I have a serious issue now. I desperately want a $2100 bass. You see, Ernie Ball/Music Man came out with their new Stingray Special series, with roasted maple necks that have stainless steel frets and updated bodies that are lighter, and updated electronics that are punchier and quieter. Of course, it’s not happening. I don’t have that kind of cash.
Cut to a few weeks ago, where I was doing my normal Craigslist perusal, and I came across a guy up in Cedar Park selling my $2100 bass for a mere $1295! I literally did not have the funds to scrape together to get this incredibly-cheap offering of EXACTLY THE BASS I WANT – Black. Maple fingerboard. One pickup. Just like the Sterling Sub series that I’m playing now as my #1 bass, but lighter and more pro in every single way.
So I’ve been anguished about it for a couple of weeks now. And the ad has finally timed out on Craiglist, so no more drooling over that which I can not possess. I did send the guy an email basically begging him to keep in touch if he still happened to have the bass next month (since I plan on scraping together money and selling things). I’ve heard nothing back. I’m sad.
So what does this tell me? Well, I snoozed and most likely lost. And I simply cannot justify spending almost $1300 on a bass, even if it is the $2100 bass I so desperately wish to own.
But if on the odd chance I do hear back from Allen from Cedar Park…well, I guess we’ll see how my willpower handles it.
I don’t NEED this bass…but damn if it wouldn’t be a hoot to have it!
In other news: Things with The Bings are going as wonderfully as before, better, actually, because my voice has been solid. We’ve been killing our Thursday shows at Stereotype, with people showing up basically just to see us and then clearing out once we’re done (except on the Saturday gig – they hung out – we wish they’d hang out on the Thursdays, too, but it’s nice that they’re there for us specifically). Not sure what the future holds with that. 2019 might be something different there. We’ll have to see. I do look forward to seeing some of my “buddy bands” there, though (like HighRoad, Zoodust, and especially Hit & Run). They’re all being booked when we can’t make the shows.
I’ve been cleaning things up in my studio and getting things all wired up for proper use in preparation for work beginning in earnest on some recordings. I know if you look at the 10 years or so I’ve been writing this blog that that seems like more of the same promised bullshit, but this time I really have all the pieces together and am feeling some creativity, so it might not be any of the songs I’ve already written – it might be writing new ones from all the progressions, melodies, and riffs I’ve been recording on my iPhone for the past six or seven years. I’ve got good software and plugins and I’m raring to go. Now it’s just finding the moments of quiet necessary for getting things down. I think I can manage it. 🙂
I’m probably heading out to a jam night tomorrow to see some friends and maybe rock out a few tunes I haven’t played in a while. I might even see if they’ll let me play drums on something. I haven’t done that in front of an audience since a Slaphappy gig in Georgia about 15 years ago.
On the “gear I actually own” front, the HX Stomp has been PERFECTION for my gigs with The Bings. And I got a new set of quad-driver in-ears for cheap on Amazon that have been perfection as well. It’s crazy – I haven’t even been running a speaker or amp. Just BIG FAT TONE from a teeny tiny pedal.
Thanks for reading my update, and have a wonderful Christmas and New Year – if that’s your thing.
(note – Just some thoughts. I wrote this piece back in March, but am finally publishing it now. Not sure why I never hit publish.)
As someone who has spent the majority of his musical life as background music for people getting drunk, it’s hard for me to relate to what it must be like to actually create music as art. Sure, I’ve written my fair share of songs, and I have pretty strong opinions on what I like and don’t like about things I and others have created, but I’ve never seen myself as an artist, or my work as artistry.
I wonder sometimes if that’s just me avoiding actually putting myself out there for judgment or if it’s putting art on a pedestal, or a mix of both. I definitely am proud of some of the stuff I’ve created, and I’m definitely proud of some of the ways I’ve put my stamp on other people’s work through my experience in cover bands of various types.
I’m inherently not a precious person when it comes to creating musical things, which is to my detriment, I think. I do believe I’d have something to offer as an artist. I just carry this inbuilt suspicion and animosity toward the very act of being precious, with the notable exception that I’m all in if it’s an artist I love – they can be as precious as they feel they need to be and I’m still eating it up. But I wonder if it really does come down to fear that nothing I could ever do would measure up to the things that I like.
