After a long week (9 or 10 days) on the road The Hobo Banned got back to Albany late this last Sunday night after a great show with our friends The Red Lions .

The whole thing started with Alpha team (Alex, Louis, Tim and Adam) heading out thursday night and blazing a trail to the awesome cabin we stayed in outside Athens. Bravo team met us there after 16 hours of straight driving at around 10am on saturday.

After that we packed in and played Athens Pop Fest , which was awesome. Our set was a bit lack luster but we made friends with BaakGwai who played right after us, and were pretty cool, definitely check them out. The best part of Athens Pop Fest for us though was definitely the Music Tapes. Elf Power was pretty good, but The Music Tapes were amazing, I could have just gone home after that set. Thanks to the power of the internets you can check out the whole set vai You Ain’t No Picasso , via The Flat Response.

After that we moved on to Charlotte where we got to play with the lovely and excellent Anna Bullard ( I even got to play Tuba (poorly) on one of her songs) and we started our tour habit of busking everywhere.

After that it was off to Chapel Hill where we played with Reid Johnson of Schooner . Eric (aka Pops) corralled some business people off the street and we got to play for a sizable crowd mixed of locals who came out to see Reid and out of towners there to get drunk and see lots of horns. We made good friends with the Cave’s bartender Tony as well who was an awesome guy and hopefully we will play with his band Salt to Bitters on our next pass through the Cave.

After that we had a couple days off so decided to get signed to merge records by busking in front of their HQ. The plan didn’t exactly but all in all it went pretty well. Check out merge’s account .

By then it was Thursday and we went to play at the Golden West Cafe in Baltimore where we made friends with Hop Along, Queen Ansleis , who was already one of our current favorite artists. Her real name is Francis (we think) and we ended up hanging out and she came and played percussion and sang with us at our show in west Philadelphia in the basement of a cool house some people call Chernobyl . The next day we went and hung out at her house and tried our hand at putting some Sgt Dunbar arrangements on Hop Along songs which was way more fun than we deserved.

After that we went and played at Piano’s in Manhattan and due to some booking snafus didn’t end up going on until about 2:30am but there was still a ton of people there which made the show really fun. On the drive up to Woodstock I repeatedly stuck my head out of the window to stay awake until we got to my parents house.

And that brings us around to our last show at the Colony Cafe. Now obviously I left out a lot of stuff here because it would probably take a week to describe everything that happened. For example, I missed the lady in Georgia who asked us for a ride and when we said no she asked for a dollar and when I gave her the dollar she asked for five dollars. I also missed the story about how Omar the wise transient of western Philadelphia ended up giving Eric a boogie board and the rest of us a couple of cushions.  and so on.

We all can’t wait to get on the road again but for now you can catch us this Saturday at Valentines with the Eureka Birds .