Adam Pranica, filmmaker and principal over at Dorsia Films and true indie rock enthusiast, with the perfect opening line:

"In the winter of 2011, Victoria VanBruinisse came up with a crazy idea to invite John Roderick of The Long Winters over for a potluck dinner. He played a few songs, told some stories, and ate all of the food."

And that's pretty much the long and short of it. When I found out that I was going to be in New York at CMJ for this past year's City Arts Festival, and would subsequently be missing the only performance by the Long Winters for the 2011 calendar year, I almost cried. Not literally, but still. It was a huge disappointment, a sigh to end all sighs, the conundrum that comes from being vested in so many interests and not being able to be everywhere at once. And so I did what any fan would do: I suggested to John that perhaps he might want to play a show in my living room.  I base much of my interactions on the simple methodology of the old adage that it never hurts to ask, because as the lottery tells us, you can't win if you don't play.

Well, we played alright, and we won. All of us, and that's you {yes, you!} included, because we won something big: a beautiful, candle-and-twinkle-light-lit evening with two dozen of our closest friends, where we enjoyed food, comraderie, and a series of brilliantly performed songs by the one and only John Roderick. And because of the genius embedded in Adam Pranica, Tyler Kalberg, and Zach Varnell — the latter two being names you should recognize from the Notes from Home series — we get to share the collective product from that near-perfect night with the world.

Adam continues:

"When we asked questions John's answers were thoughtful and introspective, and he played songs with the attention of a musician who was as much reacquainting himself with his music as he was performing it for an audience. To me that relationship has always been the draw of seeing Roderick perform; the shared catharsis in the connection between a performer's desire to play and a listener's need to hear it. So, yeah: this is another musician playing songs in a living room, but to those in attendance at a good friend's house sitting in front of the fireplace, it felt like more than that. More than shapes."

We'll be featuring a video here from the series every {new release} Tuesday for the rest of the month, starting aptly with the big-inhale of "Carparts", a longstanding mixtape favorite:

I can only hope that you enjoy John's performance every bit as much as we enjoyed putting the evening together and witnessing it first hand.  Keep an eye out for the next video, which we'll be baking up fresh with lots of love for February 14th!