Live March 18th at 10pm. We will be doing a 40 minute set ages 21 and up and the cover is $10
6010 West Pico Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90035-2625
(323) 954-9400
FREE CD’s and a fun time.
More to come….
…So it’s Friday night, and I am reflecting on my week, actually my month and a half and finally able to find a moment to put down some emotional reflection.
I am a musician, I play the guitar and I sing and write and I have never really wanted to be anything else, save may be the scientist / interior designer I had my sights set on at 11. And here I am with a mighty full plate, 27 years old and getting on in “musician making it years” and I am still desperately trying to hold onto the dream of doing this for my bread and butter, not even outrageous riches just as comfortable survival. Oh I like that, “comfortable survival” Erm… well… perhaps not…maybe the desperation is talking.
I am at that tipping point again, when it all gets too much and your love of playing is in jeopardy. Well not really but applying the kind of effort necessary to succeed is, there is an appropriate metaphor in my head right now but I am afraid putting it down and sounding cliché, ugh!!
But its Friday night and I felt like venting after a hard days grind, I hope that there are a few people out there who feel this last six weeks has been a dream come true, if only so that I can have faith in the yin and yang of the universe and know my turn must be around the corner.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gudstufphotography/4081238713/
photos by gudstuf Photography
by here is the repost
Hear Noho happens the first Thursday of every month.
Galleries, music & a good time all for the price of one bracelet.
Laura Duncan
Cella Gallery
5229 Lankershim Blvd.
North Hollywood CA
I was totally amazed at this woman’s talent. Check out her website for a taste of some of her goodness.
From the article here – http://redfishingboat.com/2009/11/laura-duncan-cella-gallery-for-hear-noho/
As I was breezing through the monthly HearNoHo musical showcase last night, Laura Duncan was a revelation. I’m talking blues riffs, jazz tinges, and one of the strongest voices I’ve heard in a while. This UK transplant is now based in Los Angeles, and I’ll seek her out again. She can sing, and she can play guitar. I think she’s coming from a musical theatre background. I see she’s played Molly Malones. I wonder if she knows Philip Sayce?
Laura Duncan – “Open Arms”She has a 4-song ep for free download on her site at www.lmduncan.com. Or if Myspace to stream music is your thing: www.myspace.com/lmduncan
I’ve been cranking “Less Earth More Rubber” all the morning after. I’m hooked!
Some bonus photos:
I don’t know what prompted me to write this blog, since I haven’t wrote in a good time.
But it sort of feels right today. Plus maybe this won’t even make it to the blog site and instead become just another word file clogging up my computer…
Anyway…
I think some people just have more drive than others. I find this hard, I find it hard to motivate others, book shows, write blogs, spend endless hours following leads for music festivals or competitions you have to dodge paying rent in order to enter an albums worth of songs. Or sweet talking venues to let you play 11pm on a Tuesday evening to your family, and girlfriends of the band. To be honest, I find it consuming enough to try and write something I don’t think sucks.
But what do you do? You can’t stop. You can’t stop trying every avenue that might hold hope of exposure for your songs.
I know I am getting older and I never thought I would be this age, it just seemed so far away. “Hey, didn’t all the best rock stars die before age 27?” But it is making me view things in a different way.
I was going through some old songs last night, amazingly I wasn’t totally horrified by what I was hearing, some of it was not half bad and I was listening with new ears. So I spent most of the evening trying to remember chord progressions and lyrics to these songs. I briefly enter the euphoria of naivety and the pure love of writing and it was great. But it’s like any high, there is always a low and the low was knowing I can’t get that time back.
So does that motivate me, does that make me say “Well then I can’t waste more time”?
Well yes and no….. Yes because I don’t want to look back in 20 years and feel even more like I wasted time and having less of a chance to make something of myself.
And no, because I am still not sure what I could have done differently and what would make all the difference now. “Ah, a time machine and the early days of you tube”
So I continue with, motivational spurts and slows. What else can you do?
The guest arrives w/ pure confusion
Viewing eyes are opening w/ red.
The air it feels like suffocation
Desolation breathing in instead.
The warning signs were always there
But ’till you’ve seen the mark you’re unaware
The guest inquires about the weather
Softly to replace the mute despair
The coffee lays untouched before
The whitened knees of people in their chairs.
The clock it marches on past light
Where noone dares disturb the wrap of night
W/ bowing heads and shriveled shoulders
Weakened kin are aided to their beds
The last of us choose to recall
Smile happy tales while dancing around death
And in our minds, try to insert,
A wall that slowly closes around hurt.
