I bought my first record album in 1973. It was Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon. I was in 7th grade, and I earned the money to buy it breaking up cardboard boxes at the corner grocery store for $1. an hour. I think the retail price of albums then was around $5.99. I bought the album after school on a Friday, rushed home with it, and had barely hit the surface of my bean bag chair before I had the cellophane completely off and the cover opened, drinking in the graphics.
I read every bit of the liner text before I even put the LP on my turntable. Then, as the joyful noise enveloped me, I examined the liner text again, slowly passing my eyes over every photo, every image, every word, breathing in the smell of the new cardboard. For me, the packaging of a record album was just as much of an experience as the music that came out of those tiny little vinyl grooves. It told me as much of a story as the music did. And, if there were lyrics to read, even better! And a poster in the jacket...well, JACKPOT!
Not since vinyl LPs has music packaging been as entertaining and essential to the overall listening experience. I read my CD covers, yes, but the text is so damned small, it's a bit of a strain to get into. Still, I'd rather have tiny text and limited imagery than none at all. And this is what distresses me about the impending downloading revolution. CD sales are down dramatically. It seems that no one appreciates the jacket of a disc anymore. They want the instant gratification of downloading the tunes. They don't care who the artist wanted to thank, or who wrote or played on each tune.
This all fits in with the apparent drive thru mentality this country seems to have adopted. Get it fast, period. All other considerations fall away as quickly as the cellophane did on that Pink Floyd album. Where is the continuity? Where is the art appreciation? Shove it on the pod, crank up the buds and half listen to the tunes while you text with one hand and eat a fast food burger with the other. Where is the connection in that? The true experience of a very well planned work of art?
Clearly there is an undeniable connection between the audio and the visual. How will that connection be answered for when there is no packaging to consult? When there is nothing to settle into a comfy chair with and delve into like a good book? Don't say that I'll have the option of subjecting my already too-tired eyes to some pseudo packaging offered up on a lap-top. It's just not the same. I want to hear the music through speakers that fill an entire room with sound, that wrap notes around me like a blanket while I snuggle into a favorite chair and peruse the photos of the players, the names, dates, places, reasons. The thank yous.
I still have all of my vinyl LPs. And I still love them. There is a comfort in the warm analog sound. I snuggle up to that sound with the jacket in my lap, reliving the first listen, the first view. Relishing the stylus in the grooves, the soft scratch of tiny particles of dust, the familliarity of the pops and cracks. I try to embrace the new technological advances with an open mind and a willing ear. But my heart...my heart belongs to vinyl.
 
 

In some other life, I may have been confined. I may have been shackled, too. I am claustrophobic, and I cannot stand to have anything tight around my neck or wrists. Who, in a time when confinement and shackles were the norm, would have been the lucky beneficiaries of such righteous punishments? Criminals, certainly. But, also, folks who existed on the fringe of accepted society. People who scared other people with their willingness to experiment and wonder and question.
Mathematics has always made me feel claustrophobic and shackled. Numerical alchemy is bad magic to me. Beyond simple everyday math, I am baffled, mentally constricted, frightened, even. Algebra? You may as well smack me with a sledgehammer!  So it was, that one day when I was nine years old, I was being beaten into mathematical submission by a nun at the school I attended.
I'd had enough, and asked to go to the "lavatory", as the bathrooms were known then. I was granted two minutes to achieve this. I knew it would take me the full two minutes just to reach the bathrooms, which were in the basement of the archaic building. I decided to take my time walking, nevertheless, rather than chance being scolded for running in the halls. As I descended the grand marble steps, I could see a bright blue sky blazing through impossibly tall windows.
It was May, and warm. As I approached the huge ornate double doors where every day I entered this building, something compelled me to walk right through them into that sunlight. The sense of freedom I felt when I heard those doors slam shut behind me was nearly overwhelming. I just kept right on walking at a brisk pace, an escape pace, down the street, around the corner, and I was gone.
I'd never done anything like that before. Up until that day, I'd been fairly compliant. As I walked, I felt weight after weight lift from me, until there was nothing on my mind but the path ahead. Where to turn or not turn. What to look at or not look at. I could have walked a hundred miles that day, each step making me happier than the one before. How far would I go? I didn't care. Just numbers. How long would I wander? Didn't care. More numbers. None of those damn numbers mattered anymore. Not the ones on the clock, the ones on the phone, the ones on the houses, or the one that marked my age.
I was, for one exceptionally wonderful afternoon, totally, completely free. It wouldn't last, of course. It couldn't. But I learned a very valuable lesson that day. I learned what really mattered in life. And, let me tell you...it isn't numbers.

