Edensong – PRESHOW RITUALS

In this Preshow Rituals segment, TD Towers of the progressive rock band, Edensong, shares what they do before every show. You can check out their rituals, after the break.

Hi folks – this is TD Towers, Edensong’s bass player, resident gnome, stone fruit connoisseur, and the only guy left in the band with long hair. Our upcoming North American tour will feature a newly reconfigured lineup of band members and a brand new host of seriously deranged but incredibly necessary rituals.

I imagine that the amount of time, effort, precision, and soul-rending patience required to prepare an Edensong tour is similar to what a PhD student experiences when preparing their Doctoral dissertation. I’m not entirely certain that Adrianna Szczepaniec, Ph.D., endured greater hardship in writing and defending her paper, “Mechanisms Underlying Outbreaks of Spider Mites Following Applications of Imidacloprid,” than Edensong, and particularly our band leader James Byron Schoen did in putting this tour together. I’m well qualified to tell you that there were nearly as many Spider Mites involved in our task.

If you’ve never been to JBS Studios, where the band rehearses and pre-stages its tours, it is truly a tangled spider web of wires. But several months ago, things got really out of hand. While returning from an iced coffee run, our new drummer Nick DiGregorio and I found James literally tangled in a cocoon of Cat-5 cables; he looked like a mummy, with only glimpses of his kind eyes and scraggly bits of his Viking beard poking through the tightly wrapped wires. We noticed that the wires were writhing like enchanted vines, squeezing the life out of our friend like a boa constrictor. The rig was alive, and it was trying to eat James. Fortunately, Nick is a former lifeguard and very quick on his feet. He’s also a medical technology professional, and he managed to quickly hack into the system to free James. He managed to breathe life back into our band leader with tender mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. But while Nick was rescuing James, I noticed that the tentacles of cables were starting to writhe once more. In a moment of intuition, I looked at the rig and could almost hear a digital voice shouting “BANANA.” So I pulled out a banana from my gnomish rucksack and shoved it into the ADAT Lightpipe on the back of James’s rig. All at once, the system went silent. Sounds of weird licking and chewing could be heard. Now, before every time we practice or even play a show, I preemptively feed the Edensong live rig a little bit of mashed bananas and leave a bootleg .tor of Minions playing on a loop.

In Edensong, we don’t believe in the supernatural, but we do believe in spirits, angels, and ghosts. Before every tour, to appease the spirit of chaos, James goes out of his way to publicly break a guitar at a great personal cost to himself. He also makes sure to forget his capo at least once during an actual live performance, and then invites his incredibly wonderful and patient wife Jeanne up to the stage to clamp her index finger around the 2nd fret of his guitar so that he can play “Sixth Day.” We don’t know if its necessary, but we’re glad for his family’s participation.

Only the deepest, most long-time fans of Edensong know about the arcane rituals of our former bandmates Stefan Paolini (keyboards 2008-2017), and Tony Waldman (drums 2008-2017), and how they led necessarily to their resigning from active duty in our band.

Stefan was tasked with the sacred duty of maintaining the very fabric of reality by constantly solving and re-solving a Rubik’s cube that grew in complexity every year. It arrived by mail on August 8, 2008, sheathed in an envelope made out of lizard leather heavily embossed with geometric designs. On our last tour, Stefan was able to solve the 17x17x17 Rubik’s cube while still having enough energy to shred hot-lightning synth solos. But this year, as the cube grew to a 18x18x18 dimension, this task became so arduous that Stefan had to resign his post as our keyboard player and dedicate himself full-time to his holy task.

Early in his tenure in Edensong, Tony Waldman met a very wise and truly ancient Edensong fan who loved our music, but who was locked in the realm of spirits and could not experience it in-person. He could only step forth from that domain of shadows if the Ghoulish Guards of the Gate (GGG) were lured away by a cartoonish looking slice of ham. In essence, Tony had to “lend a bro some ham” if he ever wanted to meet his friend. Tony traveled long and far to deliver the ham to a secret location. It worked, but the GGG managed to re-capture Tony’s friend, as well as imprison a type-to-the-tee Princess with perfect arms. To free his friend and his Princess, Tony now travels the land in search of the most exotic slice of ham to offer to the Ghoulish Guards of the Gate. He has yet to find it.

These days, our rituals and sacred duties are actually not so arduous. Our newest band member, Kento Iwasaki, plays an amplified Koto. For those who do not know, the Koto is a 13-stringed Japanese harp that involves individual moving bridges to suspend the strings and bring them to pitch. Because Edensong’s music is so complicated, Kento needs to change the tuning of this instrument several times within the same song, all while shredding on the instrument like a wizard. In order to calm his shattered nerves after a show, we administer a ritual bath of matcha mocha and massage his aching muscles with fruit roll-ups.

Well, that’s about all the time I can give to writing this piece. James is about to fire up the rig and I haven’t even mashed the bananas yet.

See you on the road!

UK TOUR DATES

10/5 – Chepstow, UK (Summers End Festival)

10/9 – Southampton, UK (The Talking Heads)

10/10 – Leicester, UK (The Musician)

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