Stepping away from music for a bit – when I was first creating audio productions, long before I worked in radio production, I was very particular about things being “just so”. I really crafted the things I created with a lot of care. When I started making commercials, I would do the same, and take tons of time just trying to get them perfect. Once I worked in radio production full time, I learned that I simply did not have enough time to spend hours on one 30-second commercial. I really had to speed it up to get things done. Then I became a production director all by myself, and had no time to be precious about it – I just had to get things done.
One might think I’d be able to carry over that “get it done” attitude to music, but the lack of hard deadlines in music has kept me from really feeling like I’ve ever accomplished anything. People flog the “art is never finished, only abandoned” cliche, but it is a real trap if you think you can keep working on something forever. That’s what I’ve been doing with a lot of my own music. Nothing feels good enough for me, and almost every time I’ve shared something, it’s mostly met with indifference, which reinforces the idea that I’m simply not doing anything interesting. Which is largely true, if I’m being brutally honest with myself. I have my retread pop punk-style songs, and my retread power pop songs and my retread sort of singer-songwritery songs. Nothing is all that “me”.
I grapple with the whole “me” thing as a writer. It reminds me of a time in high school. I was doing my normal thing of talking in every voice but my own (doing accents and characters and basically being a teenage Dana Carvey wannabe) and my best friend Brandon had grown tired of my antics, grabbed me, and said, “What do YOU sound like?” It’s funny how much that resonated. It went far beyond just doing a surfer dude voice followed by a fey German accent. It sticks in my head to this day, but it’s morphed into something even bigger. Perhaps even something menacing for me as a creator. What do I sound like? Honestly, I’ve been avoiding that for years, mostly because every time I create something, I really hate what I sound like when I’m not basically doing a style impression of some other artist I admire. Who am I kidding? I hate that, too, because it’s not original!
Which brings me to the whole point of this spiel: Artistry. How does one define it? I struggle with it all the time, because I feel like 25 years playing in cover bands has basically robbed me of any artistry of my own. I am a pretty complete musician, because I’ve played many different genres of music and can slide into most musical situations quite comfortably, but I never feel like an artist or feel like anything I do is truly artistic. I’ve gotten close to it from time to time, especially during improvisational performances at jam nights, and coming up with parts to complement the crazy ways we redo things in Chandler and The Bings, but with the music I’ve composed, I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten there, to a place where I’d consider it art. I’ve definitely tried.
My 44th birthday is next Saturday. I officially am starting to feel old. My lovely fiancee decided that she wanted to do something super nice for me for the occasion, so she purchased a really nice 2-in-1 laptop for me, which is the “new machine” mentioned in the title of this post. Even better, she decided to let me have it early! I am so excited because this allows me to take any sort of productions I’d like to do portable. It’s got more than enough power to do everything I need, recording-wise, and it plays nice with all my recording software. I will be able to use it to write and blog more, and be more creative in general.
I really had committed to doing more creative work earlier this year, but I somehow let life get in the way again. I’m still not doing what I really want to do in that respect, though I did come up with a good song idea for Chandler And The Bings that we should be adding to our show soon. It’s just going to take some vocal work and “Bingsification” to really make it special, but it’s got GREAT potential. I’ll have to be satisfied with that for now.
As for my Bings, we’re kicking every type of ass. We just did a benefit last night for hurricane victims where we raised a small pile of money, and it was a really fun show. Listening to my live recording of the show, it’s not as musically “there” as a lot of other bands I’ve done, but it is more energetic and fun, and the crowd is loving every minute.
The one thing that’s truly been nagging at me musically is not playing any shows where I’m doing most of the singing. I really didn’t think I’d miss it as much as I do. I like being bass guy, harmony guy, and once-in-a-while lead vocalist for the Bings, but it’s kind of weird how much of a hole the lack of lead singing leaves just mostly being an instrumentalist.
Anyway, that’s the update from here. Peace be the journey and #leadwithlove!
TMS
Chandler Bing was by far my favorite character on the sitcom “Friends”. I had already been a huge fan of Matthew Perry from some of his earlier shows, and he’s the reason that I even decided to watch “Friends” when it hit the airwaves in 1994. Well, not the only reason, because I had seen Courteney Cox in a few other things at that point and was a little obsessed with her. But together they were for sure a win for me – funny quippery from a familiar face and an absurdly beautiful woman I could watch? Sign me up. It premiered when I was in college. September of 1994 – so it was my second year living up in the dorms. Friends became an event back in these pre-widespread-internet days. Groups of coeds would gather in the TV lounges every Thursday night for this bit of “Must-See TV”. At this point in my life, most of my friends were young women, so of course I was going to be roped in for the Thursday night festivities even if I hadn’t been a Matt Perry and Courteney Cox fan. I thought the show was a little ridiculous, but I really loved their wisecracking ways, and aside from Ross, who was a whiny bitch, and Rachel, who embodied pretty much everything that could go wrong with a woman to me, I really enjoyed the show. It was so thoroughly white-person-90s that it seemed targeted directly to the Gen-X temporary denizens of my very small, very white college town. And every time you hear someone say, “I was SO not happy” or something to that effect (the emphasized negative), you have “Friends”, specifically Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing, to thank for that.
