on the road...

Blogging from beautiful Seattle, Washington. Lord almighty this place in gorgeous...I could totally see myself living here for a while. There is a vibrant choral scene and some of the most breathtaking scenery I've ever seen.

I'm out here with mi madre to pick up little Shank from college and I'm falling in love with the landscape. The 4-day drive to pick up dorm room accouterments is a difficult one to do solo...so the only over-16 member of my family who has summers off got tapped and I obviously volunteered (or was guilted into it...you be the judge).

One of the things I love about the northwest is the music scene. Jimi Hendrix, Heart, Nirvana, Death Cab, The Decemberists...the list goes ever on. I've been listening to bands from Oregon and Washington for the last six months and, because of that, I've finally dusted the cobwebs off my guitar technique. I really want to start songwriting again. I feel like I've been appreciating other people's words and setting them to music now for a while now and it's long past time I expanded my search for "musical fusion" (or some other lame term) to another area of my brain and start writing those words myself. (Not that I'll be giving up setting other people's words to music any time soon.)

I went to the Experience Music Project today and watched a great video about the music scene here and it occurred to me that there are kids out there that will probably be famous someday. Seriously...they start small enough and you know them when they are young and naive but the ones that have the tenacity and creativity will make it. It's actually that simple. I watched this exhibit today and they happened to mention Death Cab's small start and I thought to myself, "You should give this a try." Not for fame or anything that hedonistic but maybe for the simplicity to find out if I can do it at all. Can I write a song? I've been "classically trained" right? For some that's the faux measure of respectability.

Let the countdown (or the procrastination) start, I suppose. Look for some old, bald dude in a few years that has a minor hit on the adult contemporary charts and you can say, "I knew him when he was young(er) and bald."

More on that whole New York trip (and a TON of other photos) to come soon...