The beginning of something grand...

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 :)