Thursday 

Good morning! About 9:40 in the a.m. A beautiful day out there for a change. Good for morale- which is a tough thing to maintain in these times. A Pandemic is easier to handle on a sunny day...

Music news. My new CD, Near-Miracle on 33rd Street, is supposed to hit the porch today(hopefully not too hard!), via UPS. As far as anything online, it's due to go up on Spotify on November 1st, and has been submitted to Apple and Deezer and iTunes, Amazon, and God knows who else. In the meantime, CDs are available through me. Just PM me if interested. They're $12.50 if I mail it to you, and $10 if you just come by here to pick it up. 

Also, there are a few shouts, acknowledgements of folks who've been kind and supportive, or just cool in general. . If you got a shout in the liner notes, your money's no good here. This one is on the house. One of our policies here at samcrain.com. 

As far as the Music Lab, I think I've shot my wad for the time being. The end of a creative binge. I can always tell when my Muse has left the building. My stuff starts to get formulaic, by-the-numbers. Time to pack it in for awhile. But I have a goodly number of Fusion/Smooth pieces from it, which I share on the Music page here at Sam Central. 

One of my coping devices is to alternate between several different areas. I do this 'across the board', but as far as music, it's between writing and playing., Some time is spent on composition and then I switch gears and work on guitar playing. So it's time to get back to those scales and arpeggios. I even devise my own technical exercises, which I try to make as gnarly as possible--what I call Castor Oil exercises. Love 'em/hate 'em...

And  that's my basic stuff for now. A friend of mine, also a musician, remarked to me that I haven't "come back" as far as playing anywhere. My last engagement was March 13th at Robbie's. And my gigs were either there or various nursing/assisted living facilities, both of which are closed indefinitely. So for the time being, I'm a Man Without a Country as far as that goes.

Before I do play out again, I want to clean up a little bit. Haven't had a haircut since February, and need to buy some new duds. I don't think I'm the only one who's gotten shaggier over the last couple months. So this is on the agenda. 

Okay! Thanks as ever for stopping in and reading. Happy Thor's Day to you! I'm outa here. More later. 

 

Today's pic was taken back in 2013 or so. A nice little restaurant/bar between Spring and Edwards. Dan Rivero, Frank Parker, Wayne Carter, me.

Leave a comment