Sorry about the lack of updates, folks. This past week has been devoted more to music than to words, I’m afraid. The band I play in, the "sublime and swampy" Salter Cane (not my description, but an apt one, I guess), had a fairly important concert on Monday (if you live in the south of England, you can check out the Guardian guide listings for this week and find us in there!), and between the pre-concert practicing and the post-concert buzz, I haven’t been able to get it together to write a single creative word.

The concert was brilliant and just reinforced my suspicion that leaving Germany was probably the best thing we possibly could have done for the band. We played as Beam for two years in Germany and never got anywhere. I mean, it wasn’t like we were out looking for a record contract or something. We just wanted to play gigs and have people get into the music - and we did play gigs, but people didn’t seem to get into the music. We had some real fans, alright, but at the risk of sounding completely arrogant, I have to say that I always felt the majority of people just didn’t "get" us. It was pretty disheartening.

But here in Brighton it’s a completely different world. We’re riding on a wave of alt.country and Americana that we didn’t even know existed when we were in Freiburg. Our very first concert here was a revelation, and things just seem to be getting better.

I’m still buzzing from the concert on Monday night. We played well, and the audience was really into it. I couldn’t believe that complete strangers were coming up to me afterwards and telling me how much they enjoyed it. I felt completely humbled and really proud at the same time.

And I made an important realization on Monday, too. It can be quite a heady feeling to have people raving about the music we make, and it is certainly intoxicating to get such a positive response from an audience. I was completely over the moon when we got home after the concert Monday night - and in a way, that worried me. I wondered if I was too susceptible to the compliments and the "hype", if you will.

After thinking about it for a while, though, I realized that while I was happy for myself and the rest of the band because the audience liked us (and it’s flattering and reassuring to have people like what you do), the real fulfillment I felt came from the knowledge that people enjoyed themselves and we helped them do that. We were able to bring pleasure to other people by doing something that we like to do anyway - and that is one of the best feelings in the world.