Will somebody PLEASE get that fucking poseur Katy Perry OUT of my face!!??  There IS such a thing as TOO MUCH marketing!!  Gross.  ( I'll take Jill Sobule over her ANY DAY!)

Years ago I was in a laundromat and a young woman sitting beside me struck up a conversation. It was the usual topics of the day type of chat, somewhere during which something she said prompted me to probe a bit deeper and ask her something she clearly considered to be a bit personal. She pondered the question very briefly and then declared, " You're so analyzical!"
Because I didn't wish to insult her intelligence, and also because I loved the new word, I didn't correct her. I found it interesting then, and still do now, that the question I asked her then was fairly benign in nature, yet still tripped her guards. I surmised that she was unaccustomed to topics which probed any deeper than what was the top news item of the day, or what sort of washing detergent I preferred.
And she had me figured out despite! I am quite admittedly "analyzical." I am thouroughly interested in the human condition. I want to know how things work. And why. Everything is a fascination for me. I have anxiety attacks when I realize that I'll never have time to learn eveything I want to learn before I die. I use the information that I aquire for songs, stories...paintings, when I used to paint.
I use the information that I gather as learning tools to better understand myself and the people around me. I believe that the aquisition of any sort of knowledge is important, essential, even, to being human. I could have been a psychologist, a profiler, a forensic pathologist, except that my artistic nature precludes me from any field that requires a concerted academic effort on my part. I'm too interested in too many things to focus for too long on a single topic.
Unless that topic is music...but, that's for another discussion entirely.  I particularly want to know the inner workings of people whom I consider to rank among the most important in my life. I want to know what they think and what they feel..what are their desires, hopes, fears? What promotes joy for them, and what causes pain? I want to know so that I can be more efficient as a friend and advocate. I want to know where we connect and how. I want to have the background information necessary to give them full support in times of need, and to contribute to their happiness in whatever ways that I can.
This desire to know seems perfectly normal and appropriate to me. I have enough tact and respect to know what not to ask and where not to probe. And if I still cross that line, I am open to being corrected for it. I'm a good listener, because I am truly interested. I'm interesting, too, when the listener is someone else!  I can exist within the rhealm of the mundane and engage in small talk when that is what a situation warrants. I do tire of it rather quickly, though.
If we do not open up to each other, how can we know each other? If we do not know each other, how can we maintain interest? If we cannot maintain interest in one another, how can we connect...and why would we want to? Isn't connection the most fundamental part of the human collective? We have to matter to each other to matter to ourselves. We are hopelessly interdependent in this way. We can talk about the weather, sure. But sooner or later, shouldn't we be talking not just about whether it's going to snow today, but *why*?
 
 
 
 

There are but a few tunes left to lay basic tracks down for, and then we'll be cruising in the guest performer fast lane...breaking only for pizza and caffiene!!
Once again, Jeff Root is the producer to reckon with! He's got a great new CD of his own just gone to print...woohoo...and the rest of us on deck couldn't be more excited about his project or our own. 
I'm hoping for a late Spring/Early summer release...but, I don't want to rush the magic, so I'm ready to be flex on that.  The party will be worth the wait...I promise!
 

