My good friend and former Oncle Julien bandmate Scott Anderson called me up at some point with the notion of putting together a cover band that could make lots and lots of money on the bar circuit in town. That never quite came about the way we had planned it, but instead, we wound up with The Neighborhood. The group started as a full-on, electric band, but eventually became a small, mobile unit consisting of myself on percussion, Scott and Kara Kesselring on acoustic guitar and vocals, and Sara Bylander on violin and backing vocals. Add bass and keyboards and we'd immediately be back up to the electric version. The material was very middle-of-the-road pop -- lots of Indigo Girls and Sheryl Crow, for starters. The obvious advantage of the instrumentation was that we could play smaller rooms, rather than having to shoot for places like Joe's or the Cubby Bear, which can be difficult to break into.

I wound up covering the narrator part for "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" by the Charlie Daniels Band. I'm not exactly sure if that's a high or a low.

One important thing that came out of this was my approach to accompanying acoustic music. I bought my djembe specifically for this band, and since we were playing pop music, I came around to the notion that I'd rather sound like a drummer than a percussionist in this context. So I got myself a shaker, which I'd typically use for a "ride" pattern with one hand, and effectively play kick and snare drum patterns with my other hand on the djembe. On some tunes, I'd just go with the djembe, if that seemed like a better fit, but this allowed me to add a bit more texture and more "foundation" to the songs. I'm sure a real percussionist would cringe at my technique, but I've always been about subverting things to my needs, so I'm not really concerned.

We took a hiatus in the summer of 2001, and just never recovered. I don't think we had terribly compatible notions of what kind of songs we should have been playing, as evidenced by my continued insistence on playing "Mexican Radio." I still maintain that it would have sounded very cool in that context, but the rest of my recommendations tended to be a bit on the dark side, as opposed to the sheer pop Kara would lean towards, and Sara's tendencies towards country. Scott was already moving on to other things as well, and recruiting a new guitarist when there was some conflict over the material may have seemed like trouble just waiting to happen. Everyone in the band still has plenty of other projects going on, so there wasn't some vast imperative to keep the project going.