So how does it all relate to music or me being the Musical Schizo? Well, there was another character on the show, Phoebe Buffay, who was an aspiring singer-songwriter and would play her hilariously bad songs at “Central Perk”, the coffee house where all the Friends hung out (and one of them worked). Around that time, perhaps a year later, a coffee house opened up in my very small, very white college town called the Java Hut. There were plenty of Phoebe Buffays that played that place. One of them was actually not terribly bad, and he was the roommate of a friend of mine. This singer-songwriter would enlist my help because I was the only person he knew who owned a PA system. I’d cart my rig (Peavey XR600B and two 10″-12″-horn column speakers) down to the Java Hut and get it all set up so he could play his music for the caffeinated clientele. He wrote songs about all kinds of things – life, love, Star Wars – he just wrote endlessly. His notebook of songs was ENORMOUS. At this point, I think I had written about 20 songs, and they were all pretty terrible blues songs or things forced into some neat riff or chord progression that I had come up with that didn’t really have a story or any sort of decent melody. After meeting this person, I was inspired to write more – and better – and to figure out what it was that I really wanted to say. I went through a five- or six-year period where I wrote a lot of songs, most of them still terrible, but more and more they started to represent things on my mind, or stories about characters in my life or characters in my head. Then I got married, had children, got full-time work, and life started to distract and intervene.
They say major life events like getting married or divorced and having children can really inspire creativity, but weirdly my most creative periods have come when I’ve had nothing going on. When life is really boring and I have nothing else to do. Periods where I’ve gotten over the initial grief or joy of some big life event and psychologically feel “okay”. My most recent big tough life event was probably my divorce in 2013, and to date I’ve gotten basically zero songs out of it. I did meet a wonderful woman and she’s inspired a song or two, but my writing output has been utter shit for the past 10 years. When I have the time I don’t have the energy, when I have the energy I don’t have the time. I’m sure many creative people have the same issues. It doesn’t help that I generally assemble my song demos in the same digital audio workstation software I use for my day job. When I come home from staring at that for eight hours, I’m not exactly inspired to stare at it any longer just to get song ideas down. I’ve thought about using other media to write stuff, and every time I have something vaguely inspiring I make a note of it on my phone’s built-in recorder. Thus far, that’s resulted in one new song. The song inspired by my fiancee but not directly about her necessarily. It’s been through a couple of demos and I’m not fully satisfied with it just yet, but it is quite a stylistic departure for me:
But moving on, I have in my head that I really want to be more creative. I feel like I want to write new and better songs again. I have a studio space where this is possible. But it’s not happening because I can’t decide exactly how I want to focus my creative musical energy. I don’t know if I want to write new songs or improve myself as a musician in general, by working on my relative pitch and understanding of theory, so that when I do write, I can connect things more easily. So my life with music has been one of pleasant distractions for the past few years, since my songwriting output went down the tubes. I’m not sure if the pleasant distractions are WHY my songwriting output is in the toilet, but they have been very pleasant – my long and satisfying (if up and down) run with Roman Holiday, my abbreviated tenure with Nudge, my many fill-in gigs with Texas Players and Mark Chandler, my even-more-abbreviated time with Flext, my false start that was The Dangerfields, and all of my wonderful solo gig experiences. Which brings us back to my current pleasant distraction, Chandler and The Bings.
I detailed in my last post that they have managed to soften the hard candy shell that represents my “musical perfectionish” tendencies (not “-ist” because that’s unrealistic). We come up with clever reworked versions of songs and that’s pretty inspiring – to hold on to the essence of the song and make it relatable but put a new spin on it that better fits our personality as an ensemble. It’s the same bit that I found endlessly inspiring working things out with Roman Holiday, creating rock band versions of 80s synth-pop tunes. Our wonderful shows with engaged and happy audiences have made me understand more and more that if you just have fun, they’ll have fun with you. I want to carry that fun back into my creative endeavors, so I think my next plan is a fundamental lifestyle shift. Taking a little bit of time every day to just create something, good or bad. Just to remind myself that it’s fun and that I love creating things. Because I DO! So, much like realizing that I need to have some physical exercise every day, and committing to that, I’m going to make the commitment to have a little creativity exercise every day, too. This blog post is the first example of that. Musing about life in the mid-90s, my love for “Friends” and how inspiring it can be to just love creating music, art, whatever. I AM A CREATIVE. It’s time to start behaving like one again. A creative that doesn’t create is nothing. I’m tired of being nothing.
