Left Handed and Upside Down
“It’s funny how most people love the dead, once you’re dead you’re made for life” – Jimi Hendrix (A recollection of a Jimi Hendrix live performance) Author’s Warning: My intention is not to take a trip down memory lane but to share my experience of a great musician, a live performance and a pair of AR speakers. I don’t think I would have ‘gotten’ Hendrix through an mp3 player and a pair of ear buds – sometimes it just takes a really smokin’ loudspeaker. I was a 15 year old gr
The 3 Martins
(Check out the playlist below!) It is a long, strange trip for a song to go from an idea percolating in an artist’s head to the finished item that we, the music fans, hear. Some songs are born fully formed and some take years of tweaking before they are deemed worthy of release and some never do fully developed and either come out half-formed or never see the light of day. There is an art to creating the perfect song. Think about a song that you feel is perfect, what is it ab
Creative Differences
It’s pretty cliché to say the opposite of creation is destruction. But when I think about the bands I love, and the songs I adore, I often think that juxtaposition is at the heart of it. As an aspiring songwriter, the problem I find with my own material is it’s too me. There’s no yin or yang. There’s no push and pull. Everything is always exactly what I would do. It all falls (or fails) to my sensibilities. There’s creation, but no destruction. There’s no counterpoint, no dev
Ballroom Bliss: Cain’s Ballroom
(Check out the playlist below!) Off the beaten path, away from the showrooms of the coasts and corporate arenas in major metropolitan areas, there is a quaint little place in middle America that’s worth mention. Tucked away in Tulsa, Oklahoma is the city’s homegrown, crowning-jewel for live music -- The Cain’s Ballroom. Practically sitting under the looming shadow of the hulking Bank of Oklahoma Center (BOC), Tulsa’s behemoth entertainment arena, the little Cain’s Ballroom ea