A Wizard Rock Birthday, or How I Now Have an Entry for Cake Wrecks (part 1 of 5)

Thursday through Sunday I spent with Rose, Kathleen, various wizard rockers, and lots of new friends. Overall, the good parts were awesome and amazing and the bad parts were awful beyond belief. By the end, though, it definitely ended up well in the plus column.

Thursday, Rose had a show at her house where Matt (The Whomping Willows) and Justin (Justin Finch-Fletchley and the Sugar Quills) played. Sam Friedman is their merch girl for the tour, and so after seeing her various cameos in the Five Awesome Girls videos, I finally got to meet her. She alternates between vivacious energy and low-key snarky remarks, and she can take it as well as dish it out. A good combination, for sure.

Matt has a new album coming out in May that is mostly about the wizard rock community and touring. One of his songs, titled 'A Brief Repose', features a stanza about Pittsburgh. It even mentions Edgewood in particular. Even though JP wasn't there, Matt dedicated the song to the two of us. Aside from the fact that we're included in there, I really, really dig the song. All of the new songs, actually. Justin wrote an EP with songs inspired from Beedle the Bard that were all new and completely enjoyable, too. I especially love 'Hairy Heart'. It's very quintessentially Justin. The first time I heard them, I wasn't that into JFF, but after a bit, it just grabbed me. Meeting Justin helped as well. His music is exactly what I would expect from him, and that makes me like it even more. Justin in song form! Such a good idea.

Since the next day was Matt's birthday, I had planned for our house afterward to be a small birthday party of sorts, replete with a Hannah Montana birthday banner and a cake that I had ordered. The cake probably could've been much worse, but to quote Tim, "The guitar was clearly drawn by someone who's never seen a guitar before but has only had it described to them, in a language they had a shakey understanding of. Or [they] thought you wanted like a science fiction guitar from the future."



So, we sang happy birthday and drank cocktails until the wee hours.