Well, there were a lot of possible songs I could choose, but really only one winner. Prince’s “Purple Rain”. For fun, here’s the rare video of him debuting the song with his then-new band, The Revolution, at the First Avenue in Minneapolis in 1983.
Here’s the challenge, if anyone wants to do it themselves:
For Larissa and me, 2012 was the year of stasis. We had big plans, and we worked towards them diligently, but a great deal of it felt like marking time until we could pull the lever that would propel everything into motion.1
A year ago, we threw that lever and began the adventure. Leaving our jobs, packing the car, and driving west to Seattle was a carefully orchestrated gamble, but a gamble nonetheless.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.
–Henry David Thoreau, Walden
2013 was the year of transitions. We moved across the country and set up house with a dear friend who needed roommates. Six months later, we introduced her to another dear friend, with whom she promptly fell in love and moved to Boston. We left our landing spot in the suburbs and moved into the heart of the city, in the shadow of the Space Needle and just blocks from the scenic waterfront of Elliot Bay.
I found a new job. Larissa found an old one.
One romantic relationship came to an abrupt end, to my dismay. Another unexpectedly came into being, to my delight.
I left one podcast, and began the work of reviving another.
I wrote several new songs. I performed a concert at OryCon.2 Just recently, I started taking guitar instruction for the first time in over 15 years.3
Darling, I’ve always tried to find the road not taken
From Monterey to Macon, two lanes have been my friends
Coastal highway, bayou byway, out and back again
But if you say you’re lonely, you know there’s only 40, 80, or 10
–Tanya Savory, “40, 80, or 10”
I drove the entire length of the country, from Georgia to California and up to Washington.4 I saw the Grand Canyon in all its glory, and traversed the Great Divide. I travelled to destinations old and new: Portland, Oregon; Vancouver, Canada; Salt Lake City, Utah; Columbus, OH. I explored my new city and it’s surrounding lakes and mountains, the place I had chosen at long last, to call home.
Over the course of this year, I’ve not done some things as well as I would have liked. I have been a terrible correspondent, relying much too heavily on social media to keep in touch. I’ve done an even worse job reaching out to newly local friends.5 For various reasons, I’ve done very little podcast recording this past year, though that was almost entirely not by my choice. This blog has been too too neglected, though I made a couple of efforts to remedy that, and I hope to do a better job in the coming year. And it will probably take most of the next year for our finances to adequately recover from moving all the mountains we had to shift in order to make it to where we are.
But where we are, I have to say, is pretty damn good. As the year draws to a close, we are finding a new equilibrium, and settling into new habits and routines. There will always be change; the wheel will always turn. But I feel as though the great transition we set in motion a year ago is complete.
We are home.
This is my ghost, this is my home — millions of miles my mind can’t own
No one’s seen it all; no one will
But I want to memorize it, every inch, want to remember where I’ve been
I bless these waves, I bless this wind, bless this grace & all my sins
–Marian Call, “Highway Five”
I remarked to Kathleen Sloan in July of that year that I felt like we were turning our entire world upside down in slow motion. ↩
Where I also was a program participant on a wide variety of panels. ↩
Aside from a 12 week introductory group class in 1998, I’m entirely self taught. Many of you are now nodding and thinking “Ah, that explains it…” ↩
I’ve now driven pretty much the entire length of I-40, most of it on this one trip. ↩
Social anxiety is awkward. I really do want to spend time with all of you. I’m just really really bad at actually saying that. ↩
(This is a repost from an entry I made 10 years ago, because it’s a fun topic to revisit periodically, and a good way to discover new music.)
Music is a constant in my life. It’s a rare day that I go through without listening to or making music in one form or another.
And it occurred to me on the way back from lunch with kitanzi this afternoon, as I cranked up a particular song, that there are some tunes that just never fail to make me happy.
Here are five of those songs, in no particular order:
Love Shack, B-52s
Sledgehammer, Peter Gabriel
Every Day I Write The Book, Elvis Costello
Got To Get You Into My Life, The Beatles
Linus and Lucy, Vince Guaraldi Trio
What are some songs that always leave you more cheerful than before? That make you dance in your seat? When you’re down, what music do you turn to to pick yourself up? What songs make you instinctively reach for the volume control to crank it up?
Share in comments. 
This week our theme is art in various forms.
