by Rebecca Write

Created on: November 18, 2008   Last Updated: February 24, 2010

Life is a serendipitous affair, after all. I like to take pictures, and I like live music. Here in a college town, in central Texas, we have no shortage of bands being born on stage at open mike nights, which means no shortage of bands you can see for $5.00 today, and some of them will be playing sold out concerts a year from now, but most of them won't exist a year from now. Either way, it's worth the time and effort to capture some of these elusive moments while they are here.

Musicians are lot like horses, very gregarious creatures usually, some quite gentle, some quite wild, but not a flesh rending species on the whole, and around here they are of a most helpful and generous caliber, so it's just a matter of time before any fan that is even remotely aspiring to perform onstage or make a recording does just that.

With me the deciding moment happened while standing in line to buy a drink, and a dear bluesman friend of mine who was going to retire and move to Mexico (which means liquidation sale) was standing behind me. I mentioned I was looking for a guitar, and we shook on a white Arietta for $150.00. I don't know why exactly, but owning a guitar made me think I could sing. So I did. Turns out that a spliced mike and the bottom of the line computer that it rode in on can make a vocal recording, even if you do have only 90 seconds at a time, and have to judge accordingly.

No one buys a guitar in order to make a'cappella recordings, but once you have them, well there they are, and if you already have myspace and youtube accounts, and you have lots of poems and lots of photos, they will just run around in their little pens until something gestates and ultimately gives birth. Birth is a messy thing, and I don't recommend it as a rule, but since my son turned out to be such a great guy, I thought well hey, these songs and videos might grow into something wonderful if I don't get in the way of it.

Some of them did to a very modest extent, and this leads to that magical thing called collaboration. So far, I am pretty sure I have either pissed off, offended or just disappointed everyone I have collaborated with. This includes the best video I ever made hands down, which is not saying much since I really don't know how to make videos beyond the automatic slide show, but I have learned how to tip the odds in my favor as far as a decent finished project, while still leaving it up to fate to determine things that I would never have thought of, thereby improving the result.

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