Hey wow I'm busy...

Busy both in brain and body.

Had a great debut gig as An Historic, despite my nerves. The crowd was fun and willing to sing along. I'll be doing another one in early November at the Elm City Infoshop - details forthcoming. In the past week I've also written almost four complete songs (with certain details still nebulous), which is really fast for me. I've even made it through the stage where I hate them and then revise many of them extensively until they meet my satisfaction. Who knows how they'll sound when they turn out?

Also, yesterday morning was the first meeting of an acoustic sub-grouping of the New Haven Improvisers Collective. We had Nathan Bontrager playing cello, Gabriel Bolanos playing acoustic guitar, Anne Rhodes singing, Nate Trier playing accordion and Euphonium, and myself playing accordion and clarinet. Everybody responded well to the thought and we hope to do it again sometime - the lack of drums or electric guitars meant that we had to rely on different strengths than what work in the NHIC at large, and it's definitely going to be some interesting exploring.

Fiddler on the Roof approaches, and damned if I'm not a little nervous...

Finally, I've been thinking a bit about revisions...I like the whole Kerouac idea of "imagine it better and move on," in terms of a creative output, but I'm also a little too neurotic to just learn from my mistakes and not revisit the piece itself. Currently I've begun radically restructuring a lot of drafts of compositions that never made the light of day, like the septet version of "Devil Horn Man" as well as "Smiling, Laughing and Taking Pictures," among others. There are several more fragments and fallacies from my early years that I've been wanting to re-compose, in a sense, almost as though I'm my own arranger. But I realize that after a point that can make you stagnant, and can be an easy way out rather than challenging yourself for new ideas...if anybody has any thoughts about this, I'd love to hear them.