bulldooozers burning rubber

Grandpa Elliott, this is your second appearance on my blog. You represent everything that is good about music to me. Keep making me cry. Keep giving me hope that a growing community of individuals in our global village can make change; through art, through music, through unadulterated joy, through bright spirits, warm hearts, educated minds. Keep playing your harmonica like it's the pacemaker pushing warm blood through the old veins of The Big Easy and you're the ventilator, gently easing new breath into damaged lungs. Keep their buldooozers burning rubber. 

There's nothing quite like playing a bad show.

It crinkles you up into balls of the high school sketchbook paper you wrote your first lyrics on. 

I'm an awkward performer. I want to perform with joy. I feel Joy when I'm on stage, but it comes across as

a) Deadly Serious

b) Uncomfortably Out-Of-Synch 

c) Annoyingly Snarky

d) All of the above.

especially when I'm performing for a room of people that I feel like I have to win over. My shows in California were so unbelievably good (definitely set a new P.R. out there) because even though I didn't know lots of the people, most of them had heard my EP and were excited to see what I would do. The energy was there. I had fans. Tonight, I had a room full of people. Just people. Which is exactly what I'll keep having rooms full of as I start performing more often.

My only real aspiration is to make music for my entire life, play live music for my entire life, and to do it because people connect with what I'm making. I just want to connect with people. So it gets confusing when I'm up there, playing, and feeling like they're listening wrong. But I know they're not. I know that it's me who's not playing right. It's not nervousness though, so far it sounds like it could just be nervousness; It's a lack of something. Joy, or the successful expression of it. Lack of looseness. I was able to let go of something in California that I need to learn to let go of consistently.