Woke up in Holbrook, Arizona. From the door to our room, you could see the highway. Beyond that all you saw was The Nothing from The Neverending Story. Back out on the motorway, we cleaved the desert expanse at 8.5 miles-per-gallon. It was our first time playing a show in Phoenix, albeit our fourth show in Arizona. The first was at a place called Minder Binder's in Tempe (where they didn't let us play until two in the morning - all the other bands had left and we played to the sound guy and Holden). And the other two were in Lake Havasu for the Family Guy Spring Break extravaganza. All I remember from that experience was that the other band, Showgun, had made themselves "All Access" laminates for the show. And it was ironic, because there was no real backstage area or security that would require "All Access." Ha. But this show was in Phoenix! We were excited. We rolled up, loaded in once the promoter got there, set up and then prepared for rock. The band other than Nick and me got some Chinesey-type food. Yum. I warmed up in the van and then we took in a performance by a band called 42 Eternal - they were cool customers. We only recognized a couple people out of the several dozen who were there by the time we went on, so we were pleasantly shocked when they all started singing along to our first song. Fair enough... we went with it! Somehow we had some Phoenix fans who had come out to see us. It went: Broken Bride, Love Me Dead, Hum Along, The Lamb and the Dragon, Lake Pontchartrain, and then Epic (point of interest: our cool points really seemed to go through the roof on this tour with that Faith No More action). Dude, all these long-time listeners, first-time attendees were down with every single lyric, and rocked out the entire time. It was really surprising and pretty exciting for us, since having never been to Phoenix, we were only hoping for maybe one or two Ludo fans to show up. Loaded off really quick, helped the Graduate on, and got out of the way. Loaded out, Nick got food, and we hung out with all the peeps who came out to see us, particularly for a long time with a large contingent of Tucson kids who were very cool. We also kicked it with several Ludo fans who had transplanted to Arizona from the Midwest (Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan), and we were all certainly happy to see each other. Everyone else who'd come out to see us for the first time had been waiting a LONG time to see Ludo, and it seemed like we didn't disappoint. The Forecast rocked it, and Spitalfield closed it out hard. We loaded out merch, said our goodbyes, and drove away. Ludo in Phoenix for the first time... awesome. Who knew?! A six-hour drive later, we were saying good morning to Marshall's mom in Menifee, California, and she was saying good night to us. Knitting Factory-Los Angeles tomorrow, boys... sleep up!