Last Big Show in Austin! Friday 5/18! With the Band!
Top: The Doras - Connie, Mariana, Heather
Bottom: Emily Shirley, Katie Lessley
126 - Bouldin Creek Food Park
Photo by Nancy Hellton
Friday was really fun. It was the first time that I played for a whole hour, and I only did one cover! MT and Nancy Hellton host the open mic on Wednesday nights at Kick Butt Coffee and they started having songwriters perform at Bouldin Creek Food Park last year before it got too cold, and just started up again for March. And yes, that is me playing outdoors in a tank top in MARCH. I am pretty sure it snowed in Iowa that day!
I got $6 in tips, which true to my word from the stage, “Support super-local, because I’m local and I’m gonna buy my dinner from these trailers right next to us with the tips!” I used them to buy dinner and since performers got half off on the food, I even had enough to give tips to the other performers!
It was super fun to do a show with all these gals because they are awesome, and especially since so often the open mics are dominated by guys. Who are great, but sometimes it still just feels a little lonely.
Katie Lessley, Daisy O’Connor, Me, Heidi Nadine & Kristin Astourian of The Lovely Brigade. - Photo by Nancy Hellton
Daisy & I both commented that we weren’t sure how to choose what food trailer to order from, so we decided to share! She ordered from the African food trailer and I ordered from the Thai one and it was all quite tasty! I particularly liked the mashed African yams.
Check out the Bouldin Creek Food Park Music Facebook page, they have lots of music coming up.
120 - Backroads and Whip In
Wednesday was an awesome day. Gilberto came to visit me! I took the bus to meet him at the airport, and when we walked out of baggage claim, the bus was right there again, so we just took the bus home. He came with me to Rubicon where we had a nice catching up with Dan and realized that it had been pretty close to exactly a year since the first time we came down to visit and check out the studio!
We went straight from Rubicon to Backroads. Kind of. The bus was late. Which meant we missed our second bus and had to wait for it to come by again. There was a girl at the bus stop with a black smudge on her forehead. I was debating telling her that it was there, but the placement seemed intentional so I kept quiet.
It turned out that Ana B was on the bus that we finally got, so G got to meet her and we got to chat a bit on the way up to Backroads. A bunch of people got on at the stop by a church, and they all had black smudges on their forehead and it finally clicked in that it was Ash Wednesday! So glad I didn’t say anything to the girl. :-)
It was fun to introduce G to the open mic peeps at Backroads. Fun to sing him the new song I wrote for him live. We both got the 5 minute massages from Ariel. Raul convinced Ana to sing a few songs and her friend Mandy showed up and borrowed my guitar to play for their set.
Right after they played, we walked down the block to Whip In where Emily, Jana, Katie and Elizabeth were playing.
Harmonies and guitar and piano and cajon, hooray! It was a great show. Unfortunately the kitchen had just closed, but luckily we found some tabouli, dolmathes and falafels in the mini-grocery section, so we still were able to have a yummy snack, just not the country we were expecting the food to be from. ;-)
Another fun thing about the show was Emily was wearing the guitar string necklace I made her and it looked cool! Always neat to see what my jewelry creations look like “in real life”.
It was great to be able to show G so much of what my life here in Austin has been like, from riding the bus, walking to Rubicon, talking with Dan, open mics and shows. Kind of amazing that it all happened to be on the same day!
Songs: Anchor, I Know, Keep Telling Me, Wings
The Lovely Brigade at Whole Foods, What’s in a Look, and Plants!
Thursday night I took the bus down to Whole Foods to see The Lovely Brigade. I had some yummy tomato-zucchini soup and raspberry chia seed kombucha. They were supposed to play outside but it was chilly so they set up in the corner of the food court inside.
Seeing as it was a grocery store and folks were mostly in and out, the gals actually did a set, took a break and then did a second set of pretty much the same stuff. Which was fine by me, because the songs are all good!
One thing I learned from watching the grocery shoppers who stopped for a song or two is that if you were doing that gig to pick up new fans, you’d either need to be announcing your band name after pretty much every one or two songs, which would probably be a little goofy for both the employees and the people who were sitting to eat for several songs, OR you ought to have a poster or sign of some sort with the band name/website on it, big enough for people to see from a little bit of a distance. I mean, sure, not everyone is going to go home and look you up, but there’s a better chance they might!