I was a very poor student. There was nothing that my teachers could offer up that was more interesting than what was going on in my own head. I was the sort of kid who was writing poetry at an age early enough to proudly title my work, "A Poam, by Gayle Picard".  I hated the baby dolls imposed upon me, and ditched them for any sort of action figure that I could build an adventure around. I drew, constantly. Colored. Painted. Walked around singing songs that were being conceived even as the awkward rhymes were leaving my mouth, long before I ever knew how to play an instrument.
I once subjected my best friend to hours of packing, molding and carving blocks of snow into an eloborate stage set, after which I composed, on the spot, an entire musical which I then directed as she struggled to assume the multiple roles imposed upon her. While all of the other kids in the neighborhood were building snowmen and forts and warring with icy spheres, there we were, dancing around our sculptures and singing, off key, at the top of our lungs. After an endeavor like that, no American History propaganda session was likely to hold my attention.
While my teachers expounded on the Boston Tea Party and resultant Revolution, I would stare out of the window, wishing I had a monkey. Fantasizing about how I would dress the chimp, and what funny things I would teach it to do. Then, while faint voices went on about taxation without representation, I'd draw the monkey in his little outfit, on my notebook, inside of my textbook, on the desk. When, at last, the bell would ring, I had learned nothing except that drawing a monkey from memory was hard, and that next time, I would need to work from a photograph.
When the report cards betrayed my distractions, the three hour top-volume lectures my Dad sentenced me to were good motivation to make a conscious effort to pay better attention to what was going on in my classes. I forced myself to listen and process, but, in the end, I realized that I just didn't care about these things I evidently was supposed to care about. So, it was the punishments I received for conducting myself in ways that were wholly natural to me, that made me realize that I was, indeed, different than the other children. And that being different was not OK.
Now, some 40 years later, being different is still not OK. Except, perhaps, for the very small percentage of people who managed to become famous for being different. And, I expect that was mostly luck. There are no benefactors banging on my door, crying, "Please! Entertain me with your strange ways, and I will take care of you!"  If only...
I try to pay attention to what is supposed to be important to me. I fall into line and try to do what is expected of me so that I might earn my keep in a society that seems content to pay me for anything except what I love to do. I go through the motions, striving to avoid the angry lectures, keeping my head low, trying to blend in, unnoticed. I move with the slow, deliberate steps of the conformists, secretly wishing that I had that monkey.

Creative people, and I mean true artists...the driven-by-compulsion-to create sort...are the most misunderstood and underappreciated beings on this planet. This is not a new thing. We've heard the tales. Van Gogh and his ear. Goya and his demons. Hemingway and his booze. Janis, Jimi, and Kurt and their heroin. Lost souls caught between the rock of relentless need and the hard place of endless disregard. Looking for a way to numb the calling.
I've always thought of being born with the C gene as both a blessing and a curse. Because, in order to respond creatively to the world around you, you need to experience it completely, deeply. You need the motivation of extreme consiousness, and a thin skin to fully absorb every detail. Every emotion expanded to extremes, until the absolute need to respond to the influx takes over and here comes the purging; the words, the music, the imagery, the relief.
And, of course, the relief is always temporary, because even as you are purging you are absorbing more in an endless cycle of take and give. There is a constant mental and emotional processing happening inside. Everything is something, and sometimes, nothing is everything. To those born free, you seem odd. More than odd, you seem off, bent, maybe a bit scary. The crazy artist.
Expressing yourself with your art is not always enough. The purging needs to happen in other ways, too. I feel compelled to share what's inside of my head, my heart, sometimes my very soul by, God forbid, *talking* about it. If you can converse with your own kind, the words can fly about for hours on end, linked together by empathy and understanding, whipping around the room like a comet.
Concepts and realizations and procedures, plans for world domination! A mighty comraderie that heals, re-fuels, centers and grounds you so that you can feel strong and positive and *alright* about being who you are. Your people, they know what it's like to be overwhelmed by sadness, overcome by joy, propelled by excitement...they know what it's like to feel things to the extreme.
They understand the sanctity of the sacred space, that place where you are when the art is happening, when the purging is full throttle and everything, *everything* is compelling and inspiring and magical. That place where you can write a sonnet to your hangnail, because for whatever reason that hangnail seemed to warrant attention for one glorious moment in time, when even the mundane was transformed by the alchemy of clarity.
But, not everyone can understand. Most people, are, in fact, not your people. You are a threat to their simplicity of routine. You are an assault on their tempered intellect. You are contrary to the norm they were taught to believe is the best way to live their lives. The flies in the ointment of their assumed roles, their self-imposed limitations. And, these people, they are the people you are bound to deal with every day as a member of an established society. You, who cannot any better understand them than they can understand you. You, who are not equipped to navigate their realm but are nevertheless thrust into it every single day.
Forced to adapt in order to simply survive. Expected to comply, in order to retain some degree of freedom. Sentenced to a duplicity that drains and dulls you, until you are at last paroled, and you run, not walk, back to the comfort and safety of your sacred space, fully loaded and ready to release.
Stay tuned for part two.
 
