Two loves: Ida and my fiddle.

I've been playing the fiddle for about 7 years now. The first two years were misery. I thought I sounded awful. Learning any concrete song was like trying to use chopsticks for the first time again. The one thing I eventually developed was an excellent ear for melody, and the ability to follow along in a lilting sort of rhythm.

I was always painfully aware that my fiddling lacked the drive, the rhythm, the flexibility of true old-time fiddling. But, I could play along with many of the songs we played, and eventually I thought it sounded okay (but not great) when I played along with the melody.

Enter Chris.

Chris is a local banjo-player and fiddler with a band called "Bueno Avenue String Band." He plays a rollicking, loosey-goosey, good-time fiddle that I found myself wishing I could replicate. We've played music a few times together now, he's given me some excellent tips on old-time fiddling, showed me how to cross-tune my fiddle, and all of a sudden I'm having a hell of a lot of fun listening to fiddle music, thinking about how the sound is created, and then trying to come up with my own phrasing on my fiddle. So far, the tunes I've learned are: "Cherry River Line," "Black Eyed Daisy," "Over the Waterfall," "Willow Garden," and most recently, "Cluck Old Hen."

All of this makes me very happy.

As for Ida, we had an impromptu photo shoot night when she was tired and lying on the bed. I started taking pictures and it was like she was posing in the most adorable positions on purpose so that I could take pictures with my iphone. I think she was a plus-size model in some previous life. Here are a few other pictures from our shoot:


Of course, I would be remiss to write a blog entry about loves without mentioning Shed and Molly. I'm damn lucky to have them. It's good to remember that right now, with my work future on uncertain ground. If all else fails, I can become an itinerant fiddler, and train Shed and Ida to dance around like monkeys as I saw a tune and Molly backs us up on rhythm guitar.

In Love Like...

I was thinking this morning about why it is that some cds don't hit you until months, years, decades after you first acquire them. This is a topic I've discussed many times with my brother Thomas, (who writes about music on his blogs--casket, shroud, and grave and per diem) because we're always giving each other music, and only months later finding ourselves really loving it.

This has been on my mind recently because I put on an old cd by the Avett Brothers in my car, the other day, and ended up falling in love with at least 3 songs that I had never noticed before. I got the cd about 3 years ago, when I was a DJ at KRCL. In those days, with KRCL's huge library of music, I was always scrounging up albums, copying them, finding one song I liked to play on the show, and then moving on to the next cd. That's one problem with DJing--I have a compulsion to keep finding new artists, new songs, new sounds. That means that I often move through cds quickly, mining songs and not paying attention to the cd as a whole. The Avett Brothers' cd, "A Carolina Jubilee," provided me with a song that I loved, and which I played on the show. I think once I heard this one song, I stopped listening to the record:

This week, with the cd in my car on my commute to work, I've discovered 3 new songs that I cannot believe I didn't fall immediately in love with before.

and

Right now these songs seem so obviously FANTASTIC, that I can't believe I didn't like them when I heard the album for the very first time. But no, except for "Love Like the Movies," I thought I didn't like this album. Why is that? I have no clear explanation except for this one possibility: at the time, I was listening to a lot of music by the Magnetic Fields that Thomas had passed on to me. Not surprisingly, "Love Like the Movies" is the most Magnetic Fields-y song on "A Carolina Jubilee." Perhaps music sounds different depending on what other music you've been listening to at the time. Kind of like with food and wines. Certain flavors can overwhelm others, making them taste weak and simplistic, but if you try that flavor alone, or in combination with similar ingredients, it will suddenly taste amazing.

Attn: Avett Brothers

You taste amazing!