David Freeman Music

The 2019 Yacht Rock Revival was once again at Chastain Amphitheater in Atlanta, and we were fortunate to once again sell it out--6,900 people.  It's surreal. It blows my mind that we're playing a gig on the same stage where I've seen Sting, or Hall and Oates. Instead, it's us on stage, and I can look out in the audience and see my parents out there singing along. The guests for this year were Matthew Wilder, Robbie Dupree, and Johnny Townsend and Ed Sanford (Sanford Townsend Band). Gary Wright was originally on as well, but he fell ill earlier in the week and had to cancel. We played Dreamweaver without him (even using his backing track!). I especially enjoyed playing Sanford Townsend's Smoke From a Distant Fire , which is a song we used to watch on video back when we were just starting out. Here's my chart. Their other song for this show was I Keep Forgettin'  (a hit for Michael MacDonald), which was cowritten by Ed. In order to fit it in Jo...

But wait--there's more! We got home Sunday, did laundry on Monday, and left for Savannah Tuesday morning in a stinky van. Four hours later, here we are. This gig was a corporate thing, played on a combination of extra gear we had at home (our gear was now en route from Massachusetts), and rental stuff. Kind of a "whatever" gig. Fireworks ended the night at 9 PM.

Here we go--three more. Lots of time in the van. Thursday: The band flew to Washington, DC, where we met the van and trailer. From there, we drove two hours to Dewey Beach, Delaware.  The Bottle and Cork has been around for a long time, and attracts some pretty big groups. I'd only heard of it because Mark Bencuya has a t shirt from there. They had a t shirt with us on it, but they misspelled Revue. Not impressive. Before the show, we had a quick photo session for AARP, led by these two hipsters. It's unclear why this happened to us, but it did. Ticket presales were very good, and then the last three hundred or so sold, and all of the sudden, we were at capacity. How about that? This was a pretty great gig--the sellout, the energy of the people, and probably because the place looks like some shitty bar in a beach town in Delaware (of all places) that they clean out every night with a firehose that suddenly became this epic night. When it was going d...

Here's three more: Thursday: Slept on an airplane and woke up in Providence, Rhode Island. We've played this place before as a public gig, and someone who'd seen us booked us at Féte for her birthday party. Our arrival was early enough that we went to the venue, dropped our bags, and went to lunch. Even after a leisurely veggie burrito, there was still loads of time for me to basically play everything I would work on when practicing flute at home, and I must admit, it was really nice to go through everything on a gig day. The backline rented for the evening finally showed up, though, and it was time to go to work. I did really well in the backline roulette--two really nice keyboards, plus a super cool keyboard stand ( a "Z" style one ). This was a strange gig. There were only about a hundred people in the room, which usually translates to a low energy evening, but my in ear mix sounded good and my keyboards sounded good--I don't know, I gue...