The world needs music

From the files of Catty Tasso

After the show in Houston we drove to Pipe's uncle's house. Like a good and warm Latin family they got up at 2:30 in the morning and served us an amazing paella, some hot bread and Chilean wine.
Pipe's little cousin Sofia (she is 10) inspired us for the next two days: she was wearing a May Fire shirt and even though she was sleepy and tired she stood up and sang a song with her mom on guitar. "The world needs music" she sang. It was a pretty good song, which kind of comforted our tired and vulnerable hearts. We ate, drank and slept for two hours to wake up at 5:30am to drive to Kansas.

I seriously don't remember much of the morning, only that I saw Pipe's aunt cooking for us again -- some french toast. I couldn't eat it since I had just stuffed myself with paella two hours earlier. Like I said before, Latin people like their kids to eat. We are always too skinny for them - "come mija, come!" It was raining and we were deeply tired. We picked up James, one of the Morales brothers from Astra Heights, and drove 13 hours to Manhattan, Kansas. Now we were 5 people in the van, so we had to make some special sleeping arrangements. It worked out fine, I slept like 7 hours.

We made James pay for his place in the van by making him drive for 5 hours while we slept in the back of the van. So basically, riding in our van is a luxury (the other van carries Monte Negro and Astra Heights, i.e. 8 people plus the tour manager). So if you want to be with TMF you got to offer us something good. In this case it was his driving skills. Mark Morales did ride in our van before (after Vegas) but I don't remember him offering anything, we are gonna have to charge him later.

When we got to Kansas City we encountered a not too full bar, but very nice people that kept buying us drinks and telling us how the music is what really matters in life. One guy told me he would give anything to do what we do. He was really nice, and bought one of our vinyls. I guess by now I've had several people telling us "don't ever quit music." I wonder if it is because of our faces of desperation.

Later on we spoke with a really nice army guy that told us war stories, which are pretty scary. He said his real love was punk music and gave us some recommendations on some Ukranian punk band. He also told us he won't be doing the army thing anymore, which we were very happy to hear. I told him he should start a punk band. He laughed. We partied till 4 am and went back to the hotel with Astra Heights and we kept on partying -- I mean, the guys did. I was watching them from my bed. I just wished I could have had 7 hours of sleep. That would have been nice.