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Sooj

One more trip to #Fairyland

I realized yesterday morning that I’ve known my beloved friend Catherynne M. Valente for ten years.

March 1st marked the release of the fifth and final novel in her Fairyland book series, The Girl Who Raced Fairyland All the Way Home.

Some of you may know that I recorded an album inspired by the first book, and that I was the audiobook narrator for the second book.

Some of you also know that for a while there I was able to join forces with Cat on her book tours, and that we’ve done many a song-and-story roadshow together.

I wasn’t able to join her for this book tour, so I made a “Happy Bookday” video as quickly as I could.  Watch it below, and visit Cat’s website to see if she’s coming to a bookstore near you!  If you’re not familiar with the books at all, I encourage you to make them a part of your life.  Do not wait!  Here is book one on Amazon, and here is the music that I created to go along with it.

#theGreenAlbum website officially launches today!

#theGreenAlbum is a project I’m very proud to be part of.

Fourteen songwriters and bands are releasing new music in support of The Rainforest Trust this spring, and The Green Album is where you’ll find it all.

Our intrepid web wranglers have just launched the project’s official website!  Go check it out!

 

Truth Beyond Paradox

Those of you who’ve ever played Mage: the Ascension will get a particular kick out of this.

Onyx Path Publishing released a new short fiction anthology this week.  It includes the first published story that Ryan James Loyd and I have written together!  You can get the ebook version, the book-book version, or BOTH for a great price!  Click here.

Our editor Satyros Phil Brucato has been a heArt brother of mine for more than a decade.  He knows his stuff, and I’m so grateful that he chose to include our story- it’s put us in some truly brilliant company.  Phil told us that he wanted “stories about awesome people like us, doing magickal sh!t out in the world.”  He encouraged Ryan and me, pushed us just the right amount. and here we are at the finish line with the rest of the gang.  You gotta check this out.

 

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Here’s the super sexy description of the book from the web store:

Passion. Loss. Laughter. Fear.

Truth is a paradox, especially when magick is involved. To get beyond illusions of reality, then, a person must reach beyond what we think is possible and find what’s really there.

Set in the award-winning world of Mage: The Ascension, the 17 tales featured in this collection span from the bizarre humor of “The Theogenesis Gimmick” to the aching loss of “Life,” the tangled passions of “Toxic” love, and the grim assurance that “Nothing Important Happened Today.”

Hope, betrayal, fury, lust, even the lack of feeling for another’s pain – it’s all part of a realm where magick is real, and reality is magickal.

Featuring all-new stories by:

Seanan McGuire
J.F. High
Emily Jones
S.J. Tucker & Ryan Loyd
Balogun Ojetade
Antonios Rave-N Galatis
Scott Havens
Kris Millering
Bill Bridges
Travis Legge
Stephen Michael DiPesa
Shawn Connolly
Luna Lindsey
Tina Shelton
R.S. Udell
Janine A. Southard
Sandra Damiana Buskirk

Another Snow Moon Entirely

My friend Leslie Hudson, a fellow songwriter based in Hamilton, ON has a Snow Moon song of her own, and it is absolutely lovely, as is she!

Happy Birthday to Me, Happy Moon Song for You!

Trees & Moons & Birthdays

Tomorrow is my birthday!  Let’s do this, 36!

I’m working on a mix of a new song right now that I’m hoping to upload to my music page tomorrow!  It’ll be a special birthday release, and I’m going to make it available for exactly one month.  The song is called “Snow Moon”, and it’s a love song to the full moon in the month of February, which will be happening – you guessed it – tomorrow!  I get a full moon for my birthday, which means YOU get a new song! I’ll update the blog tomorrow with the link to get that new, very limited release, so watch this space!

 

The weirdest thing happened a week ago.  My mother’s giant read oak tree, whose canopy absolutely covered her back yard and has done so since well before I was born, pivoted into a heretofore unknown hole beneath its roots, and very gracefully fell into the yard.  This was the biggest tree I’d ever seen for about half my life, and it’s at least 175 years old, according to our arborist friend who came to see it to tell us what he could.  I was very glad I’d already planned to come and visit my mother for the weekend.  We’ve been keeping a sort of vigil together, she and I, as the tree gets visits from arborists and insurance adjusters.  The tree hit her lawnmower shed and left some gouges in the yard where it landed, but miraculously it did not hit anything else- not the fence, not the dogs, not the house.  It occurred to me when I saw this with my own eyes that, perhaps when you live for so long and grow to be so tall, you have lots of time to plan the way that you’ll fall.

