Day 19: New York, NY
Welcome
Yesterday we left Virginia and drove 500km Northeast to Manhattan Island for our show at Webster Hall.
After a waking on the bumpy ride into Manhattan I rose as we pulled into our parking space in front of Webster hall on East 11th Street. Jake and I went for a walk for looking for breakfast and ended up at Tompkins Square Bagels. I ordered a ‘Triple Crown’ on an everything bagel - Canadian bacon, apple-smoked bacon, bacon scallion cream cheese, spicy honey maple glaze egg, cheese.
After breakfast I went on a small sightseeing walk ending up in Madison Square Park.
The Empire State building.
The Tiffany Street Clock.
Tristan and I went for a run in the afternoon and saw some more excellent sites including the excellent span that won bridge of the day. The Williamsburg Bridge is a suspension bridge carrying eight standard vehicle lanes and two NYC Subway tracks across the East River connecting lower Manhattan with the Brooklyn neighbourhood of Williamsburg. Completed in 1903 it suffered an almost fatal calamity when a fire in one of the towers almost severed the cables. The cables themselves are 48cm thick and made up of nearly 8000 smaller cables twisted together. The roadway stands 42m above the river and the longest span is 490m.
There comes a point in the creation of every album when you realise that some of the electric guitars that you recorded the day before in your bus studio don’t sound as excellent as you had hoped so you have to rerecord them in the Webster Hall after soundcheck. Luckily this time the distortion tone was perfect and this guitar part can get put straight onto the album.
Webster Hall was a special show for us after having postponed tours for almost two years and finally getting there, and being the biggest room we had ever played in the US. Our very good friend Amanda Cheng was at the show and took some great shots of us performing. Thanks Amanda for raising the average quality of photos on this blog by a significant amount.
Runsheet.
Soundcheck.
📷 Amanda Cheng
📷 Amanda Cheng
Lunar Vacation charm the NYC crowd.
📷 Amanda Cheng
📷 Amanda Cheng
I’ll leave you with a small video I shot at the end of the night as we left Manhattan on the way to Philadelphia. The music accompanying this clip is composed by Elizabeth Stokes and arranged by Oliver Devlin. Additional thanks go to Jonathan Pearce for using his powerful laptop to edit this video after my Macbook Air was not up to the task.