I know there can also feel like a fine line between being cheezy and obnoxious about self promotion, and doing what needs to be done. It made me think about those bands that have their name or logo painted/printed on the kick drum and how it’s not just a cool thing, it’s a band identity thing.
The whole identity/look thing has been on my mind a bit lately. The other week I had conversation on Facebook about my stage look, a friend was asking if I had thought about coming up with a signature look, and I said that I wasn’t quite willing to choose only ONE thing because I’d get too bored. (Maybe also has something to do with wearing school uniforms for 12 years growing up!) But I do think that I have a general style that includes some combination of cute caps, big earrings and hair bling in the form of feathers or flowers. Still, some folks that I recognize from previous open mics don’t always seem to recognize me a week or two later. I don’t know how much of it has to do with the fact that maybe I was wearing a hat one time and not the next, how much of it has to do with how much they were drinking, that I cut my hair significantly in December, and how much of it simply has to do with my internal confidence and how I carry myself.
Because people do comment that I’ve changed. Especially because sometimes they will recognize me after I play and they remember me for the songs. They can’t quite put their finger on it but they see a difference. It’s always a positive difference. So I’ll just put that in the “Seems to be working” pile and keep at it! ;-)
Anyhoo, back to Whole Foods, after the show I bought myself a couple little plants, because they last longer than cut flowers and they make me happy! The checkout gal trimmed a paper bag for me so I could carry them easier on the bus. It made me feel very romantic for some reason, my flowers on the bus, like riding a bike through Paris with a baguette in the basket. haha!
The tall flowering one is a Paper White and it smells lovely. The teeny one is a Lithops or Living Stone and it’s a little succulent originating in Africa that grows low to the ground and camouflages with pebbles in its native habitat. It has a rather particular yearly watering schedule to mimic the rainy and dry seasons there, so we’ll see how I do with it, but I have it in my window and it seems pretty happy so far.
Acoustic Austin at Baker Street
Thursday night I headed out to Baker Street, a place I’ve been to often on Sundays for open mic, but not otherwise. I got to see the open mic hosts Justin and Tiffany perform for the first time. They are usually so busy hosting they don’t play on Sundays. Their band is called Justif. Get it? :-) They are an adorable couple and an awesome band.
Next up was The Lovely Brigade.
That would be Kristin Astourian and Heidi Nadine. I first saw these gals trading off on the Cherry the red Korg at a Flipnotics open mic, probably not too long after they met. It has been fun to get to know them better, add some more gals to the musical circle of support, talk songwriting and goals and watch them get more and more polished as a duo every time they perform.
Then there was an awesome and funny Charlie Mason, who I forgot to take a picture of, but he was great. At one point, he maybe had a quarter of a beer left, and made some comment about how thirsty he was, so if anyone happened to go to the bar, could they pick him up a drink? And within minutes someone left him a beer by his feet, another song in and he had two more beers, and another song or two after that and he had two shots lined up next to the beers. He didn’t make much in the way of cash tips that night, but he sure got paid in booze!
Closing out the night was Blue Bear, in their first official band debut!
They are another cool band I met out at the open mics, but I don’t think I’d ever seen them rocking out with electrics and keyboard and certainly not drums. They had a few minor tangles in guitar cords as they traded off instruments, but I for one thought they were badasses for all being able to play so many different things, and they sounded great.
Here is Wings in widescreen, with drums! :D
Heather Miller performing “Wings” live at Cafe Paradiso in Fairfield, IA. December 27th, 2011 with David Hurlin on drums.
http://heathermillermusic.com
Mentioned in the video:
http://thefearlesssongwriter.com/
http://www.bluegrass.com/songschool/
http://arthurleeland.com/
Oh Me Oh My Oh…
…look at Miss Ohio.
If you’re reading elsewhere, you may need come to the blog to see the video.
Yeah, I keep thinking of blogging, and every time I think of it, that line pops up for some reason. Doesn’t bother me really because it’s a damn good song, I’m just not sure why exactly it keeps coming up. Maybe it’s being back in Iowa, and all the talk of the raygun shirts that only people from Iowa, Ohio or Idaho understand. (This and This).