Related unrelated comment: I once wrote an episode of Friends in college with my wonderful roommate Mary because we had a TV Writing and Criticism class together. It was great. Well, we thought it was great. But it was certainly great fun to create!
Expect new stuff from me soon, because I’m going to document my creations here on the blog.
Thank you for reading, and peace be the journey!
TMS
P.S. Come see a Chandler and The Bings show – it may not be perfect, but it sure is FUN!
The Dangerfields, Solo shows, keyboard, fitness, etc.
The Dangerfields are still in progress, and we’ve played one more show since my last post. Okay, that’s not really accurate, because it’s not The Dangerfields, really if Lee isn’t playing drums. But it was a nice try, although an overally unpleasant experience for a variety of reasons. (Kudos to Ernie for filling in and doing a good job) We’ve had a couple of rehearsals since then and the last one was very inspiring – we’re starting to sound like a BAND – which is really good. Finding time to schedule shows around our lives and Lee’s other band is the next trick, but we’ll get to that. So life is good in the world of no respect. 🙂
I booked a few more solo shows at Scoreboard, and I’m very excited to be back there. I’m going to try and make my PA and light rig even more simple for easier setup-teardown, which is a delightful challenge.
I bought a Korg X50 synth at a pawn shop, and it’s already inspiring me with its sounds. I’m excited to become a better keyboardist, and I might even learn some songs on it for the solo gigs. Wouldn’t that be weird?
Finally, I’m back at the gym on a regular basis. Time to get in shape and stay in shape. It’s already making my joints feel better, and once I’ve worked out a way to eat better with my weird sensory food issues on top of the regular gym activity, I’ll get lighter and will be able to start exercising a little harder.
I have been inspired to improve my overall musicianship, but I also really want to tap into whatever emotions are flowing through me now. I’m very happy with my life in general – my work is pleasant, my home situation is awesome, and I feel very loved. And that sort of peace usually keeps me from being all that expressive with music – I just don’t write all that much. I have had some serious moments of worry and pain, though, with family far away, first from Hurricane Matthew (everyone is okay, but it was scary), and then through a friend’s loss this past weekend.
One of my best friends in the world, both musically and non-musically, just lost his brother. I can’t really imagine the emotions he’s feeling, but it’s made me very, very sad, because his brother was always such an encouraging spirit, supporting our musical endeavors and really just showing us “the love”. If I ever had to do a crying scene in a movie, I’d think about losing one of my brothers – the very idea is that level of pain for me, and I wish there was something I could do to help my friend through this horrible time.
I wish there was a way to express it as well as I think Neil Peart and Rush did on this song:
My long personal nightmare is over: I’m writing again! And this is a pretty dang cool feeling…
The first song I’m sharing is a song that is very close to my heart. I decided to try and dig deep and “feel all the feels” as some might say, and this new one is the result. This one makes me cry. It also doesn’t sound much like anything else I’ve ever recorded, so it might be kind of shocking (especially vocally). Go with me here and don’t carry any prejudices – this is 100% from my heart.
It’s called “Way Too Long Of A While”:
It comes on the heels of spending some time with my family that I love deeply and miss terribly because I live over 1000 miles away (or more). It’s actually a fairly simple concept, inspired by my internal conflict of feeling sad because I’m far away, but really loving the life I’ve got aside from the distance from “home” (which to me isn’t a place, but rather the five other members of my family – my mom, dad, and three younger brothers).
Thanks for listening, and watch this space for more!
TMS
Now, things are looking really good for getting back in there (I’m literally texting with the booking agent in between typing sentences here), but it’s still frustrating because I really wanted to make this a very regular thing – at least once a month, preferably two or three times. It’s SO MUCH FUN and the extra cash is very helpful. 🙂
On other fronts, I’m trying to work out scheduling to sing some backing vocals for my friend’s first album, which is terrifying and exciting all rolled into one. I don’t consider myself much of a singer, which is probably silly, since I’ve been doing it in front of people for money on a regular basis now for 16 years, but it’s the fact that I’m not properly trained that keeps me from feeling good about my singing. I know I could be better. I even want to take lessons. Financially that hasn’t been an option.
