The band (me included) played an awesome show Tuesday night at Ralli’s in Albuquerque. Much to our suprise, the place was packed out — no small feat for a bar off the beaten path on a Tuesday evening.

We played with the Seattle group, the bradbury press, which is always a fun and talented bunch of guys to jam with.

The crowd was pretty much made up of college students, and they were really a great bunch to play for. It’s always encouraging to have your audience respond to you positively, and even more so when there’s a lot of them.

The set of music went awesome, and aside from our bass player’s rig dying (I felt its pain) in the middle of the set, it really was a blast.

I don’t have any pictures from the show on hand (I know… I’m a slacker…), but I’m trying to track some down, and when I do, I’ll get ‘em up here.

Until I do, here’s a copy of my set list (pretty much my cheat-sheet which tells me what song we all agreed to play next) that I tape to the floor during shows:

If you didn’t get to come see us play, you can check out the set list and pretend you were there.

Besides our own stuff, our set included covers of Radiohead, Switchfoot, and the Foo Fighters.

We dedicated “My Hero” by the Foo Fighters to our friend, Jeremy Aranda who is leaving later this month to do another tour with the Army, this time in Iraq.

Stay safe, bro.

Get ready for the US population to hit 300 Million Tuesday…

On one hand, part of the following excerpt from an article in Elle magazine is demonstrative of the ever-growing hypocrisy of modern churches:

Jessica Alba decided to leave her born-again Christian church after religious leaders accused her of being too promiscuous. The Fantastic Four star insists her multi-ethnic appearance stopped her from being accepted in the Latin community she grew up in, so she turned to the church looking for comfort. After four years as a born-again Christian, Alba backed away from religion because “older men would hit on me and my youth pastor said it was because I was wearing provocative clothing, when I wasn’t. It just made me feel like if I was in any way desirable to the opposite sex, that it was my fault, and it made me ashamed of my body and of being a woman.” Alba also vehemently disagreed with the church’s condemnation of premarital sex and homosexuality and was bothered by the lack of strong female role models in the Bible. She tells US Elle magazine, “I thought it was a nice guide, but it certainly wasn’t how I was going to live my life.”

Secondly, it’s also demonstrative of what Gandhi pointed out when he said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

Despite the pride America likes to take in being known as a nation of rugged individualists, our society has a difficult time dealing with people who fail to fit into the dominant culture’s notion of how they should live their lives. What’s even worse, though, is that the dominant religious culture has the same problem. If it’s perceived that you’re not looking, thinking, acting and worshiping in a certain way, well, then you’re probably a heathen or something. It’s that kind of thinking that has driven hordes of people from the teachings of Jesus, since the modern church and Jesus are seen as one and the same by most people. They see these church people’s bigotry and rejection of them as a rejection by this “Jesus” of them.

Either way, its demonstrative of a critical failure on both parts to understand the teachings and example of Christ.