Last night I volunteered for the Skillet/TFK/Decyfer Down tour. Though I haven't worked a show in a while, I found it was easy to get back into the flow of how the event typically goes. It was a good night, sold-out show with a packed house of 1500 and many willing to buy the TFK merchandise I ended up selling.
The show was a long 3 1/2 hrs with a two-hour teardown afterwards. Here are a few of my favorite moments from last night:


- The peanut butter chocolate cake Jesse scavenged from catering
- TFK's intro music, Ennio Morricone's film score from The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
- The "emergency gaff tape" stuck inside a glass box
- Amber texting Decyfer's backstage number for fun...and winning
- Skillet's "Best Kept Secret" encore followed by anticlimactic, Jars of Clay exit music


And for the favorite quote of the night:

"I admire your strength...and your earrings." - Bob, event volunteer to me during load-out

Dear Former Classmates:

Today is the day we graduate. Or we were supposed to. To tell you the truth, when they told us to look to the left, look to the right, I didn't believe any of us would be a statistic. I didn't buy into the myth.
But slowly, surely, only a third of my initial friends left, or transferred, and now I only know two or three of the near five hundred graduating today. Am I saddened by this? Maybe. Disappointed? It's worn off. But I'll tell you a few things I'm not expressing at your absence.
For most of you, I do not agree with what the baccalaureate speaker said about those seated before him working the hardest. Being the most determined. I still know you, I know how you're making things happen in your lives and have more self-motivation than I could ever dream of having.
I do not believe we robed and tasseled today are better than those who haven't made it here yet. One more semester or a few more years, you'll get here and have the same joy/relief/fear/anticipation that I do right now.
That said, I do not believe a degree is a be-all, end-all. Hell, it's just a piece of paper. Some of you have discovered this and are actually doing things with your life. That makes me so happy for you.

A Well-Deserved Victory

There are many things wrong with the current music biz. It's refreshing to see something work in the artists' favor.

http://www.ascap.com/press/2008/0430_ratecourtdecision.aspx

Madness/Miraculous...

Well, I have an excuse to move to New York...an internship. I'm uber excited and amazed and nervous and over-emotional, but mostly excited. Time to become all that is starving artist!

Whatever & Ever...

So I attended church for the first time in four months today. Maybe that's not quite accurate. I mean, I visit this church every Sunday. But today I guess was the first traditional church service I've attended since January.
At any rate, I knew this would be a change, that it would be a difficult thing to get through, this reintroduction to the traditional, normal worship service. Because I don't attend my parents' church on a regular basis, this makes the transition back into this part of "real life" all the more difficult, as people really don't know me, don't recognize me, and have little to say to me, except for the casual "Oh, is your sister back from college, too?"
I'm sorry, I'm rambling. It really was a good day, but for untraditional reasons. I didn't really find God at church today. I found him this morning after the thunderstorm that crashed into our house last night. I found him later, in that same house when I was alone and free to pray aloud with no one but the dog (and God, of course...ha) to hear. I found him in this Nada Surf song that I re-stumbled across this evening, reminding me of the true reasons embedded in the last half-year or so, what I've been learning all along. Like the Hornby story I read a few weeks ago, Jesus is where you find him, and perhaps where he finds you.
I've just begun the journey of processing all I have learned, and I feel that getting back into this church culture will be the most difficult. I was a jagged piece before all this happened, and I've become rougher still. I fear I may not fit in here again, and it's a fear that fuels and doesn't extinguish...whatever that means.

Tips For Going Home...

Don't panic. Don't stare out the window for eight hours of silent scenery, wishing you weren't moving at all. Don't play Joni Mitchell as you unpack the boxes and suitcases that seem to have made it back more intact than you. Don't sob when you're confronted with a million memories of the place you left. Don't find comfort in this becoming new normalcy. Don't get over what has happened to you. Don't forget it. Don't let it go. Let it become a part of you, even though it seems to have left a terrible hole. This is significant and will continue to be so for as long as it is remembered. God, don't let me forget.

Rock is Dead. Long Live Hip Hop?

Through a recommendation, I've been reading a lot of Bob Lefsetz recently. This isn't really related to any of his newsletters, but it's a conglomeration of musical thought that has been running through my brain this past week. Maybe because I've been thinking about music's place and progression as inspired by Mr. Lefsetz all these abstract ideas have been floating around. Who knows if it will actually make sense...

Our community meets weekly for a critical listening session. We talk about rock 'n' roll's history, key artists whose emergence gradually influenced music as it is today, and sometimes about where music is going. I was thinking about how rock has slowly died out and how I wasn't even around for the death rattle. Instead, it is the era of urban music, rap music. My thirteen-year-old brother abhors The Beatles but loves any hip-hop artist he hears.

And this disturbs me on a certain level. Will this generation of a-la-carte music purchases and Guitar Heroes forget rock 'n' roll altogether? Will the next great era of music be shaped by the history of hip hop, or will it fade out like the 80s scene? Will my brother's generation discuss the dichotomy of sampling and remixes instead of guitar riffs and bass lines? As the music dilutes into sub-genre after sub-genre, will it become edgier than ever and rock 'n' roll become analogous to the Lawrence Welk of our grandparents?

I thrive off of rock 'n' roll and to tell you the truth don't know the history of urban music quite as well. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the genre, but would love to dig deeper into its roots. I've looked on the 60s and 70s too long and ignored my current era. Perhaps my children will ask me one day what I was doing when important rap albums dropped or hip hop exploded onto the scene as I question my parents about Woodstock. To not have good answers for these hypothetical offspring daunts me.

Who knows where the industry is going? Hip hop and rap could die out in five years, but I don't think so. On the other extreme, it could go the other direction. A good friend predicted once that he saw urban music spawning its own dialect in another eighty years. It will probably pan out to be somewhere in the middle. At any rate, I hope rock makes another appearance on the scene. It deserves to see another day.