Wondering…

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me-at-martys-3I was sitting on the couch playing my guitar this evening. My 2 year old son was sitting on the chair across from me playing “his” guitar (my baby Taylor). He would strum the guitar on his lap and sing along with me (using any words he could think of). He occasionally stopped to look at me with a huge grin on his face to say “I’m a good singer!”.

It was cute. What struck me was how much I don’t do this with him. In fact, I spend so much time working with technology that I sometimes stop feeling like a musician at all.

This evening was odd, because I suddenly felt inspired to do some of those musical things I had left behind to “be the good father & husband” and to “provide for my family”. All lies to myself. I was just afraid to allow myself to be the creative person I really am. And now I am feeling such a pull to be “the old Steve” and pursue that part of me again.

Oddly, this all comes on the heals of starting to take better care of myself; exercising regularly and eating better. Maybe that has something to do with it, maybe it doesn’t. All I know is that I feel inspired like I haven’t felt in a long time. So much so that I have decided to resurrect my second album project. I released my first album, Wasted Time, in 2000. I was planning on getting the second one out there in 2003. That never happened. I wrote songs for it, recorded some of them and then just became occupied with other things.

My thought right now is to work towards  finishing the album and to then release it under the creative commons license to make it freely available for people to listen to.

Oh, and the working title for the second album has been Hurricane Season for years. I’m sticking with that…for now.

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Gig: 6/28/09 at The Bitter End

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the bitter end

Just booked it today. I’ll be performing as part of the Singer/Songwriters Sessions. I don’t know who else will be performing, but I imagine there will be some other good music too.

I go on at 7:30 pm, and will be sending out some emails to let people know and (hopefully) get a few supporters in the crowd. I should have more details soon.

Mark your calendars and come on down.

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Virus Outbreak

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computer-virus-bugs-clip-art-thumb3167674No, I’m not referring to the recent news of Swine Flu from Mexico that may (or may not) have reached the New York area. I’m talking about PC virii, well the Conficker virus to be specific.

So, I know that at least a few of my PC using friends have recently contracted the Conficker virus because a very private email address, that has never been posted anywhere, is now receiving tons of spam daily.

I’d like to personally thank all those people for not having working anti-virus software and also for buying a PC when they have no idea how to harden it to keep it safe from these types of attacks. I now have to spend my time changing this email address and alerting everyone who had it about the change to stop receiving the spam.

Over the years I have used just about every system available: DOS, AppleDOS, ProDOS, UNIX, Classic Mac OS, Windows, OS X, Linux, et al. In this day and age there is no good reason to buy a PC. Microsoft is still building Windows around a DOS core. Yes, that’s state-of-the-art technology for 1982! I don’t care how much Microsoft has spend marketing “the latest & greatest”. It is still based on technology that is coming up on 30 years old, with 30 year old security holes that never envisioned an always online world. It’s archaic attitude toward privacy & security is laughable or, I should say, would be laughable if so many people weren’t actively using it an exposing the rest of us to these gargantuan security flaws.

Here’s a hint – if you don’t know how to manually edit the registry, don’t know which services to disable (or set to manual) and have never heard of msconfig – buy a Mac. You know, everyone should just buy a Mac anyway. If you can’t afford a new system right now – wipe your hard drive and install Ubuntu.

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Decisions, decisions, decisions

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All my life I have been in search of the “perfect guitar”. That one instrument that gives me everything I want in tone, feel and playability. Of course, the longer I’ve played, the better I became and the more intricate my technique, it became less and less likely a single instrument could ever deliver everything I wanted.  At one point in my life I was accumulating guitars at a break-neck pace. Buying new ones and unloading older ones. The I started buying other instruments to satisfy my need for other sounds.

Between my wife & myself we have a total of 13 guitars (4 electric, 9 acoustic), 2 bass guitars, 2 mandolins, 2 violins, 2 dulcimers, a drum set and various pieces of hand percussion. Storage and care of these instruments gets to be more and more of a chore, yet I can’t seem to find one that I would be willing to part with. And even though many of them go unnoticed for months at a time while I have my current favorite, I will go back to the others and remember why it was I bought them and what they provided that the others lacked.

I suppose the hardest part to deal with is that I really do want to have my one guitar that gives me everything I need. I just don’t think it exists. I even feel guilty about having so many instruments. I used to think my 1995 Taylor 812c was that perfect guitar, but I recently have gone back to my 1997 Taylor 810-WMB and am just smitten with the huge, all-encompassing sound of that instrument and the deep and sonorous low-end. It doesn’t have the delicate top end that the 812c has, but it has a power and depth that the 812c will never have.

If I could somehow magically meld these two guitars into a single instrument I would have my perfect acoustic. As far as the electric goes…well, that’s a story for another day.

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Broken Mirrors

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broken-mirrorSo, I played my first gig in a long while this past friday as part of a songwriter’s circle. It was really fun to get out and play in front of a crowd again. I really like the energy of performing to a crowd that is there to listen…which was the case this past friday. After so many years of being in front of crowds, I feel so comfortable in that situation. That wasn’t so surprising.

What I was surprised to find was just how much I truly missed performing live. For the past few years I would remind myself of all the negative aspects of gigging: you always spend way more time loading, unloading, setting up and tearing down than you want to and the actual playing end of the night goes by so fast. Not to mention, the ROI on a performance is somewhere in the negatives. It’s a strong argument against it.

What you forget, after a while at least, is how alive you feel when you’re up there performing. I somehow feel most myself when I’m in front of a crowd playing my music. And I don’t mean that in a narcissistic way. I just really enjoy sharing my music. For me the pay-off is when someone walks away from the night having really “gotten” one of my songs. I think most of my friends get that about me.

And so, I say to myself: Step lightly over broken mirrors

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Rediscovery

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I have spent the evening going through my old recordings (those that have been digitized, at least) and I was surprised to be rediscovering many of these songs. As with most creative types I try to move on and not revel on past achievements, but it has been very encouraging to go back and listen to a lot of old music that I had dismissed as “not as good” as what I wrote later on. That is not the necessarily the case. It has been an eye opening experience.

I think the biggest epiphany has been the reminder of some of the arranging & production techniques I used to use quite heavily. These are things I don’t do much, if at all, anymore. I’m trying to remember when I stopped using these techniques and why.

So, the lesson here seems to be: it’s good to remember.

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