giant giant sand started out by accident, like all the great natural disasters. berlin invited us to represent our desert and bring with us 3 guests.

brian lopez, gabriel sullivan and jon villa seemed the natural choice.

brian requested his string section come along since they live somewhere in europe anyway. but of course.

thøger lund and peter dombernowski had been the live rhythm section for isobel campbell and mark lanagan’s tour. twere in australia till the day of berlin’s festival. they flew in just in time. the rest of the giant sand men came down from denmark. we would never be able to play completely together till the moment we were all on stage together. since fate was handling things anyway, this did not seem like a problem. i had no real idea of what was expected of us anyway.

in berlin we discovered brian’s 2 piece string section were from the same town in denmark as the rest of giant sand. one of them, iris jakobsen, was actually born in tucson.

also carice van houten accepted our invitation to round out the evening for a live attempt at a song i wrote for her upcoming album.

she invited her berlin co star from a movie she was in called ‘black book’ .. and when the both of them were sitting backstage together .. it was impossible to tell if all this was still not a movie.

the sound check was what you’d expect; too many people on stage and not enough time.

the promoter informed us we would need to play 3 hours. fate probably wouldn’t have a problem with that.

so we segued out of our guests opening set into our set with their choice that was an old peruvian cumbia called caranita. peter and thøger played it flawlessly like they were raised on this kind of thing in denmark.

the rest of our set kept getting better then how lucky it started.

a song would come to mind quickly after every one we’d just finished, and the rest of the band had no problem jumping in.
thøger and peter were on fire, nik and anders were shockingly delicious with sporadic licks of spoink and zing. then brian, gabe and jon would slide into it all and take it higher. the 2 stringsters had no problem without any rehearsal. they played harmonious together like they were related, instead of just married.

then for the finale we brought up carice to nail the set shut.

3 hours had felt like no time. the sold out crowd seemed to agree.

something had been born on that berlin stage: GIANT GIANT SAND.

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