Shipe & Ebbage at Eichardt’s

By day, Eichardt’s is a fine restaurant, with a quiet clientele that makes you think you’ll be playing soft folk ballads for calm people. (Not a bad prospect, for this tour is much about introducing Ehren’s album, with all its sweet music, to the music fans of the North Idaho corridor.) But, at night, by the time you get sound checked and ready to play, Eichardt’s turns into a bar. There were quite a few noisy people who were unsusceptible to our finesse, intricate composition, and emotional crooning. We were pulling out our rockers quite a bit more than we thought. A woman from the audience actually came up to us and asked us to turn up, furtively pointing to the noisy fellows at the bar.
Anytime we’re asked to turn up, that’s a good thing, and we’re happy to oblige.
Strangely, though, as raucous as some of the audience seemed to be, we were complimented on our lyrics of all things. All night, they kept coming up to us: “Which one of you writes your lyrics?” (So they were listening after all, even those guys with their backs to us, who at one point seemed even to be heckling us.)
Incidently, we both write the lyrics. If E-dog is singing, he wrote it. If I’m singing, I wrote it. Unless it’s a Jerry Joseph song, or a Mark Alan song.
At last I’m getting inside the lap steel on Ebbage’s tunes. Fewer mistakes and juicier melodies. This is important, ’cause there is something about that instrument that turns an ear with just one note. I can see why Ehren tries to play with pedal steel players at nearly every gig. You don’t have to do much with it; just fade in a sweet chord tone at the right time, give it a little vibrato, and make it sing.

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