I’ve been hanging out with a lot of creative people lately. I’ve been seeing a lot of inspiration. It’s had an effect on my state of mind and I think I like it.

It’s been a long while since I have had to decide between many different passionate creative pursuits in my free time. Although this may be detrimental to my songwriting, it’s been quite productive for documentary proposals, prose writing and painting ideas. I’ve got so many things running across my mind it seems I don’t have enough time to keep them all under wraps.

In the chaos of the ideas in my mind, I’ve rediscovered the creative ambition inside of me and I feel like I’m back on the right path. So now I guess what I have to do is redistribute time and energy in order to make these thoughts materialize, to make them tangible things.

I went to dinner with a friend today in Nolita. She lives in Long Island City and comes downtown sometimes to dine in my neighborhood. I took her to a cozy little restaurant with good food and bad service and we had a ball. We dined and chatted and as we were leaving she told me that she thinks of me as her perfect city girl. I know a lot of restaurants—not all of course, not yet at least—and I always manage to take her somewhere she’s not been before.

What’s funny about that is that she seems to me to be the perfect city girl. Perfectly stylish and chic, unique and intelligent, interesting but not trying to hard. It’s funny how you can be friends with someone for the same reasons but by different means.

She’s also a musical inspiration. She’s learning to spin records and took on an apprenticeship with a well-known DJ. She’s taking the plunge into the world of late nightclub and bar scenes. On the flip side, I to her am the musician, with my guitar and homemade songs. I am the one that plays, and she to I. We are each other’s flip sides in a way. It’s fun to be something to someone, and they to you, but in such different ways.  

There are so many complexities in life sometimes you forget to look at how simple things can be. I was at Slow Food Nation in San Francisco over the weekend and I believe it changed my life.

It’s not often that you get to talk to so many people who are so passionate and kind. Everyone that I spoke with was a specialist in whichever food they were purveying or serving, the countries most knowledgeable pickle maker, the woman who makes the best hand-made ice cream, the perfect cup of espresso made by the country’s best barista, the coffee bean farmer from Columbia who rose from a small family farm to a small family farm ranked among the best in the world.

For some reason the person that touched me the most was a melon farmer from California. I was chatting with him about picking good produce and he explained to me how to pick the best melons at the market. When he got to talking about watermelons he explained that tapping them was a good indication of ripeness but just like playing a musical instrument it takes a long time to figure out what they should sound like. He told me he must have tapped a couple million before he figured it out.

He said your ear has to adjust, you have to learn what the perfect ping sounds like. And you could tell by the sound of his voice that he tried his hardest two million times until he got it right, and that now the sound of a perfectly ripe melon is music to his ears.

When I was a kid we used to catch fireflies all summer long. It was a never-ending source of entertainment and wonder. When you finally catch one—those little buggers are difficult to capture—you first feel their soft bodies crawling around in your hands. Then they light up. And you can see it through the soft skin between your fingers; their little yellow glow peaks through just like it does through the nighttime air.

This weekend I went home to catch some fireflies, well, not just for the fireflies but to relax and enjoy the quiet. I spent a night in my backyard with a glass chasing around the few sparklers that were still out. I couldn’t do it, I wasn’t quick enough or smart enough to predict where they were going and I didn’t catch a single one.

When I got back to the city on Sunday night I dropped my stuff off at my apartment and went out to meet some friends and as I was about to cross Bowery on 5^th street a little flash caught my eye. Sure enough it was a firefly, lost in Manhattan. This time I caught it easily, and when I opened my hand it just sat there and I reminded it that there were much better places to show off it’s glow then the East Village and let it crawl onto a nearby light post.

“So you’re running round the parking lot
til every lightning bug is caught
Punching some pinholes
In the lid of a jar
While we wait in the car”

http://www.aimeemann.com

At the moment New York City is a sauna. People are sweating on the streets and giving into the temptation to stay anywhere and everywhere there is air-conditioning. It is so hot that everyone — even the people with the most mundane jobs – who works in an establishment with central air is elated to go to work in the morning, or the afternoon, or late at night.

After my regular work day was over I came back to my much milder – but still not cool – apartment and decided to write music instead of going out into the sweltering evening to meet up with friends so they could watch beads of sweat drip of my forehead.

In this state the city is a constant buzz, a hum, a whir of fans and cooling units that constantly whir and click and thump along. They add an entirely new track to the song of the city that hums along all year round. The pace of the city slows when it heats up, the colors brighten, clothes get smaller, and people’s faces start to exhibit that summer flush. It becomes ok for women to walk down the street in bikini tops and not alarming to see a shirtless man – let me take that back, it’s always alarming, now it just makes more sense than in January.

The homeless people have a ball when the city heats up. The fountains and the playgrounds in the park are awash with children. Doggie pools are dragged into the dog runs and the barking is multiplied many times over by the furry friends who meet there with their owners.

The city’s energy speeds up and slows down at the same time. People come out in mass, but their gate slows and runs in time with the slow humming of their air conditioning units. The rhythm of summer is upon us and I spent the evening holed up alone in my apartment writing a song about it.

And the wall that says summer like no other…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/weissfoto/2476191577/

I have a tendency to read multiple books at once. Right now I am in the process of reading five books. Two are collections of short stories, two are non-fiction and one is a giant of a Russian love story.

I think just as I have music in my blood I have words too. I come from a long line of word loving people. It’s impossible to me to not be reading something all the time. Since moving to New York I’ve gained a reading place that I’d never had before. The subway.

