Music… a sound track for my life…

I find myself following music… much like a follow the yellow line down the center of a road… occasionally leaving the road to follow some interesting path…  dodging dead skunks and armadillos…  It is a journey of connections, events, people and influences…

 Like music, I rarely sit in silence…  the radio(KFOG) is playing in the background in the early morning… later it may be the TV instead, not so much to watch, but as background noise…  Late at night, I generally shift to CD’s or vinyl… in the car it is the radio, mostly music, but NPR and who ever might have the best traffic report…  At work when at my desk it is KFOG again…  I look for concerts, buy CD’s sometimes downloads… 

We (Tina and I) recently attended a house concert, Mike Compton playing mandolin…  We attend a lot of house concerts, small venue concerts…  Our favorite is ”Acoustic Tune ups and Joe’s Garage”… If it is a stand up show (Slim’s or the Fillmore) Steph joins me in place of the lovely Tina… she is beyond stand up venues…  If neither is available I will go by myself…  Recently I spent three days in the redwoods listening  to music at the Kate Wolf Festival by myself (with several  thousand of my new friends) The pull of the music is strong…

If I attend a concert, I generally visit the “merch table” and pick up a CD or two, occasionally a t-shirt…  The CD’s generally from the earlier acts… I probably have the current CD’s from the headliners already.  Over the next weeks I listen to the CD’s… getting to know the group… some continue in the rotation, some are filed in the CD shelf’s, rarely to surface…  

The best lead me down a road… looking for more related music… googleing (is it spelled google-ing or googl –ing?, what is the rule on the last “e”…  Microsoft word’s dictionary doesn’t know… of course, Google is a competitor… and there for ignored, shunned if possible…).  Back to the blog, I Google the musicians, the back-up musicians, song writers, covers of the same song…  Each can be its own road… with more music, more roads, sometimes alternate paths to follow…

When I find an interesting artist, I sign up for updates at their websites… I occasionally Google them…  I look at their page on Amazon…

I am planning a road trip in a week…  music is important on a road trip… hours driving frequently away from good radio signals… having music available is good… it is a good time to listen to full albums, with limited distractions…  So I Googled several favorite artists… and found some new stuff…  Likely the best is a Guy Clark tribute album “This One’s For Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark”… it is on in the background while I write this… The album is Guy Clark’s friends, playing Guy Clarks songs…  It has meaning…  I am familiar with them sung by Guy, but the different caring voices let the lyrics sing in a different way… It is likely influencing this blog post… From a song just played, “Stuff That Works”  “I got a woman that I love…. I got a tattoo with her name right through my soul”…  Tina, I love you… 

There are a number of song writers that I follow… Guy Clark, Gram Parsons, Towns Van Sant… I have followed the sound of a Gram Parsons song into a bar on Beale Street… with my daughter, only to find it was the only Gram song the duo knew, but sat happily listening for three beers…  My cousin was playing guitar at a family reunion at Thanksgiving… along the banks of the Merced in Yosemite…  He played one of Gram’s… I said something… he said his favorite was Towns… I don’t think we have talked about music that way in the last 40 years…  It brings us closer…

Back to Mile Compton… I bought three CD’s…  inside one was a postcard… a questionnaire… a survey… with a possible reward of 30 CD’s from his record label if I return it… They are looking for my contact information to add to a mailing list…

Beyond that, under the heading:  “And if you have a minute…” (complete with three dots) were 4 open questions… plus a 4 more multiple choice questions…  the question that got my attention, and lead to this blog post was; “How do you find out about new music?”… (this time my three dots)

I think they get it… The new paradigm… music beyond labels… A&R men… Music for music… But, it calls the question… how do I find out about new (to me) music…  They give me about 4” to answer… not nearly enough…  hence the blog post, the answer to the question.

Among the multiple choice questions is another interesting “thing”…. They offer four alternatives for the question “what kinds of music are you interested in”… among the choices is “Americana”…  A new category trying to define a place between country (and western) and rock and folk… 40 years ago Gram called it “Cosmic American Music”… Houston Jones calls it “High Octane American Music”… Americana works…  In the current mix in the truck’s CD player is a new CD by Chris Doud, “The Story Song”… I found Chris through his participation in the band “Good Time Thrift Store Outfit”…  I bought his CD at the Kate Wolf Festival.

The CD player has now flopped to the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” … the first single I ever bought… they lead me to Emmy Lou, to Levon Helm… Emmy Lou and Levon lead me to Gram, who lost his battles with his demons before I found him…

Back to Chris… I found Good Time Thrift Store Outfit at a concert at Slim’s… I followed them to the Kate Wolf Festival… Chris is the lead vocalist, co-song writer with WilleTeaTaylor…  Chris has a song, “Guitar Case Sticker”…  about a folk singer (“the good news he’s a great folk singer, the bad news is he is a great folk singer…”) It contains the line “ Americana was created by industry folks to give us  folk singers a second chance”

Back to Mike Compton… I sent the post card with the survey back…  It seemed to matter…

Bye, Randy