Our friends, the pirates (of PDXYAR)

We love a lot of things about Portland. It's got good places for brunch. There's a poutine cart about four blocks from my house. Also: things that aren't food are also good.Today I'd like to tell you about some of the people who make us glad that we live where we do.They're pirates.We first met PDXYAR last summer, when we played our first Portland concerts with Marian Call. At that time, the PDXYAR pirate crew was in the process of building "El Tiburon," a portable pirate-ship-shaped stage and performance area and awesome huge thing that they funded through a Kickstarter campaign. We toured their construction lair, and then they came to our concert, and we all hung out and talked about being pirates, and it was awesome."Pirates!," we thought. "Cool!"INDEED, past us. Indeed.A few weeks later, we were eventually invited over to meet the "pirates" in their lair, to drink their coffee-infused cocktails, play music, and watch fire-dance to Fatboy Roberts' "Geek: Remixed." That night led to a song, they let us play that song on their ship during the Portland Pirate Festival, an altogether kickass experience.

The pirates are awesome people. They inspire happiness and drinking and friendship and joy. They're nice, they're very funny, and they're simultaneously serious about their weapons and pirate history. They have fun and they protect each other. It's inspiring to be around a group of folks who make a "hobby" into a passion and organize excellence with it. Many of them, in addition to being pirates, are theater folks and dancers and singers and writers of songs.When you get our new CD, you'll hear pretty voices singing backup on some of our songs. Those people are from PDXYAR.When you're with the pirates, awesome and strange things happen, and it seems normal, like awesome and strange things happen all the time. You find yourself saying things like, "OF COURSE Jessica is belly-dancing to hypnotoad," or, "OF COURSE all of the Pirates are joining the Eagles Lodge in a moment of alcohol-fueled brilliance," or, "NATURALLY the PDXYAR female singing trio 'the Broadsides' have rewritten the Band Perry's 'If I Die Young' to be about zombies."All this leads to the video below. We wrote a song about PDXYAR, and we performed it on Sunday at the Chocolate Potluck show we played with Marian Call. You'll see PDXYAR joining in with their antics. It makes us smile.xoxoAngela