Baker St: The Spring of Collaborations

    Baker St, my band, is having a show today, March 5th at Vox Pop Cafe in Brooklyn. We are playing with Tony Gong, a folk musician. It should be fun. I rearranged some songs to be appropriate for a cafe and am even doing a short acoustic set by myself. It's been a while since I've done that, so I'm looking forward to it.

    I am also in the process of putting together a show with two other Columbia bands at Fat Baby on the Lower East Side. We're going to rehearse together so that we can incorporate other bands' members into some songs in each set, and at the end we'll do one giant song with everybody. It should be pretty sweet. I'm stoked. At first I tried to get five bands together, but that epically failed. No one responded to my emails, and then the guy who deals with booking was frustrated. Then we played Columbia's Battle of the Bands, where we met many other Columbia bands. We really liked two of them (The Tendencies and Flink) and asked them to play this show with us.

    So it seems like the spring of collaborations. With collaboration come cross-promotion, and any promotion is good, so this seems to be an excellent plan. We've also found a few potential people to add to the band...guitarists/singers/pianists. I don't like the world of super professional musicians, but I do love this world that I am in. People without record deals, without big followings. Just people who love to produce something outside of themselves as a means of expression. They do it for fun as they struggle to meet minimum requirements at bar gigs, and scrape by with their meager, minimum wage jobs. This is the time to try to be musicians, artists, playwrights, and actors! There's always time to go become a doctor/lawyer/banker/professor. But you cannot always do what we are doing now. That's the beauty of being young and having this time of freedom after college.

    In the world of my actual jobs, I have to figure out how to make a version of Hamlet for 2nd graders. I asked my class what plays they wanted to work on this year, and it ended with twenty 8 year-olds chanting "HAM-LET, HAM-LET!" So, this is going to be interesting. If anyone reads this* and has any suggestions, please comment below!

    So things are getting pretty exciting. I need to get going on some things for the band like getting our CDs printed, booking more shows for April and May, etc. I also really need to start studying for the LSAT. I need to take it so I can apply and potentially be back in school in the fall of 2011. This is necessary as preparation for my future, which I've never been good at. I'm good at getting things done that need to be done for the next day, but not the next year, two years, or decade. I get overwhelmed too easily. But this is not a big deal. It's just a test. I'll take it, and decide what to do when the time comes for applications. I want to have to option of applying this fall. I have so much I could be doing, but I'm still a lazy slob. I need to get out of that mode.

    In any case, the show tomorrow should be fun, with a whole new audience (provided BY the venue, as in, we didn't have to promote ourselves!). Yay for a step up in the world!

*I do understand that no one reads this. I am not that much of a delusional egomaniac.