I might as well ditch this blog. I have no idea where to start another post. Is this a technology blog? Is this a blog about life as a musician? Is this still my rallying cry against the music industry? So much has gone on the last month/year/decade I don’t even know where to begin.
I’ve joined a band. I didn’t think I’d be doing that ever again. I actually thought my career as a professional player was over. I thought I’d seen the top of the mountain and that was that and it was time to move on into the next phase of my life, whatever that would be. I sort of had to jump out of the last phase of my life so quickly and so definitely that I didn’t have nearly the prep time I’d have liked to have had for that kind of thing. The result? Last year was one of the roughest of my entire life. The roughest.
Then last year’s November surprise ended up being another bass player in a band that I fit into pretty neatly.
So here I am, back from the musical dead. I just had the most righteously good time in Big Sky MT at a bluegrass festival called Big Grass, and I’ll tell you what feels the best of all - feeling like part of a musical community. It’s no secret that I’m a born-again Stringdusters fan, so I was actually nervous when half of them were standing stageside while we were getting out set going last night. It was more an acute awareness that people were there and were listening, which is how nervousness tastes to me. But then we got some of them up, and a few more of them up, and a KILLER time was had by all.
Afterward we went back to the main lodge where everyone was staying and there was a giant picking session going on in front of the giant fireplace until about 4:15 or so when it broke up to take care of other duties. Right about then Vince and Chad and the rest of Great American Taxi showed up. It was just so cool to me, because the last time I saw those dudes was my last gig in CO with RRE. It’s cool to be in a band where I already know everybody, so I can relax about all that. It’s cool to be in a band where we take days off to go skiing with the lift passes that are thrown in with the gig. It’s cool to be in a band where load-in and setup takes all of 15 minutes and there are only a dozen inputs to check. It’s cool to already be up toward the top of the bill at a bunch of the festivals for which we’re booked this summer. It’s cool to play bluegrass.