Woke up to a sunny, frosted-over day, hearing the crunch of snow shovels outside...
Heading into the city in a little while to play a set at Caffe Vivaldi and help our friend Tania Stavreva raise funds for her debut album. We are planning to kind of rock out more today but we'll have to see what people are in the mood for with their brunch!
It's finally time to announce our two big album release events. I am super psyched to be performing both of these shows with a full band, featuring some wonderful musicians who appear on the Circles of Swallows album. These will be two very special evenings and I really hope that you can make it out to at least one of them!
At both events we will also be premiering the official music video for "Old Languages" -- revealing the top secret story line that we came up with during our two-day video shoot last May. It wasn't so easy to find a venue in Manhattan that could also project video, but we finally found Drom -- an awesome club in the East Village that is a longtime presenter of eclectic music. We're super excited to play there! And it's a large venue -- so please come out if you can and help us to fill it up!
The second new single from my upcoming album was just released today!
Along with a lyric video:
I hope you enjoy :) For the rest of 2012, 100% of the proceeds from sales of this single will be donated to the United Way Hurricane Sandy Recovery Fund. You can name your own price when you purchase it on my website if you would like to make a larger donation to the fund.
As we all know by now, the predicted Frankenstorm indeed turned out to be a monster. Many friends, relatives, and neighbors in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania have been affected.
We were fortunate not to have flooding or power outages in the part of Brooklyn where I'm currently living, but Sandy impacted all of us in many ways and the devastation wreaked has been astounding. Some of my relatives still haven't been able to move back to Long Beach Island on the Jersey Shore, while other friends have lost their homes completely. Along with the life's work of many other artists based at the Westbeth building in Manhattan's West Village, the Martha Graham Dance company's historic costumes and sets were submerged in 8 feet of water for days and suffered irreparable damage. The company is now trying to preserve whatever they can, from precious costumes worn by Graham herself to sets created by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi.
You may ask why I've included that last one. It links to an organization that fights hard to protect our planet, and their work gives me hope.
Maybe we can't say for sure that Hurricane Sandy was caused by global warming. But we need to protect the environment REGARDLESS of what is or isn't causing climate change. There are so many reasons -- the disappearance of species, the disappearance of natural and "unspoiled" lands, the threats to our food supply by the commercial aims of companies like Monsanto... I can hardly believe that these things have reached the point that they have. When people say that the economy etc. should be more of a priority, I truly wish they could realize that the way we treat our planet is quite directly connected to the economy and to so many other aspects of our well-being.
I remember the gas lines in the 1970s and the consequent banning of station wagons and other gas guzzlers, and how astonished I was to see the later mass popularity of SUVs that seemed to represent an amnesia and/or denial about the environmental concerns brought to light in those earlier years. At the same time there has also been a great increase in awareness about organic, local, and sustainable food, clothing, building, and holistic philosophy; these things give me hope too.
I'm in Brooklyn for now, to rehearse and get ready to start playing live more. Hopefully this will also include playing in Philly (and elsewhere) and continuing to work with musicians in both cities; we'll see how it all turns out. This week Tim Daoust and I had a great rehearsal and hopefully it won't be long til we have some shows to tell you about.
Afterwards we headed over to Tea Lounge in Park Slope, because Tim knew about an Indian music jam session happening there run by Brooklyn Raga Massive. I am definitely going to have to keep track of that jam in future, because it attracts some world class Indian musicians. Quite the night of blissful listening, and it brought back memories of some of the music I was listening to when writing my first album. Most especially, the lady below... here's the first song from her gorgeous album Qareeb, which I've listened to many times over.
In other news, a FRANKENSTORMMMM!!! is supposedly headed for the east coast of the USA just in time for Halloween... so I guess I'd better leave this coffeeshop behind and go buy a jug of water or something. Stock up and stay safe, everyone!
