"They Oughta Write a Song" WON the award for Best Vocal Jazz Album at the 2009 Just Plain Folks Awards! It is an incredible honor to have been included in the top 10 album nominees in the first place, amid so much amazing talent from around the world. To actually win the category was unbelievable!
The awards were held at the Wildhorse Saloon in Nashville, TN on August 29. There were hundreds of performers present, and approximately thirty bands/performers played on stage during the awards event between category announcements. I was lucky to be one of the nominees who was invited to perform at the JPF Showcase event held at BB King's Blues Club the previous night (Aug. 28), which was an incredibly diverse group of talent as well.
Live at BB King's Blues Club, JPF Showcase (photo by Adrian James) I owe much gratitude and credit to the fantastic musicians that played on the album and helped to make it into an award-winning project: Matt Treder, Mark Schneider, Brian West, and Tim McLaughlin. Special thanks to Matt, who did a great job creating some stellar musical arrangements! So many thanks are also owed to all of the JPF members who voted, all of the Just Plain Folks volunteers and staffand to Brian Austin Whitney, the founderof JPF and organizer of the entire awards process.
Receiving the "Best Vocal Jazz Album" award onstage with Brian Austin Whitney (photo by Adrian James) Congratulations to the other nominees and winners at this year's awards! There is truly an incredible wealth of talent contained in the list of nominees and winners, and I encourage people to check out the other albums, songs, and artists that are named on these lists, which you can find at www.justplainfolks.org. Listed below are the top 4 albums in the Vocal Jazz Album Category (click on the artist names to visit their websites):
Halie Loren (1st Place, "They Oughta Write a Song")Aga Zaryan (2nd Place, "Picking Up the Pieces")
Justin Thompson (3rd Place, "Brand New Same Old Obsessions")
Sashird Lao (4th Place, "Watsdis")
My award and I--still glowing :) 
Finale song of the evening, with all of the (still present) nominees and winners joining in onstange
It's just past the halfway point of 2009, and quite a momentous year already. I've graduated from college, turned to full time music, gotten married, elected Obama, and just turned 25. What better time to start a blog? No time like the present, especially now that I'm a quarter-century old (I used to think that was a funny thing to say... now it just makes me feel prematurely ancient). Yes, indeed, times are a-changin'!
I must admit from the start that I have no clear direction from the get-go in starting this particular blog, but if I think of some earth-shatteringly important and/or unique theme, I will certainly let you know. With the blogosphere so full of, well, bloggers, with a million different voices and subjects/life experiences to write about, I think it's best for me to kind of wing it. Maybe I can get some assistance from you, too... feel free to leave comments and ask me questions. What do you want to know (within reason, that is :))? What would you be interested in reading from me? I'm game! :)
In the meantime, I'll tell you about some of my immediate plans for this summer with regards to music and life--and the two terms are often quite interchangeable for me, by the way. First, I am gearing up for a neat adventure in Nashville! I lived and worked in the music industry there for about a year and a half, starting at the tender age of 17, and haven't been back since I left in 2003. Not only will I be visiting my old pals and co-writers (and possibly getting to work on co-writing something with a songwriter friend or two), but I will be attending two separate and very cool events.
First, I'll be among the attendees at the Indiegrrl Women in Music conference (www.indiegrrl.com). My song, "Maybe I'll Fly", placed 3rd in the Indiegrrl Songwriting Competition, so I will also be performing in at least one showcase during the conference. There will be lots of women musicians, songwriters, industry professionals, etc. at the conference to meet and network with as well, which will be very inspiring indeed! I feel like I need a boost in the business-sense area of my career--some way to get interested in pursuing new paths for getting my music "out there", wherever "there" is. I think this experience is going to put a fire under me, which I am very much looking forward to. And simply meeting a lot of other women in the national creative community will be really fun, too.
Second, I'll be attending the Just Plain Folk Awards the very next weekend, where I'll be among the nominees for 3 awards!:
- My jazz album, "They Oughta Write a Song", is up for the Vocal Jazz Album award.
- "Pieces of Me", which I co-wrote with Victoria Shaw and Cliff Downs, is nominated for the Contemporary Song category.
- "A Tree Falls", which I wrote with my friends Ruth Rosen and Serena Nelson, is nominated for the New Folk Song category.
It will be so exciting to attend an awards ceremony on this scale... it's going to be held at the famed Wildhorse Saloon, which, if you've ever been in there, it's not like a cozy "saloon" at all--more like a giant performance hall. There will be several hundred people there, with many nominees. After all, there are 70 genre categories total (album and song categories combined), with 10 final nominees for each category. If that seems like a lot of nominees, consider the fact that there were 42,000 albums and 560,000 songs from 100 different countries in the running at the start of the judging process. By that comparison, the narrowing of the playing field was incredibly drastic! In fact, the list of nominees represents only 1/3 of 1% of the songs and albums considered for these awards. That makes it feel all the more like an extraordinary honor to be nominated in any category, much less three! Pretty cool indeed :)
I'll also be starting work on a new album soon! I don't have an exact timeline yet, but I'll likely start breaking ground on it sometime in September or early October. This will officially be my 4th solo album. I'm figuring out a pace for album releases now that I'm no longer a complete novice at the craft... one every year or so seems like a good pace for now, but we'll see how that holds up over time. It takes a lot of work to get it all "just so", from the song selection (and, in my case, the writing of some more songs to put on it!) to the recording to the engineering and mixing to the design and layout to the marketing... yowza. It's a lot, believe me. It's all a lot of fun, and very rewarding, too, though! Otherwise I wouldn't do it, or at least not as often. In fact, it's one of my absolute favorite aspects of what I do. I'm a studio nerd, I confess.
For now, I'm off to prepare for a rehearsal with my friends who will be playing a show with me at the Lane County Fair in a couple of weeks. It's going to be the fullest sound I've had in live performance in a long time--there will be 6 of us on stage! That's almost unheard of for my shows, except for when I sing with the Sugar Beets... in that case, 6 would be a sparse musical arrangement. I'll be joined by Matt Treder (piano), Mark Schneider (bass), Brian West (drums), Tim McLaughlin (trumpet), and Chris Ward (guitar). It's going to be so neat to have all of them add some wonderful layered nuances while simultaneously giving it an overall thicker sound. I haven't performed at a county fair in several years, so this will be a great re-introduction. This time, I don't think I'll be performing right after a troupe of Show Pigs performing tricks. Those little fellas are a hard act to follow. And a strange one, too. And just in case you're wondering, Oh Yes, I HAVE been there... and that's just one story among many... but I'll save those for another day :)
