This is actually part of the the interview, with singer-songwriter Aly Tadros and Jus Post Bellum (Hannah Jensen and Geoffrey Wilson). This first part is almost exclusively Aly, though.

Aly Tadros and Jus Post Bellum kicked off a tour of the Midwest with a stop on May 22 at Ghostlight Coffee in Dayton, Ohio. It was Aly’s return to Ghostlight, and we had met at that first show on March 10, 2013. After last Wednesday’s show, we walked down to South Park Tavern and conducted this interview on their patio:

Aly Tadros & jhunterj watching Jus Post Bellum

jhunterj: I’ve got questions

Aly Tadros: Fancy!

JHJ: So, “Aly” is short for “Alexandra”?

AT: Yes, Alexandra Jennifer Tadros.

JHJ: And last November, you were celebrating your 26th birthday in a snow-covered barn in Alberta? How come?

AT: I was on a house-concert Tour of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and it wasn’t even a barn, there’s a word, it starts with Q…

JHJ: A Canadian word?

AT: Yeah, it’s a big cylinder thing over the ground, it’s massive. [Quonset, maybe?] So I was with two other singer-songwriters, Chloe Charles and Sam McLellan [the trio + Douglas Jay Boyd are The Sweetness], they’re both out of Toronto, and we were on this two-week tour. There’s a booking agency called Home Routes; they do house-concert tours in remote parts of Canada. They took us to the middle of nowhere!

JHJ: And then shows like tonight’s show are now getting broadcast across the Internet the same night. Does that affect some of your inter-song chatter? Because it’s cool, people who can’t come out to the show can now hear it, so you get more audience, but do you lose anything because now you’re thinking, “Well, okay, now everybody’s going to be able to hear this on the Internet.”?

AT: I thought about that a little bit—I wondered if that would affect the stories I tell. People might pick up on the fact that I repeat the stories, but I think as long as they’re performed well, it’s similar to comedians performing your favorite bits. There’s some comfort there, and it means I have to get better.

JHJ: Tonight, you said, “Maybe I would tell this story one way, except now it’s going to be recorded, so I have to protect the guilty.” Is that just a joke?

AT: I think that an artist should never reveal their muse. Every time I’ve done that, it’s truly come back and bit me in the ass, or it’s gone to the person’s head, and I felt like an idiot.

JHJ: Also when you said that, it reminded me of the song you closed your last show here with, “The View from Here”. You said it was never going to be record because it only works live, and I immediately thought “Oh, I should record this!” but now it’s going to be record and published as part of this tour.

AT: And it has been; I’ve performed it on other nights on tour through Dejaset. At least then it’s true to the way it’s performed.

JHJ: You also mentioned that you got together with Jus Post Bellum for this tour, that you just met a couple of weeks ago. How do you find people to tour with? Is it an ad on Craigslist?

Hannah Jensen: It could be!

AT: Yeah, sometimes! That’s how I find bandmates. But no, we both work for the same booking agent. I was supposed to do this tour with Mieka Pauley, but she got sick. So I asked Eric [Sosa], “Who else do you know who would be a great fit?” And he thought they would be awesome.

JHJ: And you guys don’t hate each other yet.

HJ: Not yet!

AT: Well, I was asleep for a lot of the ride.

HJ: You deserved a lot of that after the flights and jet lag and whatnot.

JHJ: Right, you were just out in San Francisco? How was that?

AT: Awesome!

JHJ: So we’re not doing this interview at the Century Bar, because you told me you don’t drink, so you weren’t out in the San Francisco area for the wine-tasting scene or anything, but for…?

AT: It’s not that I don’t drink. I’m not really drinking right now, because I’m on the road a bunch and I’ve been on the road for four months.

Aly Tadros at Ghostlight

JHJ: So you don’t drink on tour?

AT: Um… I’m not drinking right now.

Geoffrey Wilson: Come back in an hour…

AT: …and we’ll see what happens!

GW: It’s a mess when you’re four months on the road, three whiskeys a night.

AT: Yeah, it’s just been a personal decision, because I’ve been playing so many shows this year, it gets really, really easy to realize that you’re drinking every night for seven months. You’re exhausted. So I’ve been training and running and stuff.

JHJ: But San Francisco…

AT: Oh, I totally drank in San Francisco!

JHJ: …you’ve been out there before and you like going back?

AT: Oh! That’s not what you were asking? [laughs] I’ve been out there, I’ve toured out there.

But then the food arrives, and the interview is interrupted, then an now. More focus with Jus Post Bellum in the next thrilling episode! And you can check out some videos from this set at my earlier blog post.

—jhunterj