Explosion

Yesterday morning, I was messing around with my pedal board and out of nowhere got an idea for a song. In a few hours, it was finished. After listening to it on repeat several times (it's play count at iTunes since yesterday is 18), I opened up a few more GarageBand projects, and ideas just started pouring out. This isn't too unusual, except for the last year or so of my life. My musical experience moved beyond the ambient, indie, folky stuff I had listened to for years, and an explosion happened. I discovered Krautrock. I discovered shoegaze. I discovered psychedelic, free jazz, noise rock, noise pop, post-rock, avant-pop, post-punk, dub reggae, etc., etc. My palette of influences jumped from a major influence list of about five (Radiohead, Bob Dylan, Bon Iver, Wilco, Fleet Foxes) to about thirty (Radiohead, Bob Dylan, Bon Iver, Wilco, Fleet Foxes, Deerhunter, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Grizzly Bear, Charles Mingus, the Flaming Lips, Dirty Projectors, early Pink Floyd, Neutral Milk Hotel, Explosions in the Sky, Can, Scientist, Animal Collective, etc., etc.). And on top of that, I had started expanding my effects pedals, expanding my sonic palette as well. Ideas just leaked out of me. So much was coming out of me, and it was so different, that I felt completely lost. In twelve months, I wrote maybe four songs I was happy with, and I had a thousand other pieces of ideas that would never fit together.
And now, I think the clouds are starting to clear. In the past three weeks, I've had several ideas come together that I am really happy with. Time will tell if the ideas will flesh out like yesterday's song did, but if they don't something else will. That's one of the things I love about music. It always changes. There are songs I wrote four years ago that I'm putting to record now, and they're almost unrecognizable, and I like that.

Wintertime

You know what I hate the most about snow? People complaining about the snow. Snow itself I'm pretty keen on. I don't even mind the poor driving conditions that much. Sure, I may be constantly paranoid of being hit by all the cars, but I can deal with it.
This weekend was essentially a string of four snow days. Friday night, Michelle and I took a late night excursion into the blustery outside, jumping off of swing sets into the thick snow, surfing down icy slides, making snow angels (her, not me), scaling giant parking lot plow mountains, and going to Kroger in the middle of the night to warm up/buy ice cream and mozzarella sticks. Saturday was the same, but more. The city declared it a snow emergency, and we walked down to Big Lots to buy a shovel, taking our time as we did. We stopped on a bunch under an awning and watched the snow come down in droves being chased by snow plow after snow plow, then we went home and watched How I Met Your Mother (in my opinion, the most well-written sitcom on television) and had soup. Sunday was Sunday, and it was good. Then yesterday, South Bend Schools had its second snow day of the year, so Michelle got to stay home, and we had another nice, cozy snow day. Sometimes, when people are cooped up like this for such a long time, they get annoyed with whoever it is their cooped up with. For me, it makes me realize all over again just how killer awesome my wife is.
I'm very much looking forward to the rest of my life.