Cats Laughing — Draw The Curtain

There are a few geeky connections with this band. Apart from Steven Brust on drums and Emma Bull on vocals, there’s also Adam Stemple who’s mom is Jane Yolen. So already there we have two fantasy authors and a connection to a third. (Brust & Bull also wrote the excellent Freedom & Necessity together. Epistolary set in the end of the 1840s.)

They also performed songs written by other authors around the Minneapolis area — not Neil Gaiman though, he didn’t live there then. (He wrote for Bulls later duo: the Flash Girls.) Some of the songs have ties to Bull’s novel War For the Oaks.

Even more importantly, they were damned good. Their second album Another Way To Travel is the better of the two records but you should check out both of them. Cats Laughing also appeared in an issue of Excalibur as Kitty Pryde’s favourite band.