Music

Not the stuff you listen to, the stuff you make.

I love my guitars. I like playing them, I like to sing with them. My 12-string (my first) helped me get through some bad times, and she's sitting in a stand next to my 6-string. I've got a damn bookshelf of music- books I bought, pages I copied from library books, stuff printed from websites- and I still haven't managed to try a lot of it. What I'm thinking of now, however, is something else about music.

I can sing fairly well. In some styles. But some of my favorite songs I just don't have the range for. Dan Fogelberg, for example, Leader of the Band and In Love With You; two of my favorites, but I just can't sing them very well, and it frustrates the hell out of me. Same for a lot of other pieces. I used to play a lot at open-mike nights at a couple of bars in town, and I had to leave some songs I could play well out of performing because I just couldn't sing them well. Very frustrating.

I can do a lot of others; I can sing Gordon Lightfoot's stuff pretty well, and he's got a lot of songs I like. There's a lot of traditional and folk stuff from Ireland and Scotland and England I can do pretty well with. It just causes a great deal of heartburn at times that I cannot hit the notes for some stuff.

'Course, I can't play as much as I used to(thank you, arthritis), which sucks. Oh well, those instruments are still here, still standing in wait for the time that I can work with them. I do need to get some new strings, which means I need to make an order to Webstrings; their phosphor bronze strings sound as good as anything else I've tried, and the prices are good.

If I can start making the time, I'm going to start playing more, see if pushing it a bit will at least be tolerated by the troublesome joints. I really miss the times I got lost in practicing.