Blog 3-
1 hour delay, 5 hour flight, azing days in New York, 1 and a half hour drive, 2 glorious days in Long island, 1 hour drive to the airport, 3 hours sitting on the runway, a 5 hour flight, 30 minutes home and 7:30 wake up for work.
I am walking through
There is a cluster of people crowding around the strawberry fields, John Lennon memorial but as we pass them, Friday morning in the park is pretty quiet.
We parked ourselves and our coffee on a park bench next to a woman who was setting up an instrument similar to a Santoor, with strings on a wooden frame and hammers to play it percussively. I got to hear a little of her playing before we moved on, but it was enough to remind me that, that really is the beauty of strings, twang em, tap em, slap em, slide em, so many options!
The next sound that pierced my ears, oh and I do mean pierce, was an old man playing the violin, not only unsuccessfully but also terribly out of tune.
I have so much respect for someone who will set up solo in the park and bang out their music with out hesitation no matter the talent. However, when the sound of sweet
On a couple shaded benches sat a quartet of guitar, upright bass, trumpet and trombone players sat tapping and wiggling out music.
The trombone and trumpet would take turns between the rasp of vocal lines to bang out solos and then wind together again in and out of each others riffs.
I sat in wonder and was downright trilled for over an hour.
So there I was 3 month’s in L.A in a job I hated with no band or musicians that I wasn’t afraid to be around or totally uninspired by. I had left all my friends behind in
I had a day off coming from work and I was sitting around the house playing guitar and licking my wounds.
This will periodically happen to me, I think it must be the Taurus in me but something kicked at me, hard and I decided to go out by myself. There was a local bar in walking distance of my house and there was a band I was familiar with supposed to be playing. Although it was late I got myself up and walked to it.
Fortunately for me there was live music playing just not the particular band I had com to see but I sat at the bar and enjoyed the new scenery.
Its funny how you never really remember how you meet new people, you just kind of do. And I am not clear how or why I started talking to this girl, but I did and I am grateful.
We talked and found we had music in common and that she played mandolin. Fantastic!
To be continued…..
So I took the advice of my brother to finally set up a blog and talk about my journey to become a successful musician in
Around this time two years ago, I had just arrived in L.A full of optimism (or perhaps romanticism). As a singer/songwriter/guitarist, the goal was to put together a strong band, work our asses off to write great music, build a fan base, start touring locally and then…
Well, needless to say, I hit a few bumps along the way…
I thought it would be easy to gather together a bunch of kick-ass musicians as hungry as I was. I set about putting up advertisements on musician sites and Craig’s list and then scoped out music stores to pin up posters.
After many weeks with no responses, I was somewhat daunted. “What the hell?” I felt I was being open-minded about age, influences, writing collaboration, etc. Finally, I got a few responses looking for a female vocalist with the specific request that I NOT be a songwriter and NOT play an instrument. I was allowed to sing though. I suppose 1 out of 3 ain’t bad…???
I passed.
After a few more weeks, a response caught my eye, and I got together with this bassist chap. We talked and had a jam session and things seemed good.
However on our second meeting he kept asking if there was a bar or liquor store close by. There wasn’t but I offered him some wine just so we could get started.
After 20 min and a very large glass of wine he asked if I had more. I obliged, but made a comment when he drank the second glass down like it was juice. His angry response to my “Wow you drank that fast” was enough to give me my answer about future jam sessions.
I passed.
New tactic. I started to go to open mics and blues jams with the hope I might get to mingle with some fellow musicians…Finally, I met a young guy at one of the jams, who was a good guitarist and around the same age as myself…
We got together to work on some of my songs, he had a good ear and played around with some nice parts but his influences sat him more on the jazz side and so we focused on one of my more jazzy ballads to begin with.
We got on fairly well and on one of our breaks we sat in my kitchen and I asked him what he thought about our combo.
He told me flat out (and in the nicest possible way) that if we were to play out shows in the future he would not invite his friends to see us play because he didn’t feel that my songs were good enough to warrant letting his chums hear. It was really shocking to hear someone say something like that about my music and in the hours that followed I had an array of emotions. Shock, misery, outrage, anger, stubbornness and finally settled on what I really do believe and that is, that yes, my songs were not been ready to play in front of 50.000 screaming fans( although there are plenty of people with no talent playing in front of even more people than that) But they were a good beginning to honing my skills as a writer and I would continue to build upon them, throw some out and begin new ones.
I take his comments with me as a way of pushing myself to get the best of a song. So what seemed like a kick in the teeth at the time, did actually turned out to have a positive effect on me.
As for getting together for another practice with him.
I passed
This is my personal blog about my trials and tribulations trying to make it as a musician in Los Angeles.