…Yeah, the song pretty much writes itself.  So I’m likely to write an ode to this tallest friend of my childhood pretty soon.  There’s no stopping it, really.  Here’s a shot I posted on Instagram.  You can kind of get a sense of the size of this oak, but it still doesn’t do it justice.  I want to thank everybody who’s sent condolences since I posted this image and told a bit of the tree’s story on social media.  It really has been like losing a friend.  I believe in dryads.  This tree definitely had a spirit all its own.  I will miss it very much.  I will miss its shade and its presence.

 

My tallest friend laid low ?

A photo posted by S. J. Tucker Music (@sjtuckermusic) on

TinyDesk contest update and other awesomeness

It’s been a pretty wild week, but maybe that’s appropriate for the days leading up to my birthday. 🙂 I’ve got lots to share with you; I’ll start with these little bits of news.

  1. I got an EMAIL from NPR a couple of days ago, and I’m STILL grinning about it!  No big deal yet, but they’ve approved my submission for the TinyDesk Contest, and they’ve posted my entry video!  Whatever else happens, my smiling face is embedded for a little while on a web page that has the NPR Music logo on it, and I’m tickled pink.  Click that link to see my video and hear my new little song, “Dragon in my Pocket”.  Don’t stop there, either! This contest is HUGE, and NPR is posting all of the qualifying entry videos!  Gobs and gobs of amazing songwriters and performers are coming together for this!  Check ’em out!

  2. I’m performing at the SWUU conference in Lawton, Oklahoma next weekend, and the organizers just decided to open up my Friday night concert to women (that means anyone who identifies as a woman) who may not be attending the full conference!  If this describes you, and you want to be there, I hope that you can come! Here’s the tickets page.

  3. In my time off the road, I love to stay active with my flow arts and fire spinning practice, yoga, and fusion belly dance. One of my favorite dancers and dance teachers made an absolutely beautiful and encouraging blog post this week, and I just have to share it here. “I care that you come to the dance sincerely, foster it as best as you can, and support others,” says the lovely Tempest. “I dance because I’m interested and invested in the beautiful unknown that happens in the space between my own dance connection and yours – and the world of discovery within and beyond that space, manifested through culture, music, spirit, and understanding.”  This is the kind of thing that brings me back to my practice on days when I’m fighting the blues just to get out of bed, let alone really move.  Read the rest of Tempest’s blog post here.

New Video: Another Little Bird just posted!

Thanks again to Sabrael and Meg of Dork & Damsel Productions!  They shot and created the original “Little Bird” music video as well as this one.  This is an alternate version with footage in it that hasn’t been released until now- including more birds birding around, which just tickles me!  I hope this makes your day the way that it’s made mine!

Get the song here!

February Update: Under the Snow Moon

Happy February, everyone!  I hope your 2016 is off to a lovely start!

My year has been very full so far, but I think I’m managing to find a good balance between work and play.  Getting the tour schedule nailed down is as tricky as it’s always been.  Deep breaths and hot baths and other good stuff are helping me not to get frustrated.  I do have plenty of things already nailed down for this year!  You’re welcome to go and peruse the tour schedule page to see where I’m headed.

This month, I get to perform at the Southwest Women’s UU Conference in Oklahoma!  I’ve never worked with these inspiring ladies before now, but I’m really looking forward to it.  I’ll be giving concerts and teaching my Music & Magick workshop, as well as selling CDs and goodies in the vendor hall.  emma’s revolution are also on the bill for the conference!  Pat and Sandy are amazing people, and I’m stoked to share a stage with them again- we met at the Amazon Music Festival in northwest Arkansas a couple of years ago.  Check out their music here!

Speaking of the Amazon Music Festival, I’m happy to announce that I’ll be returning to that event again this year, April 22-23!  More info here.

