me play. I don’t remember having any conversations with Steve, but suddenly two years later – out of the blue – I received an email from him asking if I would join him on a UK tour with Satori. I got a chance to check out his music and had three great weeks in company with Matthew Reynolds,Pete Miles and Chris Murray.

After spending only three hours together in the rehearsal room we started recording our tour EP “Welcoming in the Summer”. Steve never waist his time and quickly we realized that the four piece band he had put together was more groovy than ever. I don’t know how he does it, but he always manage to get the best out of the situation his in and the people surrounding him.

Luckily I got a chance to play with him again here in Copenhagen, in California where I also met his family and last time when I was visiting him in New York. It always inspires me to work with Steve and hopefully it will happen again soon.

Good luck with the EP
Szlavik / Babylove & the van Dangos

Here is a track that I wrote a few years back.  I ended up recording at Chris Candy’s house on the first session that I used my Tascam 388 tape machine.  Jesse Hayes (Void Union, Toasters) Mark Allen Piccolo (Soul Captives) and I did the basic tracking on the first day of the session.

About a year later Dave Hillyard from The Slackers was in town and he ended up taking a train all the way from San Francisco just to record a solo on the track.  It was really cool of him to do that for me since The Slackers had a late show the night before and from the looks of it they had a good time.

Enjoy!

Dave from the Slackers