My subway book right now is called River Teeth. It is a collection of stories and writings by one of my favorite authors, David James Duncan. He is the author of The River Why, an epic and heartwarming tale about fly-fishing in the northwest.

On Friday during my morning commute I opened River Teeth to the next story in line and found myself at “My One Conversation with Colin Walcott”. It is a tale of a night of magical music making and impossible bonds formed with little conversation and the help of the mystical beauty of the Oregon coast.

The story is knowingly self-conscious and awe filled and as Duncan states it is about something inexplicable as most things that are worth explaining are. It is a story about music and how it can bring people together, create communities out of crowds of strangers and cause magical things to happen.

            “Music is the food whose peculiarity it is to enter us through the ears.

             Music is an inexpressible from outside us touching an inexpressible 

            within, causing the frenetic persona that normally wedges itself between

            outside and inside, creating twoness, to vanish.”

For a man of words he does a beautiful job of describing his inability to actually convey the beauty of what he experienced. His story is lyrical and musical and worth the small amount you’d pay for the book to share the experience with the author.

It was the first written piece that ever made me want to sing. Now that is beautiful prose, soundless but full of vibrations.

David James Duncan - http://books.google.com/books?as_auth=David+James+Duncan&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title&cad=author-navigational&hl=en

Spring in New York is a playground for adults. This past weekend I reverted to childhood and was happy about my state of mind. A group of friends and I decided, however crazy of an idea it was, to walk the length of Manhattan, from the bridge to the Bronx to Battery Park.

We took Broadway. We walked from Inwood through Washington Heights to Harlem, through Columbia University to the Upper West Side, through midtown, Columbus circle, Times Square, by Macy’s, the Flatiorn building, through Union Square, the East Village, Soho, and China Town then dragged our tired feet across Wall Street and the Financial District and ran around the Bowling Green before crashing on Benches to watch the sun sink over the statue of liberty.

In case you were wondering it’s about 14 miles.

Though there is nothing particularly exciting to tell the day was perfect. Sunshine, mid 70’s, marshmallow clouds, friendly people and the sounds of the streets are the blocks of memory. It was a day of restful travel and thought. Seeing the city at length makes you think about it differently.

Somehow now, after experiencing the actual size of this place it feels more alive and more like home. It’s a gentle giant, really, and doesn’t mind revealing it’s secret soft side. You just have to look for it.  

I feel like I have an internal rhythm of four over four. I want to write a waltz but it’s proving to be difficult because my internal clock keeps ticking to the wrong beat. Or the right beat? Maybe I’m trying to write to the wrong beat and my inside pendulum is the one who’s got it right.

Lately I’ve been realizing that I need to expand my rhythm and chord vocabulary so I’ve been going through old notes and scale exercises to find new sounds. It is a great practice to go back over all of that information (a lot of which I’d forgotten) and it’s helping (I think) with the few new songs that I am working on. They sound a little different. More mature, perhaps, but mostly just different.

Also, I have a feeling that because of this internal clock issue they currently sound a little forced. My pendulum is swinging one note longer than each measure of my song and it’s causing me to be a little stiff. Though the songs are new and with practice I’m sure they will become comfortable, for now I’m struggling with my inner nature. Trying to sway to the beat of a waltz on the outside while fingerpicking my pentatonic scales and keeping the wrong time on the inside.

It’s all quite confusing, I know. But if you think that is bad you should try being inside my head with all this ruckus.

I just got back from a short but lovely trip to Los Angeles. In the midst of the work that I had to do I managed to see quite a few of the people on my, “must visit” list. In seeing those people I managed to drive a few hundred miles around the Los Angeles area (shame on my gas consumption) in the span of five days.

During my time in the car, most of which was spent alone, I listened to KCRW (www.kcrw.com). KCRW is probably the best radio station I’ve ever encountered and my five LA days made me realize how much I missed it. I can listen to it on my computer yes, but the only thing that I miss about driving in LA is listening to that radio station’s music shows and being constantly bombarded with good music, new music, interesting music, provocative music.

There is something about driving and listening that can’t be emulated by sitting in front of a computer and listening. Your mind is free to wipe out all other thoughts and focus on the road in front of you and the sound in your ears. Although, I am ultimately in love with the idea of not driving, that mindless pursuit of interesting sounds is something that can’t be had in any other situation.

So I say to you, if you live in Los Angeles, listen to KCRW. You have no idea what a gem you have until you move away from it and miss it like I do.

Saturday I went to an open mic at 2:30 in the afternoon. The time was the least of the strange occurrences of the day. There were numerous great performers, a few not so great performers, and many, many entertaining acts. There were songs about Super 8 Motels, mothers believing their sons not to be crazy (my personal favorite) and one precious theme song written for an as-of-yet not produced zombie musical.

Needless-to-say I felt my performance was entirely normal and completely uneventful in comparison. Except for the fact that now I have broken the ice. That, I suppose is eventful for me, though the people there might not have known it (barring my three superbly wonderful supporters) I knew it for sure, and that made me very nervous.

I’ve not been nervous about performing since my high school talent show sophomore year (or was it junior year?) when I performed in front of a large group for the first time. I was nervous this past Saturday because I am terrified of the fact that I am starting over. This new city makes me look at my music in a whole new light, it’s a whole different ballgame and I’m not sure how to play.