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November News

We opened November with another great Sundaysong Singalong in Stacy Park. They keep getting better and the coolest people keep showing up.

Maile made a pot of Chai Tea and I passed out the first Singalong Songbook. This is the first draft of what I hope will eventually be a nicely bound book of dozens of songs with drawings in the margins. Listen to us sing on Soundcloud:

Sundaysong Singalong 11-2-14, Soundcloud player

I’m now on a perpetual search for songs about peace, gratitude, wisdom, friendship, higher love… Please email me if you have or hear any good singalong ideas for a Sunday morning.

As a musician trying to focus on what I do best and present it in the easiest, most authentic way, I’m frequently wondering about the seven music strategy questions in this survey:

Please click here and give me your perspective by taking
my 1-minute, 7-question, multiple-choice survey.

Thanks for any help with those question,
j

p.s. I went to Santa Fe for the week of Thanksgiving, took a ton of pictures and found a few artists I really liked.

Tunes for Turtles

Ralph and I played a set at the turtle pond this afternoon. It was a gorgeous, sunny, 85-degree day and all the turtles came out, along with a bunch of friends from around the UT-Austin campus. Carlo snapped a great set of reflections in the water, presented here, upside down.

We opened with one of my songs, I Can See You. Check out all the background noises: birds, planes, bells, trucks… the hum of the buildings and the buzz of the Friday afternoon exodus was our backdrop.

We closed with a cover of Cat Stevens’s If You Want To Sing Out Sing Out:

j and ralph w guitars, reflection in turtle pond

Jessica snapped a pic of me after everyone had gone and caught some cool colors in the sun flair.j w guitar infront of turtle pond

Sundaysong Singalong Goes To The Park

This morning’s singalong was a great official public debut – at Little Stacy Park, 11am-12pm – and the weather was ideal. So was the crowd of 20 or so friends and a strangers who sat on the stage or laid and played on the grass.

My old-school transparency projector did the job and we almost made it through all 20 of the songs I had printed on film before the hour was up. Kids played and made chalk-art while we sang.

Here is the end of the last song we sang together, the trippy Beatles ending on Revolver, Tomorrow Never Knows, followed by our closing bell.

I began and ended the set with a ring of my new singing bowl and a moment of silence. A few people mentioned they liked the ring of the bowl. I think it added a nice cue for entering and exiting the musical meditation.

Our singalong set (with a few we didn’t to crossed out):

  • One Love
  • Three Little Birds
  • With A Little Help From My Friends
  • Take Me Home, Country Roads
  • This Land Is Your Land
  • If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out (With intro and sing verse/chorus)
  • Mr. Tambourine Man
  • I Shall Be Released
  • Forever Young
  • Blowin In The Wind
  • Lean On Me
  • Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
  • Across The Universe
  • Let It Be
  • Amazing Grace
  • Rainbow Connection
  • This Land Is Your Land
  • I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking
  • Tomorrow Never Knows


  

Asleep In The Shade

Meditation takes many forms and for me sometimes the most effortless is losing myself, late at night, in the soupy, loopy delay of a slow ambient guitar progression. (Especially when I have new loop and delay pedals to play with.)

Adding simple layer upon echoey layer bakes a nice end-of-day dream. I use this to help slip past a long day out into the night sea.

For the gear-heads, here are the tricks I’ve got up my sleeve on this track, along with an Ebow.

loop and delay pedals