Maybe it’s the line “I wanna do right, but not right now.” December was a busy month for me. Making sure I made it to 100 performances before going home (Ended up being 103, yay!). The final of those performances was a 45 minute set, so that was a little bit of a bigger deal than my usual open mics. Final Rubicon group showcase, where I also prepped the food & beverages. Getting a haircut. Prepping for and teaching a couple music lessons. Organizing my stuff in Austin to be gone for a month (By now, I honestly don’t remember quite how I left it, hope I did ok there.) Getting packed up to come home in just a duffle bag and guitar case (there are lots of great little nooks & crannies in a guitar case for stuff like socks and scarves - I even put my hair flowers and a pashmina INSIDE the guitar.)
That was just while I was IN Austin. Coming home I pretty much hit the ground running, I got to Des Moines on Thursday and spent the evening with my cousin, came to Fairfield on Friday and was asked to sing back-up in a Christmas show on Saturday (yay!), so had a couple rehearsals on Friday & Saturday before the show. Mix in there visits and parties with family and friends too, and then some doctor & dentist appointments, doing some live Lyrical Venus shows, Christmas shopping (not like I had room in my guitar case for presents!), and then getting ready for my concert on the 27th!
In some ways I’d been prepping for the concert since May, through all the work I’ve been doing with Dan in my Rubicon Year, including all that open mic experience, and in other ways I pulled off most of it in just a little over a week!
I did a quick photo shoot with my friend who also made me a beautiful poster and newspaper ad (which we also repurposed for a flyer). I printed out and put the posters up all around town. I wrote an article for the paper. I made a Facebook event and hand-invited my Fairfield people. I organized getting a sound guy who could also record the show so I might be able to use a few of those tracks for a live EP. I organized my bro & husband to man the video camera and webcast. I figured out the set list and gathered up mp3s of all the songs so I could get them to the other musicians (part of which involved uploading videos from my open mics to YouTube and then ripping the audio from them). My brother & I burned 20 copies of a little 5-song demo, I designed a label and put it on all of them, realized I forgot my website and hand-wrote it on all of them. I also put all those songs together on a Bandcamp page with lyrics and info in case I had any online people wanting the tracks. I had two rehearsals, one with Lauryn Shapter and one with the whole group, the night before the show. I asked local bloggers if I could get listed on their blogs. I did a radio interview on KRUU. I also was making sure to run through the songs myself every day and handing out flyers wherever I could.
Oh, and through most of this we were house/pet sitting for two awesome cats, which was pretty great because not only was it a nice house, both we and our housemates had more space, but also meant a bit more running around if something was forgotten at one house or the other.
The coolest thing I think, was that even with all this stuff to do, I didn’t freak out or get sick or lose my voice, as I so often did back in my high school and college theatre days before a big show or competition. I worked hard, but it was fun and felt good.
And the show went really well! I ended up with about 60 or so people, which was a nice full house. (Cafe Paradiso can squeeze maybe a little over 100 in for a really big deal show.) I think there was around another 10 people watching online at any one time. The energy was great, I felt really connected to the audience and comfortable with my between song banter, the songs felt awesome with David, Lauryn & Taylor backing me up! I even sold 5 of my little CDs. BIG BIG BIG heartfelt thanks to everyone who made the show not only possible but a success! I love you!
New Year’s Eve though, I came down with a fever which thankfully broke during the night. Spent most of New Year’s day napping on the couch between spurts of cleaning up the house for the owners’ return and gathering up all the things we had accumulated there. Monday I could have gone out if I needed to but luckily got to spend it inside having a marathon session of The Office on Netflix. I think the quick little sickness was my body’s way of saying, “If you don’t slow down, I’m gonna do it for you, missy!”
So yeah. I’ve got more to blog about, and I wanna do it right, but not right now. This turned out to be a pretty good catch-up/recap of the past few weeks at least anyway! :) I head back to Austin on the 7th for my final Rubicon session, which includes RECORDING in March! And all the fun little details of actually creating and releasing a CD. And figuring out what comes after this Rubicon Year is over. Whoa…
So This is Happening!
I have some Austin blogging to catch up on, but I thought I better post this to start getting the word out. Hope you Fairfield peeps will come have a sweet after-Christmas night out and hear some songs! (I shall be posting more about it soon methinks!)
