National Underground doesn’t pay the bills, but it has some awesome perks. One of which was to find out about the HWM reunion months before it was announced. The idea had been to record as many of the HWM shows as possible, but HOB wanted tons of money to even let us in…it’s a Disney thing. So, we recorded the unannounced pre-reunion show at Common Grounds in Gainesville the night before the big announced reunion in Orlando.

This also marked the first attempt for NU to do interviews. We had our buddies in Dirty Money (Colin and Ryan) and Cam Taylor (Southern Lovin mainstay but at the time a Clemson student) take a stab at it. They did a pretty good job for their first try at interview work and got the guys to let them in on some old school HWM points of view.

So, to give you some perspective, they hadn’t played together in years and were two hours out from taking the stage at home to a crowd of friends and family (seriously it didn’t even sell out while the announced shows had been soldout for months). They’d kind of gotten over any issues and were remembering why they were friends and bandmates in the first place.

Call the Office in London Ontario, it’s a treasure in the live music scene, and the only place in my general area known well enough to capture the attention of the bands I love. It was there I sang with The Matches, watched The Weakerthans in awe…twice, almost passed out from the heat during A Streetlight Manifesto show and it was there I won a watch by stripping down to my boxers and running a lap around the bar. It holds a lot of memories for me so what better venue to see The Gaslight Anthem, the newest and best band to come out in a while.

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