I did get a promotion at the day job, which is nice, since it came with some extra scratch, which will make the solo gig money even more spendable. Perhaps on things like vocal lessons. 🙂
I’ve stalled at creating new music…but I am definitely feeling like it’s time to record some stuff. My main recording computer cooked a power supply last weekend, and fortunately that’s all that cooked, so after a $30 replacement it’s back up and running, but it scared me. I’m a creative person that hasn’t been creating, and that makes me feel like a fraud. I need to DO SOME SHIT. So I will.
And hopefully it’ll be worthy of posting here in Bloggington.
When I was a small child, living in East Islip, NY, there are a few hazy memories that for some reason stick with me (we moved away when I was five years old). One of those memories was of our neighbors, the Infantes. I remember they had a dog. I remember they had a 1960s or early 1970s Chevy Impala that they used to park in the street. And I remember that their son Mike loved the album “Best Of Cream” that my dad had. So from a very very early age, Cream was on my radar.
When I got to be about 12 or 13, I started to become really obsessed with the idea of playing music – of actually making it myself. This new idea was largely a product of a new friend I made when my family moved from the Bay Area in California to central New Jersey near Princeton. His name was Ty Phillips, and he was very inspiring to me. He played trumpet, and he had a little Casio keyboard (an MT-100) that he used to make little compositions on. He also liked to hear music his dad would play for him. I always loved when my dad did that, too. And one of the bands my dad would play for me was Cream.
I remember being enchanted by the raw power of “Sunshine Of Your Love” and the weirdness of “SWLABR” and its tale of rainbows with beards, and I remember being moved by the propulsive live track “Crossroads” and its amazing guitar playing. But my favorite song – and still one of my favorite songs of all time – was “Badge”. Propelled by Jack Bruce’s signature bass line and his high-but-not-feminine vocal performance, it has lyrics that made almost no sense to me at all, and still don’t, but the music is so captivating I’ve never cared. That bass line is one of the first bass lines I ever learned – it’s a major part of what made me want to become a bassist. And that middle section before the guitar solo with the phase-shifted guitar pattern might be one of the most fantastic bits of music ever recorded.
Second to “Badge” was the song “White Room”. I always loved the thumping, almost orchestral-sounding intro with Ginger Baker’s pounding drum pattern and the sustaining guitar harmonies. Then the song takes off into muscular verses with a descending chord pattern that countless classic rock acts would ape in their own compositions. And then pretty falsetto singing in the chorus with wah-wah guitar that made me want to own a wah pedal immediately even before I knew what one was. It’s amazing that such a noodly, wanky band like The Cream had so many tightly-constructed pop songs. I guess they sort of lived a double life, though…tightly-constructed recorded music, insane improvisational live shows.
Over the years, I sort of wore out that “Best of Cream” record. Even when I first stole it from my dad it had a scratch on “White Room” that made me think that the line “black roof country” is going to go, “black roof-black roof-black roof…” When I finally got “Strange Brew – The Very Best of Cream” on CD in my 20s, I never even realized that the version of White Room on that vinyl LP I had was not only scratched, but it was an EDIT! There was even more of this wonderful song to enjoy.
And so, as a tribute to a major bass and vocal hero of mine, Jack Bruce, I submit the next Bathroom Schizo offering – “White Room” direct from my (off-)white (bath)room:
If you stay until the end, I’ve added a short clip of my old band from Jacksonville, Slaphappy, performing “Sunshine Of Your Love” at a show in January 2005, shortly before it ended. I hope you enjoy this little tribute and may Jack Bruce rest in peace. I’m glad his music is still around to make us all happy and challenge those of us who try to recreate it. I know I’m a better musician because he was one of the people I strived to emulate.
So my time with Nudge has come to an end. I won’t go into gory details publicly of my displeasure with how the situation was handled, but it basically came down to scheduling issues that I created by demanding that my weekends with my kids are free. Priorities, you know? I do wish them well…
The good thing is it frees me up for finally having more ownership in my musical endeavors. Whether that’s a new power trio with me back on bass with my buddies from The Extractors Ed and Lee, a bunch of solo acoustic gigs, an acoustic duo of some sort, or finally working on my album, it’s a brave new world, and this time, it’s going to be MINE.