As I wrote about over the weekend, I’ve finally done something I’ve needed to do for some time, which is find someone to sit down with who can help me expand my guitar toolkit. Tonight was my first meeting.
They have a nice little setup in the basement of a marina on Lake Union, with two small studio rooms. I met with my instructor, Mike, and spent a lot of time discussing my background, how I learned, what I was already good at, and so forth.1 Mike is a curious mixture of laid-back and hyper-focused, but I think I’ll get along with him. He had me play a song for him2 just to watch my current style, and then we got down to the brass tacks of what I wanted to learn and how to get there.
We’re starting out by refreshing on theory. Now, I know a bit of theory, because you can’t hang out with folks like Gwen Knighton and Mary Crowell without absorbing some stuff just through osmosis, but I’ve never made a formal study of it. The last time I had any formal music instruction, I was too impatient to get to the “I wanna play a SONG” stage to really focus on it. I think I’ll be a slightly more disciplined student today.
We did have an entertaining digression talking about how my personal guitar idols are.3
My homework for next week, aside from making a list of five “desert island” songs to send to him as background, is to play the note C. More specifically, to play all of the C notes on my fret board.4 I’m looking forward to Wednesdays for the next few weeks!
Actually, the very first thing that happened was I opened my guitar case, and Mike immediately gushed about what a lovely instrument it was, and took it to his partner’s studio to show it to him. Because it’s that nice. ↩
I randomly pulled “But The Days And Nights Are Long” by Cheryl Wheeler out of the air ↩
The Two Richards: Thompson and Shindell, Paul Simon, Robbie Robertson, Mark Knopfler, David Gilmour… ↩
I do actually understand the point of this exercise, but I’ve still been humming Beethoven’s “Minuet in G” over and over since I left. ↩
When I was 16 years old, I bought a guitar.
It was a bit of an impulse. I’d been working all summer as an inventory clerk for the county Board of Education, and having very little to spend my first real wages on, I’d just been putting the money in my savings account. I was visiting a friend in Greenville, and we stopped by a music store because he wanted to look for something. And there was this guitar. It was a black Rickenbacker solid-body six-string,1 and the guy who was selling it needed exactly $250 to buy a keyboard for a gig, so that’s what he was selling for. I didn’t know a lot about guitars, but it seemed like a pretty good deal, so I decided on the spot to buy it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have anyone to teach me how to play it, and I turned out to not be very good at figuring it out for myself. A few years later, needing money to move, I reluctantly sold it to a friend. But I always regretted it, 2 and told myself that one day, I was going to buy another guitar and learn to play it.
Ten years later…
A near-death experience has a remarkable ability to bring your future plans into sharp focus. I decided that I should consider doing those things I’d always meant to get around to sooner rather than later, and so I began looking for an instrument to suit me. I finally purchased a Fender 12-string acoustic3 from a shop in Alpharetta, and signed myself up for a 12 week group class at Mars Music. Once I’d completed that, I borrowed song books from anyone I could, and leafed through them looking for songs I knew the chords to. These I copied into a binder, which I then played through as much as I could, trying to develop at least enough technique to accompany myself. I’ve kept at that over the years, adding new songs as often as I can and trying to improve my playing.
I haven’t done too badly at that, I suppose. I’ve played on stages in front of tens of people from time to time. But a long time ago I found the plateau of where I could push myself, and I’ve been stalled there ever since. Good enough to do what I’ve been doing, but not where I wanted to be. I’ve known for quite some time that to get to the next level, I need an instructor. For one reason or another, I’ve not actually taken the step of finding one. There was always a good reason. I didn’t have the money, or I didn’t have the time, or we were going to be moving soon4
But there was also fear. For all that I seem gregarious and outgoing, I hide a lot of shyness and social anxiety, and the truth is that part of what I had to overcome was my own mental blocks. I knew going in that I was going to have to say to a potential teacher: “This is what I have. 15 years of bad habits, cheats and short-cuts that have kept me from stepping up to the next level. I will have to unlearn those before I can move forward”, and that was a harder thing to do that I realised.
But after searching around, I finally decided to take that step. I reached out to an instructor I found on the web who isn’t far from where I’m now living and inquired about availability, and have since exchanged some emails5 and set up a time to go in and meet with him. I’m hoping that we click and that I’ll be able to expand my horizons and start doing some of the things that have felt out of my reach.
