Older Items »
« Newer Items

Sooj

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!

 

New Video Posted, Tiny Desk Contest entry!

justEnteredtdcc_socialFB_1200x630px

VIVA TINY DESK! Thank you all so much for bringing the contest back for another year! So far, it’s been my favorite motivator for getting an occasional new video posted. 😀 I write and perform primarily with voice and guitar, but I’m really fond of this new a cappella number. Hope you like it, too!

I said yes to a really intimidating challenge in early February of 2015: I agreed to be part of a group of songwriters who’d each write a new song each week for 52 weeks, using a random prompt. This very week, we finished our 52nd prompt. I had NO IDEA I could pull off anything like this, but it’s amazing what this challenge has done for my creative output- and fearlessness. I can’t recommend this kind of thing enough to other creative folks.
This song is one of my favorites of the 52 new ones that I wrote as part of my songwriting group. The lyric prompt for that week was “in my pocket”…which immediately became DRAGON in my pocket for me and my faboo/nerdy imagination.
(Apologies for all the cuts – I had to edit around a whole lot of wind noise. Apparently the wind quite liked what I was doing here, because for a while it seemed to pick up every time I opened my mouth to keep singing. There’s still a little bit of it in the vid, and I apologize for that, too. At least the wind is an active listener?)

Read more…

Raise Your Glass. Turn it up.

Raise a glass of starstuff and chase your living dream.
May it always be that we are more than what we seem,
living by example, until our separate brilliance
can rise-
that wild example, those mismatched eyes.

I’m heartbroken that David Bowie has died. He showed so many of us that it was a Good Thing to be brilliant and creative and freaky and bisexual and Fucking Strange. I’m just one little blip of light in the sea of raised lighters today, but I’m holding my own as high as my arm will allow.

I will grieve, and then I will continue to sing loud and to be weird and to Not Apologize for it, because when I was at my most young and most lost, someone dear to me made me a Bowie mix-tape, and I listened, and the stars came out again, and I have not lost them since.

Raise your glass. Blast “Ziggy Stardust” if it helps. Or Outside, or “Wild-eyed Boy from Freecloud”, or Earthling, or or or. Write your own. Put on glitter eyeliner today (every damn day) if you want. I will be right there with you.

Here is Buzzfeed’s article on this master’s last, entirely orchestrated release and accompanying videos- both of those are terrifying, necessary, and profound.

Read more…

And a Playlist in a Pear Tree!

AT LAST, I’ve edited and uploaded the full Stolen Season digital release concert for YouTube: ten songs, all performed and filmed live in my studio, plus one filmed live in Betsy’s cello studio! Watch and enjoy, and happy 2016, everyone!

#StolenSeason Temptress video is up!

I’ve got three more #StolenSeason videos to edit and upload before the new year. Wish me luck! I hope this little house-concert-style project has been worth the wait for you all.

Listen

Listen:

someone who wants something from you is complimenting your looks, your mind, or your initiative.

Say thank you, but consider keeping your cards close until you find out what they’re after. Sometimes you can tell what they want. A reaction. A promotion. A compliment in kind. A weakness. More than you care to give. Sometimes you can tell that they want something from you in return for what they say. Sometimes it’s all right. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes they know it. Sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes you can tell. It will get easier with practice.

Try.

Listen:

someone who truly cares about you is saying “I love you,” or “you look great,” or “you make me so proud,” or “thank you for coming.”

Say thank you, and try to believe them. These are the people who mean it, and who want nothing in return for their words of affirmation. I know that it’s hard to believe them when you’re feeling awful, or your heart is broken, or you’re so accustomed to receiving compliments from people who give them to you in order to further an agenda. But try.

Try.

Some of us will see people we only see once a year this holiday season. Some of us will see people we haven’t seen in ages. It will be awkward. It could be painful. It could be the start of moments which will become joyful memories in the coming months.

Grab hold of those shining moments, and let the rest fall away.

If you can.

If you cannot let it fall away right now, remember to breathe.

I don’t know why it’s so much easier for me to remember the words and the people that hurt me, than it is to remember the kind, sometimes life-changing things people have said to me. I don’t know why I have to fight to remember those things and fight to forget the others.

But my wish for you this time of year, this year, this moment, is that it will be easier for you to remember the words and the people who love you, who say wonderful things that you can barely believe, that they really mean, because they care about you. Take care. Be well. You have my support, in lyrical form, whenever you can access it, whenever you like. It’s not much, but I mean every word. Thank you.

New Song, Free Downloads, Achievement Unlocked

Here’s my spooky, goth industrial new seasonal song about Krampus! You may grab it for free, or for the price of your choosing.  This music style isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but believe it or not, it’s one of my favorite influences.  I like letting this part of my creativity out of the box from time to time.

I’ve wanted to write a Krampus carol for ages, folklore nerd that I am.  Achievement unlocked. 😉  Lyrics and inspiration and spookiness here.

For the other side of the sonic coin, here’s my acoustic Winter Solstice tune, which is also available for free or for whatever you’d like to pay.  The meaning of the lyrics is heartfelt.  Whomever and wherever you are this season, I wish you safe and sound.

Reminder: One! More! Show!

I’ll be singing for free at Conway Arkansas’ Pagan Pride Day celebration this Saturday! It’s my last concert for 2015, and the weather forecast looks mighty fine.  The event runs from 2-8pm in Laurel Park, and absolutely everyone is welcome.  There will be vendors, concerts, workshops, a raffle, and more!

My recording studio just got a remodel of sorts!  Since its awakening in late 2011, The Pixiehouse has had no insulation, and so it was a fair weather workspace at best.  That didn’t stop me from suffering chilly winter temps and sweltering summer temps alike in order to Get Shtuff Done, but I won’t have to do that anymore.  My partner and I worked together over last week to install insulation in the walls and ceiling, and the comfort level of my beautiful little space has already increased in so many ways!  I’m still putting its aesthetic aspects back together, but it’s functional again….and LOTS warmer!  If I have it in me, I’ll film and post a new video tour of the space for YouTube soon.

Today’s PPD Concert Rescheduled for November 14!

Today was to be Conway (Arkansas) Pagan Pride Day’s 2nd annual event, but the organizers have wisely chosen to reschedule the day’s festivities for November 14th. As I wasn’t looking forward to getting washed away, I’m 100% ok with this. 🙂 Sheldon and the other event wranglers have been extremely accommodating and kind to me ever since they first got in touch with me about performing at the first Conway Pagan Pride Day, which was last fall. I’m very proud to be part of what they’re doing, and I’m glad they found a way to keep from getting rained out entirely!

Here’s the info on the event as it currently stands.

Since I don’t have an event today, I’m enjoying the unexpected downtime by getting a little work done, walking around in the quiet misty morning, and making plans to visit old friends.  My bobtail cat Gawain took a walk with me earlier, and so did my camera. 🙂

 

 

« Newer Items
Older Items »