Other scheduled festival appearances for the coming spring include Phoenix Phyre Festival down in Florida with Mama Gina, and the big one: Caldera Pagan Music Festival in Georgia on Memorial Day weekend!  Everyone’s talking about this event, which premieres this year, and is bringing performers together from at least three continents!  Almost everybody on the bill is a good friend of mine, and I’m so honored to be one of the headliners.  I hope you can join me there.  We’re gonna make history!

Also at CalderaFest, a whole bunch of my colleagues and I will celebrate a very special CD release.  Spearheaded by Danny and Rebecca of Tuatha Dea, the project is called The Green Album.  It’s a compilation CD full of brand-new tunes by witchy & earth-conscious musicians from all over the world, most of whom all know each other from the pagan festival circuit. We’ll be giving a special Green Album concert together at CalderaFest, and that’ll be the CD release party!  After that, the album will be available at all of our individual concerts, wherever in the world we play, as well as up for download.  If you’re excited by this and you want to “play along” with our progress, definitely visit and Like The Green Album page on Facebook.  There’s never been a project quite like this one.  I can’t share the music with you yet, but I can tell you that Ginger Doss, Wendy Rule, Tuatha Dea, Damh the Bard, Celia, Spiral Dance, Spiral Rhythm, myself and all the others are really bringing our A-game to this thing!  Perhaps the best part is that it’s not just about the music- we’ll be donating a percentage of EVERY album sale and download to The Rainforest Trust to help in their conservation efforts all over the world.  Christina, our Rainforest Trust contact, adores the project and has been super proactive and transparent to work with so far.  I’m excited to see where this album goes once we have it ready.  I hope you’ll get excited, too!

I’ve been at home for most of the winter, laying the groundwork for new recordings and albums to come.  My song-a-week group made it to one full year of writing new songs, and now we’re continuing with bi-weekly song prompts, to try to give everyone a bit of a break and a chance to learn all these new things we’ve written over the past year!  I entered NPR’s TinyDesk Contest again also, with a new song and a new YouTube video!  If you want to watch that video, hear that new song, and subscribe to my channel, go here!

Once I got my recording for The Green Album squared away early this month, I hosted my Tricky Pixie bandmates for a planning and recording retreat at my little studio in Arkansas.  Yes, it’s true: we’re FINALLY getting to work on recording our second CD!  I promise to keep you all posted, there.  We’ve got a long road ahead of us this time, partly because we’ve each got a whole list of songs we’d like to record together!  We’ve no notion of a release date at this time, but I can tell you that, once it’s ready, this one’s gonna be really, really good.

Speaking of my bandmates, they’re both on Patreon, creating new, exclusive music regularly!  You should be their patron!

Alec on Patreon

Betsy on Patreon

I myself have something a little less fancy than Patreon, which you’re all welcome to come and be part of if it suits you.  Via Paypal’s very simple recurring subscription service, I send out one new, exclusive mp3 per month to my subscribers!  You may sign up for a monthly subscription, or get $20 off for a yearly subscription.  Check that out here if you like.

One of my most recent new songs is a tribute to February’s full moon, called the Snow Moon.  Since said moon is happening on my birthday this year, I’m going to try to get that song recorded and posted for download in the next seven days!  I’ll announce that release on social media as soon as I pull it off, hopefully on my birthday: February 22nd, one week from today, the date of the full Snow Moon.

Thanks for reading and for being part of the music and the magic!  It wouldn’t be nearly as nifty without you here.

Creative Spotlights Article

Here is a thing that I absolutely must share with y’all today.  I’ve been included in a brilliant article over on the Creative Spotlights website, as well as in their book, In the Spotlight: Over 100 Voices in Music. This is the first time that anyone’s ever referred to me as a “key music industry player”!  I’m pretty well over the moon about it. 🙂

The article includes the wise words of several of my contemporaries from all different corners of the music biz, including Grammy winner Fred Lipsius who co-founded Blood Sweat & Tears, and fascinating NYC busker Samantha Echo.  I’m honored all the way down to my striped-socked toes right now.

Read the article here!

 

Bonus: here’s an Instagram peek into the studio stuff that I’ve been working on with my Tricky Pixie bandmates these past several days!  We’re laying down the baby steps for album #2!

 

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