My photo of Grace Potter at 9:30 Club – an artist at work
I had the extreme pleasure of seeing Grace Potter and the Magical Midnight Roadshow last night at 9:30 Club. It’s such a joy to be in the presence of someone who is so comfortable being exactly who they are. She is a ball of wild and wonderful energy, and she took every person in that sold out audience with her. I couldn’t help but dance from beginning to end. There’s something about her voice and her music that just moves you, leads you into new places you never knew you could go. I’m so glad I took the ride all the way to the end. (Huge thanks to my pal, Josh, for introducing me to her live shows!)
“You’ve got to fall in love with your path.” ~Clifton Ross III
On Monday, I went to Eatonville’s celebration of Martin Luther King Day with special guests Clifton Ross III and the Howard University Gospel Choir. Clifton spoke about his challenges getting through college at Howard University and his winding career in music. “You’ve got to fall in love with your path,” he said. I couldn’t agree more. There’s a temptation for us to compare our journeys to the journeys of others. You are unique and so is your path.Revel in that. March to the beat of your own drummer. Enjoy the view. Do things your way on your terms, and love every moment of it. That’s the only work we ever really have to do.
Here’s a beautiful display of the power of music to unite us: the black acapella group Naturally 7 & Jewish acapella group The Maccabees collaborated on a rendition of the James Taylor song, Shed a Little Light, commemorating Dr. King at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. This kind of work gives me hope that with all the problems we face in the world, we can stand side-by-side, raise our voices, and make a difference together.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to seek out new music and see more live shows. I learned about Rhiannon Giddens on CBS Saturday Morning Saturday Sessions. I was making breakfast and when she started to sing, I popped my head around the corner from the kitchen to see who she was. Her sound was so unique—both her voice and her band’s orchestrations. She’s managed to take her multiethnic heritage and meld all of the parts of her ancestry and experiences into something wholly new and very powerful. There is something about her earthy voice and music that stirs something in everyone who hears it.
“Led by Rhiannon Giddens, founding member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, this concert will explore the songs of resistance of the South, both old and new, the deep history of protest songs from Leyla McCalla’s Haiti and Louisiana, and the modern outsider-looking-in observations of 1st generation American Bhi Bhiman.”
I snapped up a ticket immediately. I hope you will, too.
When you’ve done something incredible, there’s an urge to attempt a second lightning strike as fast as possible. Lin-Manuel Miranda and Adele did it right. They took a significant amount of time between their first monumental successes and their second attempts. They wanted to roll the dice again, and they wanted to be the most skilled dice rollers they could be. That couldn’t happen over night. It couldn’t even happen in a year. Lin worked on Hamilton for five years. Adele took 4 years between her albums 21 and 25. They were patient, persistent, and thoughtful about it.
Serial, sadly, wasn’t. The second season isn’t anywhere near as interesting, suspenseful, nor intriguing as Season 1. I’ve already stopped listening because it’s not worth my time. They should have spent more time selecting, researching, molding, and shaping season 2. They should have been more concerned with content and less concerned about turnaround. We would have waited. We would have been here.
If you’re working on your second act, take the time to get it right. Don’t rush for the sake of rushing. Move along as fast as you can, and don’t compromise quality. In a world of so much noise, quality is worth the wait.
Somehow Andra Day’s album Cheers to the Fall had escaped my notice until I saw her on the Apple commercial with Stevie Wonder. Now I can’t stop listening to it on loop on Amazon Prime. There’s something so painful about her lyrics and yet so strong about her voice that strikes just the right chord to keep me hooked until the very last note. If you haven’t yet, give it a listen and get ready to dance, cry, and reflect.
“May all that has been reduced to noise in you, become music again.” ~David Teems
I’m off from work through January 3rd and decided to stay in D.C. to use the time to focus on defining my creative projects for the new year. I get tremendously excited about turning the page in the calendar, and I am absolutely ready to say hasta la vista to 2015. This was a rough one, maybe the roughest on record, in nearly every aspect of my life. It was a character building year to say the least. It was also a time of high creativity because I was forced into situations that required me to solve huge problems and conflicts.
2015 held a lot of noise for me, complex emotions swirling around in my head and heart. Rather than fighting them, I decided to use them. After all, the worst of circumstances serve as the seeds for the best art. The loudest noise can be transformed into the sweetest music. And that’s what 2016 is all about for me.
I was hypnotized by Marc Maron’s recent WTF podcast episode in which he interviews James Taylor, one of my favorite musicians. Taylor’s life has been a winding road that was often dark, twisted, and lonely. To hear his smooth and comforting voice, the voice I first heard as a young teenager and can never get enough of, that harrowing journey isn’t always apparent.
This interview, the most raw and honest I’ve ever heard Taylor give (and as a huge fan I’ve heard many!), often left me teary-eyed and profoundly grateful that he is still with us and still making music. Now 32 years sober, Taylor is in love and making us fall in love with his music all over again via his new album, Before This World. His music and the people in his life, including friends and family, helped him make that climb out of the depths and into the light. Taylor and Maron reminded us that change, growth, and healing are difficult, but possible.
With his trademark familiarity and humility, Maron makes guests comfortable enough to share the stuff that hurts. I felt like I was in that garage in Los Angeles where Maron conducts most of his interviews, and that after we’d all go out and get a coffee. This is the gift of listening to podcasts and personal interviews. It’s an intense exercise in attention, connection, and awareness that’s so personal that it transports us. It’s a meditation of sorts, an opportunity to leave our own cares and worries behind, that helps us to better understand and appreciate another person’s experience and journey. And for this gift, I’m tremendously grateful to Taylor and Maron.
I love Ryan Adams, and all the more so for quotes like this: “There is nothing wrong with loving the crap out of everything. Negative people find their walls. So never apologize for your enthusiasm. Never ever.”
The negative people I meet—and sadly there are so many of them out there—often think I’m overly enthusiastic, that I’m just too excited about life. And to that I say, “Someday, I hope you realize what you’re missing.”
I do love the crap out of everything—my friends, Phineas, my city, my writing, my creative projects, music, art, books, animals, nature, my home, travel. You name it and I can find something I love about it. Negative people will knock us down; that’s their choice and we can’t control it.Whether we stay down or eventually rise up is our choice and we do control that. Their behavior has nothing to do with us and everything to do with them. Their negativity is a direct reflection about how they feel about themselves, not how they feel about us.
So here’s my advice: take every wall that a negative person throws in front of you and carve a window into it. Crawl through that window and leave those negative people behind.You are not responsible for them. They don’t have anything to offer you and they don’t want the gifts you have to give. That’s their loss, not yours. You deserve to be surrounded by love; don’t settle for anything less.
My friend, mentor, and teacher, Ed Freeman, posted this image a few weeks ago and it really resonated with me. I’m now digging into Oliver Sack’s book Musicophilia. The book explores the neuroscience of music and all of the unknown reasons why music resonates so deeply with us.
Have you ever noticed that a song can take us back in time, that it can remind us of someone, something, or some place that we haven’t thought about in years? Music stores memories and unlocks them for us. I like to think of that power as the truest form of magic. Play on.
Christa Avampato 