Day One Hundred Fifty (Year Five)

Today was a long day without a lot of opportunity for music making, but I found small pockets of time for things today. I:

1) Listened to my brother in law play a tuba solo at Church this morning.
2) Snuck off to B&N before we left town. I picked up a couple of CDs:

Rain Dogs - Tom Waits

and Volume 4 of Dylan's bootleg series, which is the Royal Albert Hall gig where he famously went electric, much to the chagrin of his fans. I've been meaning to pick up all of those bootleg releases for a while now, and this seemed like a logical place to start. Somehow it was the full release of The Basement Tapes that spurred me on to get started on that.

That's really all I've got tonight. Time to sleep.

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Day Two Hundred Twenty Seven (Year Two)

So, the new Springsteen disc is amazing. There's enough of a mixture of his upbeat rockers, his ballads, and his message songs to make this his best record since The Rising . And speaking of that record... Buying The Boss the day it comes out always takes me back to a specific moment in life. It was July 30th, 2002, the year after 9/11, the year after someone on the streets of New York told Springsteen "we need you now." I had driven to Oshkosh, WI to visit some friends, when I remembered that Springsteen's disc was scheduled to come out that day. I drove downtown to The Exclusive Company, but had to park a few blocks back. At the time, there wasn't much going on downtown, but when I got out of the car, I could hear this music coming from up the block somewhere. The closer I got to Exclusive, the more it began to dawn on me, they had set up a giant set of speakers in their upstairs windows, and were blasting the new album out into the streets....

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So I dove back into 100 Riffs tonight, going into it with the hope that the hand written tabs I did last night would help me unlock the issue I was having transitioning from the first half of the riff to the second half. It worked. With both halves clearly written in front of me, I was able to work through the transition that had been tripping me up when the screen cut off was happening on SoundSlice. That's going to be a nice thing to have in my bag of tricks for the times when I get stumped figuring these things out. I played a little bit of acoustic tonight as well, trying to be better about finding the balance between both instruments. Late 90's-early 2000's rock has come up a lot in conversations at work of late, so in that spirit, I picked a song from that time period out of my set list notebook ("Your Winter" by Sister Hazel), and took a quick look at it. Admittedly, it's a song I had mostly learned a long time ago, so the essential parts of it w...

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Finally! A really good day. And one that I really needed after the frustration with the rest of the weekend. I took a step back from a few things today, and got what I hope will be a bit of clarity in the process. Instead of worrying about the progress I really haven't been making on the EP, I told myself that I needed to be happy with the few bits of lyric I stumbled across today, and that maybe I needed to focus my attention elsewhere, at least for today. I had picked up a really cool book on music theory as it applies to guitar last Tuesday when I was out and about, and having spent a little bit of time paging through it over the last few days, I focused in on it tonight and started reading, taking notes, and reinforcing some things. It felt like progress. It was great. When I had worked through some of that, I moved on to the whole "100 Riffs" thing, and got myself moving on that again. It's astounding how much I can get inside my own head a...

"Muse" - ings on Rock & Life

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