A good weekend

I was thinking today about this last weekend.  I think it was a pretty good one. 

Friday night started out with an afternoon of setting up the sound system for Mary Gautier's (pronounced "Go-Shay") performance at St. Philips church, in downtown Durham.  After soundchecking Mary, I went outside to get one of the first burgers and order of fries off the grill via the "OnlyBurger" truck.  This was the first night they showed up for a St. Philips concert, so we were all looking forward to being able to get dinner at the "venue" as opposed to quickly driving off site to go get food.  I'm always on the lookout for a good burger.  Only Burger did not disappoint.  And I loved their fries too.  I "ran" sound for Mary's concert, which due to the simplicity of our set up at St. Philips, pretty much consisted of me making sure nothing was feeding back.  Thankfully DJ and Wes helped do sound check and test the system earlier, so that made my job easy and helped me not feel so stressed. 

The concert was wonderful and I really loved hearing Mary in person.  Although her songs are mostly about pretty depressing experiences and slices of life lived desparately, I found that her music lifted my spirits in much the same way that Red House Painters used to lift my spirits.  I'm not sure why listening to depressing music makes me feel so hopeful and full of joy.  Weird don't you think?  Anyway, I loved the show and only wish it could've been attended by more folks.

Saturday afternoon I found myself recording over at Tim Carless's place in Chapel Hill.  His style of working is so comfortable and laid back.  We worked on two songs of his and spent almost as much time hanging out and talking about various things.  I also love the fact that he records me with two mics!   He gets a great sound out of those two mics...I think we got some great tracks and I look forward to going back there tonight to record some more with him.

Sunday afternoon began with drum lessons and then I loaded up and quickly got myself downtown to rehearse with Wade for the evening service at Emmaus Way.  I was a little excited and nervous about playing at E-Way last night, mainly because I was going to attempt to accompany Wade on acoustic guitar.  I can count the times I've played guitar in public on one hand, so I wasn't sure if I was going to be up for the challenge.  Well, it went better than I thought, and I think Wade was pleased with my playing.  Hopefully this won't be the last time I play acoustic guitar at Emmaus Way.   

Playing with Wade at Emmaus Way has been so good for my chops...not only do I show up with a slightly different percussion set up everytime I play there, I've been fortunate to be able to work on my keyboard skills and now I can add guitar playing to the skills I've been able to develop and work on, due to Emmaus Way's encouragement and support. 

On Wednesday, you'll be able to download the Podcast of last night's service and you can hear my guitar playing on Over the Rhine's "Born" and a song by Jann Arden.  On every other song, I played percussion so you'll be able to hear that as well.

I felt good about the work I did this past weekend and hope I get more weekends like it in the future (oh and I took some photos too...that's one I took at Emmaus Way at the top of the post...).