I have to start making shit instead of just talking about it or regurgitating it. Talking about it makes you an entertainer, agent or a critic. Making it makes you an artist. And I’m tired of not being an artist. (Though I won’t stop being an entertainer, too, because that pays…)
So I really love playing guitar. It somehow manages to excite me, infuriate me, please me, challenge me, inspire me, and calm me all in the span of whatever stretch of time I’m playing. For the past 15 years, since I’ve been regularly gigging in cover bands, I’ve played a whole lot more bass than guitar, and though I absolutely love that, too, there’s something about returning “home” to guitar, which was my original “serious” instrument, even if it wasn’t the first one I wanted to play (I wanted to double on keyboards and bass – being John Paul Jones before I even knew who that was).
So as I said in the last post, I’ve joined a new band called “Nudge” as a guitarist and doing some singing. It’s been a really interesting and inspiring experience. Kind of like going back and revisiting an earlier part of your life, but with the added knowledge gained from years of additional experience.
The last time I played guitar in bands was from 2005-2006, before my move to Austin. It was a few mixed experiences. The main gigging band I ended up playing with had just come off their most successful lineup when they lost a critical founding member at the end of 2004 – their singer/guitarist. I auditioned for the job and it went very well, including an incredible jam on Stairway To Heaven. But they replaced the singer/guitarist with a person that had been previously fired from the band instead of picking me. I found out later it had less to do with my ability as a singer/guitarist and more to do with my image/perceived “coolness” and worries about whether I’d be available because at the time I was still playing bass in Slaphappy (little did any of us know that that band would be defunct less than a month after they made their choice). So they brought the new old guy in and he did okay, but within months, the rest of the band was falling apart and burned out. The lead guitarist was leaving the “band lifestyle” behind to start a business and a family, and the bassist was completely tired of the grind and wanted to do something more creative and original. So I got the call. After having me fill in for one show on bass with the old guitarist, which was FUN, they found a new bassist and I slotted into the singer/guitarist role vacated by the MONSTER guitarist they had previously had in the band. We agreed to split vocals and lead guitar duties 50/50, and we were on our way, playing much of the same exact music I’m now playing with Nudge. It was quite a challenge learning that many songs, that many lead parts, in such a short time frame, but I did it. And I was beginning to shine as a singer, too. This became a problem because the other guitarist/vocalist fancied himself the de facto lead singer, which was weird because of the agreement that was reached when I joined the band. He kept shifting lead guitar duties off to me and taking vocals away – which was only annoying to me because it wasn’t improving the sound of the band to have him sing the songs. We actually received complaints about his singing on numerous occasions, so if anyone was going to be vocally marginalized, it probably should have been him, not me. This led to some serious drama and his eventual departure from the band. I take responsibility for making it dramatic, too. It was a lesson I needed to learn – how to stick up for myself without just being a dick. But anyway, through all that, I learned how to sound good as a guitarist live. I still believe that if they had chosen me in the first place, the band would have continued and had its most incredible lineup ever, but we don’t know because that “Alternate 2005” never happened.
During this time, the just-quit bassist from the band and I decided we wanted to try and get something together – less pressure than our previous bands, more focused on stuff we wanted to do rather than what we expected to work, and also to work in originals and all sorts of other cool stuff. We recruited a keyboardist with a great ear and my musical soul brother Jon from Slaphappy and started trying to figure out what we’d become. As time wore on, though, it became less and less what the bassist wanted to do, and he ended up leaving. We sputtered along with a different bassist, even playing a show, but it wasn’t the same, and we lost interest by the end of 2005. I did really work up my singing/playing chops – even learning how to play semi-complicated lead fills while singing, so that was positive.
But then I moved away.
And the only work I found in Austin was as a bassist, so the guitar fell into the background. I played a few songs on guitar in Roman Holiday for a little while, but it always felt forced and I never was fully comfortable because doing both in one show feels really weird.
All those years of being focused on the arrangements, and singing, and more than that, the GROOVE have improved my guitar playing so much that I look back at 2005-2006 and think, “Wow. I really didn’t know shit about playing guitar in a band.” And I’m sure in 8 years I’ll look back to now and think the same thing…but the parts are coming together more and more easily than ever, and it’s so far been a fantastic experience. Let’s hope that continues.
Interesting side note: The last time I grew my hair this long was in 2005-2006, too. I cut it when I moved to Austin. So long hair = playing guitar in a band? 🙂
Shows coming up:
June 14th at Steiner Ranch for the SELF benefit
June 20th at Shooters on 620