How I ended up playing a small caffe in Grenoble / stories behind the music

Last October I went on tour with my band Seine. The idea was to tour the west side of France, play a show or two in Belgium and then head back home and maybe play a few unplanned gigs along the way. The tour kicked off in Grenoble in France and ended up in a small town in Germany called Schwabisch Gmund that is apparently filled with people from ex-Yugoslavia so I was speaking Serbo-croatian with almost everyone who attended the show that night. But anyway, ''the Grenoble show'' is what I want to tell you about.

As you can see, Grenoble is exactly 1000km (okay, 994) away from Zagreb. We decided it's a two day drive. It could have been a one day drive but we found a hostel in Italy (exactly 500km from Zagreb, seriously) so we decided to stay for the night. However, even with a two day drive, we still had an extra nothing to do day to spend in Grenoble before the show and before we kick off the tour by leaving for St. Etienne which meant no more days off. We met some amazing people (my bandmate @dimitrij wrote a lot about the tour on his blog so check it out) and stayed in a beautiful house near the center of the city. At one point we were all sitting around, drinking our beers and smoke our cigarettes when Ivča (guitarist/singer/songwriter) said in his most casual manner: hey Ivan, I think you should play tomorrow too. Remember I mentioned something like that before we left? Yeah, I think you should do it. We brought your guitar... Yeah, do it. So I did it. The venue was this really small place in Grenoble called ''Le Frequence Cafe Pub'' downtown. It's not really a pub and I don't even think it's really a cafe. It's a weird mix of a patisserie that transforms to a concert venue after 8 PM. It's really cute but it's probably the smallest concert venue I've ever seen.

I was supposed to open for my own band but the owner was worried about the noise and since I performed only with my acoustic guitar, we agreed I'll play a show after I play a band show. That wasn't really a first for me, playing two different shows in one night, but it was the first time I was performing only with my acoustic guitar and it was the first time I was performing my newly released solo material. As around 40 people gathered to see the show, I became nervous. What am I doing here? How am I supposed to play with only an acoustic guitar after we play a full band show? How did I get myself into this? Do I know the lyrics? What if it turns out super bad? Why do i always think Ivča has good ideas? So I grabbed a beer, rolled a cigarette and sat outside to make a setlist for my show.
I asked our drummer Dimitrij to fill in on the drums for a song or two, just to improvise something and use his hands instead of sticks so we don't make a lot of noise. When I came on stage and started play, the people started coming in and I remember thinking: well, great. Here's a guy from Croatia, playing a show in France, singing in english to a bunch of french people about his private problems he has back in Croatia. This will turn out great. And it absolutely did. The people loved the show. They were all paying attention to the lyrics and I was nervous so I made all kinds of little jokes in between the songs that they really seemed to like. Dimitrij was grea with improvising on the drums and I had a lot of fun. I only have a recording of one song called ''Island life'' so here it is, enjoy!