And despite all my trepidation, I’m really looking forward to it.
I’m pretty sure it was a Rickenbacker 230, but since I don’t have it any more, I can’t really be certain. ↩
I’ve happily in recent years, thanks to Facebook, reconnected with the friend, but sadly she sold it to someone else some years ago, so there’s no chance of getting it back. Alas. ↩
I liked the wider fretboard on the 12 string. I have large hands. ↩
which has been the excuse for pretty much the last two years, honestly. ↩
I told him a version of this story you’re reading, with a lot more focus on the specific skills that I’m lacking and wanting to pick up. So at least he knows what he’s in for when I show up the first time. ↩
Between 2005 and 2009, I didn’t play a lot of music in public. It wasn’t a decision I made to withdraw from the stage. It started because of struggles with depression that caused me to withdraw from a lot of social spheres, and then after I came out the other side of that particular emotional valley, I just…didn’t. No one was asking me if I wanted to, and I wasn’t volunteering, and the longer it went on, the more it just became…normal. This wasn’t just not doing concert sets or one shots; many have noted that I absented myself from open filk, preferring instead to spend my con time socialising or lurking around the edges.
The last couple of years, I’ve been making an effort to get back to playing public, because…I enjoy it. So I’ve made an effort at cons to make itto at least a little bit of open filk, if only to justify having brought my guitar. And when ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.autographedcat.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
mrgoodwraith asked me at OVFF a couple of yearsago if I’d like to come play a short set at Confluence in 2011, I eagerly agreed. Unfortunately, just before I was to book my flight, kitanzi unexpectedly lost her job, and I couldn’t justify the expense. Randy understood, and extended an invitation to come up in 2012 instead.
Stumbled across this absolutely fantastic cover of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in a Popdose article last week. Thought I’d share it. 🙂
When I was sixteen years old, I bought my first guitar. It was a 1982 Rickenbacker solidbody electric, and I got it for a steal of a price. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anyone to really teach me how to play it, and I was pretty useless at teaching myself. A couple of years later, in need of quick cash, I sold it to a friend right before I moved to Georgia.
I had always regretted this, and said one day I’m going to get another guitar and learn to play it. But I put it off, and I put it off, and I put it off some more. Sooner or later, I said, there will be time and money for it.
In 1998, a near-death experience reminded me that there won’t always be time to get around to things, and I might want to think about not putting off those things I really want to do with my life. So once I was adequately recovered, I went out and bought a new guitar, a Fender DG10/12 12-string acoustic. And I signed up for a group class at the nearby MARS music store, and learned to play it well enough, and set about learning to play songs I liked and actually performing at filks and filkcons. 13 years later, I’m an adequate if unexceptional accompanist.
(While I was there, I also test drove a much more expensive acoustic: a Taylor 8-string baritone. It took an immense amount of willpower and a reminder of what I’d already committed funds to over the next few months not to change my plans, because dear lord I sounded good playing it. But I digress…)
I’ve been playing around with it for the last 12 hours. First impressions: I love the sound of it. I think I’m going to have a lot of fun with it. Good grief, I don’t know how to play it. 🙂
It’s a whole new ride. Let’s make some noise.
In a thread over on Facebook, one of my friends was lamenting that alt-rock darlings Mumford and Sons (who I think are awesome) didn’t win the Best New Artist Grammy, and complaining she’d never even heard of the winner, Esperanza Spalding. I commented that while I’d have been happy to see Mumford take the prize, it’s no crime for Spalding to win, because she’s utterly amazing, and encouraged her to check Spalding out before dismissing her.
Someone else in the thread replied, “It’s probably just as well. The Best New Artist Grammy is the Kiss of Death™ for your career.”
Now, that’s received wisdom. Everyone knows its true. Win Best New Artist, and collect your free ticket to Obscurityville. And it struck me to wonder, is it true? I mean, everyone KNOWS that it’s true, but is it, you know, factually true?
So, in one of those flashes of inspiration that always seem like a good idea at the time, I decided to find out.
Below the cut, you will find my exhaustively researched (read: I just spent the last three and a half hours on Wikipedia) report on every winner of the Best New Artist Grammy since the establishment of the award in 1959, with an eye towards determining if, in fact, the myth of career-destroying doom was justified.
Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén
