Texas Box Guitars

Maybe I'll call it "The Burqueño." How New Mexican of me. Ok, this is the COOLEST. Dan the Producer has had a Texas Box Guitar for at least over a year now, and I have been drooling over it because: a) it's a guitar b) it's got a license plate on it, which not only looks cool, but to me is a geographical reference, which I love (see also why I collect ceramic state truck stop pigs and hang maps on my wall for aesthetics). When I moved this summer for the 47th time in 4 years, I found my old New Mexico license plate in a stack of crap and pondered what I could do with it that would be cool because I wasn't going to get rid of my first ever license plate. Then the lightning bolt struck me, 2+2 came together (4), and I emailed Walter Morgan at Texas Box Guitars. Walter is the COOLEST, and he came by the music school to check on Dan's guitar (and Dan) and to show me the options for mine. We decided a black box would make the bright yellow stand out the most, and away Walter went to his magical guitar shop in Dripping Springs while I was driving around the country last month. Probably the 2nd email I sent when we were back in town this weekend was to Walter to see when I could pick it up. As opposed to most other guitar buying experiences I've had, which has either been in a music store or on Craigslist, this was super enjoyable. Where else do you go to pick up a guitar made just for you and get offered a Coke and chat with the maker (and Walter's awesome better half, Susan) at their kitchen table? So fun. It's a 4 string slide guitar, right now I've tuned it to open G, and Walter installs a pickup that sounds great. Love at first note! I'm going to have to study up on slide techniques this summer...I wish I knew someone who worked at a music school. Hm. I suggest you all go check out Texas Box Guitars' website...they are super reasonably priced and if you have a plate that's just hanging around your house, this is a great way to make use of it. The quote on TBG's website? "You can never have too many guitars." So true.

Achieving Goals That Don't Exist

Last week at Gruene we thought we might have to do one last song, and the appropriate last song is of course called "Shut This Place Down," which I have not yet played with Susan, so I wrote the chords down real quick. Sharpie. I have had flashes of an incredible time during these past couple of months of an incredibly tough situation. Like I posted earlier, no one wants their boss to break an arm (unless you have a jerk boss but hey, that's not my territory), but especially their boss who makes a living by using their arm a lot. The strum is coming back, I can see the progress with physical therapy already. And I for one cannot wait for Susan Gibson to return to full strumming form. But, the lemonade of the situation is I have pushed myself on the guitar front lately way more than I know I would have if this whole thing had not come up. Since guitar is the musical thing I have been doing the longest, since I was a wee 11 year old, I have always felt pretty good about it. But you always compare yourself to others and think you're behind in the pack just by virtue of hesitation and some kind of inhibiting humility (or maybe that's just me). Having to step up and learn 25 or so songs to be professionally performable up to the standards of me, Susan, and my standards for how good I think Susan is...was a toughie. After I started getting the progressions and charts down and then the tempos right, I was scared of the nuances that rhythm players throw in to their songs to make them theirs. Anyone with some skill can play a decent G C D progression, but only Susan can play it with the picking and strum style that is her own, and I have mine, and so does Bob Dylan. It has been an interesting balance of trying to pick up as much of Susan's style as possible, and then knowing when to just allow the tune to be a Susan song played how I would do it. I think I'm walking the line all right. At least, Susan has not thrown her guitar stand at me in disgust. Yet. I also found I like the role of being a sideperson (derivative of the general term, "sideman" haha). It's different when you roll up to a gig and all you have to worry about is your guitar tone, and it's someone else's job to sing, banter, worry about who in the crowd cares and doesn't, etc. It's a different role. Do I like it more than performing my own stuff? No, but it's apples and oranges. Give me both, please. So the goal that didn't exist...the title of this post. I never ever would have ever EVER planned on this situation, or the revelation into my guitar world to happen in such a short time. I think that's when some of our best learning happens, when you have to step up and make things happen to keep a train on its track. So anyway...I don't know how long this gig will last, or what other gigs it will open me up to, but I am probably going to add "Steadiest Right Hand In the West" to my business card, har har. Onward.

Lately

Photography by Maurice Ok, it's been forever. Part of it is that Blogger changed their publishing ways and my blog is messed up. Hence you are reading this at the non-normal location. Anyone who is any good at Wordpress design or whatever, or knows how the heck I can publish to jpo.com through this new Blogger ruledom, let me know. Blah. I'll fix it, I will. But! Things have been fun. The Boss is recovering and also playing some slick electric guitar. I have gotten pretty comfy with all the tunes I have learned, which means I don't have a mini-panic attack every time we start playing one to make sure I am doing it right. I am a perfectionist. It causes mini-panic attacks. We played a cool event in Yorktown, which as far as I can tell, is in the middle of nowhere...called Yorkstock. They made awesome t-shirts and we played on a flatbed trailer, which made a great stage. We should just haul one everywhere. The Golden Light Cantina in Amarillo was one of my favorite shows lately, because I had finally hit my stride with all the material and John Lerma, drummer with the mostest, was so fun to play with. And because there's stuff to read on the walls when you're setting up. We had quite a long row of songswappers at the Blue Light in Lubbock...there's Red down at the end, and then Brandon, and then Rode, and then Susan...who brought the lead guitar cred to the stage. Very fun. It is weird to songswap with 4 artists so you're playing only 25% of the time. I tried not to do anything distracting like picking my nose while we waited. It's wildflower season in Texas, so the drives have been, as I like to say, disgustingly beautiful. I hope it's legal to pick one for the car, because I did.

March Madness!

Hmmm. Best laid plans to blog more have gone awry, for a little bit. It's March! Hooray! This week I have spent some time with an electric guitar and a loud amp, figuring out all the Mary Chapin Carpenter solos I used to be able to play in high school and college. I could probably compile a comprehensive songbook of her entire catalog if I tried. The good news is practicing because it's fun is back in style in my world. Rock. Excited for the gig in Houston on Saturday. Maybe I'll sell some t-shirts. The first round has gone out to all the pre-orderers, and if people send me their photo wearing a Jpo shirt, I'll make sure they are famous. Just like... HEATHER! Aka Lyrical Venus! She's live every Tuesday on KRUU-FM in Fairfield, IA. Check it:

Good from the Other

Um, ok. So to lighten up the mood from that last post, I gotta say...whoa. When I was a spunky bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 23-year-old...a whole 4 years ago, I packed up and moved to Austin to see about the music business based on a few things, but one of the main ones being that both Susan Gibson and Terri Hendrix hung around the Central Texas area and used it as their home base. I figured there was good stuff in the water if those two chose to be here. And here we are, 2010 and the next show on the books for me is playing guitar for Susan while she gives her broken arm a rest, and she happens to be sharing the bill with Terri Hendrix and Lloyd Maines. So I'm going to stop blogging now and go practice guitar. Lucky for me, I've been playing a bunch of these Susan tunes for a while, and I picked up a big chunk of my strumming style from her. Luck = Preparation + Opportunity. Life is weird and wonderful.

TV, Faces, Solos, Songs, all that stuff

Barrel. Stare. Whew! It's Sunday already. I am staring straight down the barrel of a lot of things. No wonder my eyes seem so squinty. At the end of the barrel: - My first live TV appearance looms on Tuesday. I'll be performing with the girls from my Monday night songwriting class at Red Leaf...Emily and Melissa and I had a stellar practice today and I am pumped. If you would have asked me yesterday I would have been freaked out. Now I know we're just going to play music and have fun like we always do, except it will be really early in the morning. In a TV studio. (FOX 7 here in Austin...I think they put these things online, too). - We get to play hot Gibson guitars because Gibson is sponsoring our Red Leaf showcase on April 5th...and since we're going to be on TV we might as well all be playing hot Gibson guitars, right? The two I will switch between I am pretty sure total more in worth than my car. This is what it's like to be a rock star? I'll take it. Photos will come. But for now, can you say...Gibson Hummingbird? Mmmhmmm. (I told you it was worth more than my car). - Dan has been drilling into me the next level of guitar soloing for about...oh, 6 years now. Or a couple months. Or more. And I take things and I ruminate on them and sometimes they don't pop out until they're really. I'm a really super awesome incubator. Sometimes that frustrates people, mainly myself. But anyway...I've been working on it and at practice this afternoon I had a breakthrough guitar moment...or hour...or whatever. I sang along with the notes and made faces and it works. I hope it's not too John Mayer-esque. Yes, I will make faces on TV if that's what I have to do to get the solo out the best I can. - I have also been booking up a storm for The Boss. There were holes in the calendar for April and May and the thing about booking is that the more time goes by, the harder it is to book the dates closest to you. Which means you have to be ON IT. And knock on as many doors as you can until someone says yes. I've also been tackling booking a Pacific Northwest tour for the whole month of June. Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and California...here we come. (Drop me venue names or places to play if y'all have them!) We're coming for YOU. - The weird thing is I get into this strange creative flow state when I am working on this booking job...because it's utilizing my history major brain to search out venues and research if they're good or not. It feeds my obsessions with maps because routing is key. It makes my big picture brain work hard to figure in timing, routing, money, and dates. I guess what I mean to say is I like it. Who knew I got a history degree to book shows better? I guess that's a pretty long barrel. Boom!

Pinky Fingers

Connected or Not.

"Find the tempo at which you cannot make a mistake!" Yesterday at my job we had a power outage that lasted quite a while. So long that we all just went home. There was no power to my desktop computer, and no wifi to get on with a laptop. No email, no Google calendar, nothing. Also it was pitch black in the bathroom. CREEPY! Yesterday I also paid $3.09 a gallon to fill up my car. I realize that's probably cheaper than some areas of the county but I'm sure higher than others...and higher than I've paid in a while for sure. Will it change where I go? Probably not a whole lot...but it will make me think about planning trips and such around town a little more. Makes me happy that for the most part, you can get a $5 set of strings for a guitar and use it anywhere anytime. It doesn't need gas, and it doesn't need power. It doesn't need to be connected via wifi to play a chord correctly. It always shows up to the practice session...I'm the more unreliable one on that front, haha. I love being connected all the time and having info at my fingertips, but sometimes it's just nice to have notes at my fingertips. One note at a time, one chord at a time.

Wednesday Night.

Usually Wednesday is my night of Red Leaf and voice and business mentoring and check-in time until laaaaate. Really late. But alas, Dan is rockin' with porterdavis at Folk Alliance in Memphis, so I get the Wednesday off. I used it to work on an instrumental I came up with on the looping pedal. It's not ground-breaking, but it is making me more comfortable with looping. I want to be gigging with that pedal by the summer. Here's to goals! My business partner, Josh, is at the hospital right now...he's going to be a Dad! I claim honorary aunt-hood, because I do that. I'm a pro-aunt already with all my nieces and nephews, so I can handle another, haha. Yay! At my guitar lesson we were messing around with chord voicings and such and Kevin happened upon the Peanuts theme "Linus and Lucy." So now I can play the main part of the theme. I'm not sure when that will come in handy, but I'm pretty sure it will one day. I love that song. Time for bed.

Feet.

Yesterday I had a very enlightening guitar lesson. We talked about our feet. No, I don't plan on becoming the world's best toe guitarist (that sounds kind of cool, though...I bet someone already does it on Youtube. Yep, there it is). Kevin the Guitar Prof is very knowledgeable about the practice of feldenkrais, and the thought of using the natural movement and flow of the whole body to play your instrument well. It makes sense. Many of us spend our days hunched over our guitars or our computers or our steering wheels. We are trained as a society to hunch and fold into ourselves. When you are conscious of this, you can start to adjust your posture and body position to make your movements, whether it is simple like reaching behind you or something like playing a Bbdim7 chord, more fluid and therefore...do them with less effort. It's not a way to cheat, it's a way to maximize the movement our skeletons have. Yay bones! So where do we start? The feet. Some days I have good posture and they are flat on the floor, some days one foot rests on top of the other or one is kind of skewing off to the side. A firm foundation and a connection to the ground gives you confidence and the ability to move with the music, instead of have to balance awkwardly in spite of it. There is energy in the ground and it's best to be in contact with it as much as possible. Not like this. Bad Jana. I am not very aware, and I am slouching right now as I type this. I will correct my spine and in 5 minutes I will be slouching again. Perhaps guitar lessons will finally correct my posture. Just now, in my Mom's brain, the clouds parted and angels started singing. All those music lessons as a kid might actually lead to me having correct posture. Hallelujah. Feet on floor.

Gear: Going Loopy

I've been jonesing for a looping pedal for a while because of what KT Tunstall does with it in her live version of Black Horse and a Cherry Tree. I mentioned this to Professor Dan, who happened to share the same jonesing...so we did some research this week (Dan did his from the VAN on TOUR with his iPHONE, because he's more technologically advanced than Steve Jobs. I bet Steve doesn't loop things). It was down to a couple of models, and then out of nowhere comes the Boss Loop Station. Look at it. It's a thing of beauty. So now I'm a proud owner and have read the manual (it's the RC-20XL if you want to be precise)...and it's going to take a bit to turn into KT. Ok, maybe like 7 years, if I forego bathing and sleep. But...I am excited because I think when I do get proficient at looping, it'll up my live show in terms of musicality and variety. I'm not shooting for a canned one-girl-band kinda thing, but being able to riff over a nice chunka-chunka beat is going to be cool. Yeah.

Chord Theory, Theoretically.

Be at one with the neck. So my guitar teacher Kevin has been gently steering me toward chord theory. Theory is something I have always shied away from because...well, it seems complicated. Several people have explained it to me over the years, but I was either resistant or perhaps...14 years old with other things on my mind like standing in the breakfast burrito line during passing period. I don't know. But the past couple of weeks we have been examining it from a very practical point of view...going up and down the neck of the guitar looking at different chord phrasings and forms. It is amazing how fluid and synchronistic the neck of the guitar is. Yeah, it's a bunch of notes all in a row...but they all fit into certain formations that make the same chords over and over again. Joy. For a songwriter, it's like a newfound pot of gold.

Practice Time

So...sometimes I like to figure out a guitar solo and play it over and over and over until I feel like it's time to move on. Tonight was one of those nights. The song: "Slave to the Beauty" by Mary Chapin Carpenter. The Telecaster doesn't make it to gigs ever because...I am a folk singer. Go fig.