Everything Old Is New Again

A couple of years ago, I "retired" from musical performance:~ fed up with the unreliability of gigs, venues, sound engineers, "organisers" &, in some cases, my fellow performers. I never gave up on music itself though & in those couple of years, recorded (IMHO) some pretty good guitar work for other people's projects & certainly never lost interest in what I considered to be good music... even though I wasn't really producing any myself ~ my guitars rested in their cases &, in one or two cases, went a bit mouldy... as did my playing skills

But I acquired a few esoteric instruments during this exile (electric kazoo, Irish bouzouki, various things to hit with sticks or fists...) & recently bought a little hand-held digital recorder which allows me to record ambient sounds, with the vague idea of how all these things can come together with the backlog of music I've accumulated over the years of being a sideman or bandmember, but not a bandleader as such...so I have about twenty pieces I refer to as my 'Homeless Songs', which have had a few abortive attempts at realisation, but so far, no definition

Having fallen in recently with a collection of players both new & familiar, but encouraging overall, I've found myself willing to go through the trials of live performance & its rigmarole again. And it hasn't taken long for me to see that not much has changed. Live performance, at the semi-professional level at least, is a fragile thing ~ subject to change of date, venue, availability of players... & in the latest case, availability of the "organiser" himself, a week out from the agreed, albeit revised, date of play. All this is ranged against the Player's desire to play, whatever the conditions, wherever & whatever the venue at whatever the cost... Until the day comes when you either can't or won't pay it any more... as happened with me those couple of years ago

But, as yet, I remain largely unperturbed by the broken chain of events &, instead, have been enjoying the feeling of creativity one gets with empathetic players who place greater importance on the playing rather than the player. At present there is a core trio of two guitarists & a singer/keyboardist & we are developing an ear for how we play together & what kind of overall 'sound' is emerging. A couple of sessions with a bass playing friend have been encouraging, but unfortunately infrequent due to everyones reliance on daytime income &... in at least two cases (one of them mine), the vicious nature of late Winter cold & 'flu strains

Part of me wonders if I've grown beyond the accumulated grievance & anguish built up over twenty-odd years of playing at the not-quite-successful level & have achieved a Zen-kind of acceptance of the inevitable circumstances... while another part of me waits, watches & prepares for the day when I, once again, have my fill, spit my dummy, take my playthings & go home in a huff... or a minute & a huff

Somewhere at the back of all this is the part of me that wants to assemble a true 'solo' project in my glacially-growing digital "sketchpad" studio here at home. Confidence & capability have yet to be installed in sufficient levels for this to happen, but the Event Horizon is slowly contracting...

Always providing, of course, that some petty bulls#%t doesn't send me spiralling over the edge & result in me breaking expensive guitars across someones worthless brains... As long as I remember to grab the steel Resonator guitar first... The worst it would suffer would be a skull-shaped dent