 
 

Driving is when I notice it first. The cool blue hues of winter light beginning to be tinged with the soft edges of something warmer, transparently golden. Even in the grasp of frozen January, I can sense that a change is coming. It couldn't be more fitting, given that one of this country's most amazing and welcome changes has already taken place. And, just as the morphing sky gives me reason to hope, so, too does this Historically important shift in leadership.
Neither change leaves me expecting miracles. I know there is winter yet to come, arctic air yet to endure. Spring is still a long way off. So, too, is the healing of a long ailing nation. Still, just knowing that a shift has begun is a comfort, a motivator. I've walked the planet long enough to say with certainty that there is no such thing as perfection. There is no easy solution to any problem, regardless of the passion asserted in wanting to fix what is broken.
Life is hard, and getting harder. Life is also amazing and magical in ways too numerous to list. And, it's short. Hope, in my opinion, is the only regulator. The only thing that keeps us grounded enough to move past what is bad and wrong. It pushes us forward, past the fear, past the pain, out of the dark. Hope keeps us looking for the light, keeps us believing in the possibilities. Hope reminds us that change is the only constant. And we can affect change. Oh, yes, baby, we can!
 
 
 

After 2 reschedulings due to wacky weather, this past Saturday (Jan.3) finally found a very happy group of friends gathered at The Bull Run, in Shirley, for what eventually became "The Little Show That Could".  Headlining at a venue with the creds The Bull Run has is an honor...and one The Rafters, Elizabeth Lorrey and myself were not going to let slip away without a fight!  Mother Nature tried twice to steal this much anticipated show from us, and had she thrown yet a third curveball our way, we may have reluctantly conceded. Thankfully, our tenacity was rewarded with a clear, star studded sky and dry roads well suited for late night travel.

Although we lost some folks in the shuffle, the turnout was great, enthusiasm was high, and the energy level onstage was at a maximum. We were sooo ready for this show! It was an inspiring night of music and friendship. Having been fortunate to play the Bull Run several times now, it feels like home to me. I love the atmosphere, the energy, and of course the sound is outstanding. (Thank You Steve and Jeff)

We are all fortunate to have such a quality venue so close to us. Delores, George and the entire Bull Run family are delivering top notch entertainment at extremely affordable prices all year, every year. More importantly, they are tireless supporters of live music; local, national and international. The music business is not an easy one. These folks make it look easy, and make it feel right. I can't stress enough how important that is to those of us out there making the music.

So, a million thanks to The Bull Run for having us, and to all of the folks who came out to listen...friends, family, and future friends and family.  It's the listeners who matter most, and we are endlessly appreciative for your support.

With all of the turmoil in the world today, it's a comfort to know that there is a common ground that we can escape to together where there is peace, love and a unifying force we call music. We look forward to escaping with you all again very soon!