– Cambridge – Providence – New Jersey – Maryland
Right now I think Dave Pahanish is in Kerrville, TX, doing what we did last year. Except I hope he’s winning. I really want him to win.
It’s the other one. The silent one. Marvel at the different color type that heralds my coming.
The summer has just kicked off. We played the Cutting Edge of the Campfire Festival at Club Passim in Cambridge this weekend. The festival is a model of organization. These people have got it down. Other festivals need to learn from these guys. They think ahead. For example: there is not going to be enough room on tables for the mailing lists of 100 performers, so they make small Xeroxed fliers with the names and photos of the acts and tuck them into the pockets of those wall CD holders in the lobby of the venue. On the back of the fliers are spaces for them to write their e-mail addresses. The venue collects all the fliers and makes their interns e-mail them to all the acts so they can put the people on the mailing list they wanted to be on. They fed us. They DID NOT take a cut of our merch sales. These guys rule.
The 9am parade down Water Street in Warren, RI. Later they fire their guns. That’s loud too.
And it felt like an honor to play there alongside some really great acts, my new favorite being John Gerrard, a be-tattooed singer-songwriter with an incongruous voice that spoke to a little bit of a Counting Crows influence. Our set was brief, but we were very much a PART of this in a way I did not feel at Kerrville last year. The door man remembered us from our open mic appearance ages ago. Joe Kowan remembered us even though we only met him once and he’s since been living in Houston. I mean, to get our meal tickets, we were REQUIRED to autograph a stack of posters for the event.
Will took us to the beach in Warren, RI. A good walk, a bad walk for my knee though, which had been giving me a lot of trouble. I’m not sure what’s wrong with it, but I’m having a lot of trouble going up hills and stairs n shit. This little inlet created quite some trouble for me. Beautiful beach though.
Starfish!
In addition to the start of the summer, it’s also the start of our new CDs and their introduction to the world. Our release in Putnam was packed, full of happy, excited people who even laughed at MY jokes. It was incredibly intimate, and yet there were a lot of new faces, including a bird that decided to fly full-tilt through the front door of the coffeeshop and into another window inside. Stunned, it landed on a pillow. I took the pillow outside and sat it on one of the outdoor tables to keep it from being sat on. It took a really long time to get itself together and fly away – right across the street into another window. Some birds never learn. But it made a nice introduction to playing “Simile Blue” that night.
Oh. Lots of starfish.
That song’s gotten a bit of mileage this summer. I was a contestant at the Cape Fear Folk Festival in Wilmington, NC a month back, and that was one of the songs I played that got me a win at their High Noon Shootout. I didn’t write about it at the time because I was, admittedly, a little disappointed. I’d expected something big, and a venue move had shrunk the pool of contestants down considerably so that there were not even 10 of us. Though I had to go through both members of our friends Someone’s Sister to win the event, which was no easy task, I felt like it was cheap. My own boyfriend had to sit in as the tie-breaking judge because one of the three did not show and they determined him to be the most objective. Thankfully, his vote was never the deciding vote, and the judges were unanimously in my favor throughout the rounds. Everyone is telling me I should not diminish the accomplishment.
Heather was really proud of me for catching this horseshoe crab. I think Will was even a little impressed.
Flash forward to the Susquehanna Music and Arts Festival Songwriter’s contest a couple weeks ago. Here, the competition was fierce from the get-go, and I felt honored to even be picked as a finalist to stand among the 10, which included a previous Kerrville winner, Julie Clark, and the beautiful and talented double threats of Danielle Miraglia and Jocelyn Arem. I was incredibly nervous, and felt really depressed by the time I took the stage. I think for women, it’s really hard in this business – even in the folk side of things – to separate your appearance from your performance. A friend of mine recently told me about a study that showed women and men score comparably on a math test, but when women and men are forced to take the same test in their underwear … the women’s scores tank because they are preoccupied with their appearance.
Letting him go was a good idea. He was all… thrashy.
My feelings of physical inadequacy didn’t make me lose out. But I was surprised a bit at the outcome. You never know how those contests will go. Depends on the judges. Depends on the night. Danielle Miraglia and Nick Annis wound up in the top three, which I’d predicted, but the winner was someone that had not really moved me. Oddly, enough though, when I talked to others, they had a completely different take.
And apparently, in keeping with that, the Kerrville website does NOT list Dave Pahanish as a winner at the festival. Hmm.
Caught this guy a little bit later. He was less thrashy. And so damned cute!
I’m really excited about our new CD. Everything about it makes me feel proud, the artwork, songwriting, recordings. This week, I am starting to send them out for review and we are getting ready to autograph all the copies that will be going out to our sponsors. Rob just unwrapped 41 CDs while watching Star Trek on Spike TV as I write him my promised journal entry.
Will and Corinna playing fetch on the beach in Warren, RI. It’s awesome to watch Will having such a good time – I think this is one of the very few photographs out and about of Will with a grin. Despite my twisted knee, it was a really good wandering. Will is one of the kindest people I know, and I’m embarassed to be gimpy around him. Having him give me a hand over that little inlet of water was one thing, but the agony of trying to skip stones while one leg keeps collapsing beneath me, and my total inability to make them arrow out into the water in a sensible direction… it WAS amazing to stand on the water’s edge as Will’s throws went scything into the sea. He throws with this wicked vengeance that sends those flat stones skimming over the water almost humming their indignation. Stones aren’t supposed to go fast, and whereas tortoises thrill at their unexpected time in the air despite their impending demise – stones are eternally slow and dignified and take great exception to changes in their circumstances. And God knows WHAT that sentence was, it does NOT mean we’ve been skipping turtles!
Uhhh… yeah.
Things are happening.
I also finished a new song, that I started writing at Susquehanna:
Draw You In
Making angels out of paper,
They fly so well in the breeze from the screendoor.
I hope you notice all the left-handed scissors
I brought just for you.
And all the brand-new crayons,
So perfectly unstained, soldier-straight in the box they came in. My humble offering.
I wanna draw you in.
I wanna draw you in.
I hope it’s not too obvious,
All the red construction paper
Laid out on the table
And held down with paint jars.
But if I’m bold, it’s only ‘cause until this,
I’ve been holding together with popsicle sticks,
Clear tape and paper clips
In the back where you can’t see.
I wanna draw you in.
I wanna draw you in to me.
Paper cut upon my hand,
Got careless with my art.
This heart looks like a teardrop folded,
But you’re opening me up.
You’re opening me up.
Rob and I are at work on the music arrangement.
So the summer begins with a couple of contests, a song, and a brand-new CD.
Ray and I head to Wal-Mart to get me a knee brace. How that lead to juggling Pokemon in the parking lot I don’t remem- oh yeah. I kept throwing them at him and they all failed to be thrown back OR hit the ground. The just danced… magically in the air…
