If you are in LA, swing by the Corners Festival downtown on Saturday April 28th at 3pm to catch my set. I will be playing a rare solo show and will be debuting new songs that are yet to be recorded. Make sure to wear your Saturday best as I will be making an appearance on omnichord with Princess Pangolin at the L’Art Pour L’Art even that evening at 9pm. So much delicious music, so little time!

This is what it looks like when my friends dance around on the beach with paper airplanes at sunset to a recording of “The Aeroplane Over the Sea” that I recorded on my laptop in the middle of the night.

While I am busy crafting new songs with crazy sounds (shhhhhh there might be a new album in the works), I am also playing in the band Princess Pangolin. Come to the Silverlake Lounge on December 20th to catch me playing not only a set of my own songs but as the omnichordist for the lovely Pangolin crew. Yum.

Just in case you thought we were super serious about this whole thing, here’s one of my favorite outtakes from our shoot, featuring Nikita Sorokin rapping with reckless abandon.

If you are in LA, come to Timewarp Music tomorrow Friday the 20th and see me do my thing with Nikitabean. We got interviewed after our last gig at Pehrspace by a wonderful new blog, The Underground Beat. During our interview, a drunk girl dressed up as a pink sheep sat at our feet and started belching…so there’s always that.

As a rambling end note, I always tell myself that I will be more diligent about my blog but I find myself living life as opposed to recording it, which sparks the debate the duality of a recorded life versus a lived one. Are our experiences more valid once they are recorded or does it kill their vitality? This is a topic that spins through my mind and gets tangled up a bit…any thoughts are welcome. In the meantime, read some Henry Miller, sing some songs and get out there live it up.

First, you can catch me on Feb 12 at HM 157 playing at the I Heart Mom Nature fest, an all day fiesta to raise money for a new community garden and art space. Couldn’t ask for a more delightful event! I’m on at 7pm but seriously, there are some amazing bands playing so I’d stick around all day and evening if I were you.

I’m also playing on Feb 18th at Enid and Edgars, my favorite vintage spot in Silverlake and on Feb 23rd at a fantastic showcase in Pasadena at the Terrace…more news will be posted on those shows soon, complete with fancypants fliers and facebook links and whatnot.

So I know you are dying to know what to get me for my birthday…last year, you were all so incredibly generous and you, yes YOU donated and helped me make my debut album.  For my birthday this year, please tell everyone you possibly can about the album you helped to create, grab a new copy and give it to a friend, blog about it, tweet about it, the works. Looking back on this past year, I can’t help but delight in the adventures that my music has brought to me and none of them would be possible without you. I’ll always be that strange February baby writing songs on my piano in my music cave but I’d never have the courage to share them without you. So please, spread the word my dears! You can quite easily nab the cute little widgets from my Bandcamp page just like the one below. Fancypants INDEED.

Keep an eye out for more shows…I’ve been chatting with some of my favorite venues in LA and am looking forward to playing with my talented friends in the next few months. To tide you over, here’s “Play My Heart,” my favorite little love song from outer space, featuring the brilliant Nikita Sorokin and lovely Leah Harmon as recorded at our epic Bordello performance in December.

However, instead of drifting off to sleep, I read the latest blog from one of my favorite LA venues, the wondrous Echo Curio. I was extremely saddened to learn that after a ridiculous run in with the police (who shuts down a venue while the audience is singing “Happy Birthday” to the performer??), this much loved venue is indeed closed. You can read the whole story on their site but to summarize, it’s a rather absurd tale of bureaucracy. I fully understand why venues need permits but I cannot abide by a system that makes getting those permits nearly impossible to due Kafka-esque government navigation strategies and high monetary prices. Why does it have to cost so much money to provide such a positive service to the community? Why does it cost so much time that Grant and Justin, who have volunteered for countless hours at the Curio, lost patience with the process?

A year ago, I picked the Echo Curio as the venue for my e.p. release show because I loved all the shows I’d seen there. I loved that the audience was attentive and genuinely curious about the music. I loved that the bills were eclectic and inspiring at best and entertaining at worst. I loved seeing friends and strangers playing there, looking at the art on the walls, trying not to trip in the over my own feet in the bathroom (ok, the bathroom was small but I’m clumsy, forgive me). I played my very show with a band at the Echo Curio. I accidentally conceived of the concept for my first album sitting on the curb outside the Echo Curio with my friend Karin after a great set by Fol Chen. I did my first live webcast from the Echo Curio. Without realizing it, the Echo Curio became an important part of my musical identity and I am grateful for it. They gave me and other artists a chance to experiment, to grow into ourselves and to find our best selves. As a new musician, it was hard getting people in LA to book me. Bookers want to know your draw, to know your crowd, to know how much promotion you can do for their venue. I definitely understand that venues need to make money to stay open. However, The Echo Curio never asked me to bring people to a gig, to pre-sell tickets, never pressured me to do anything except make the best music I could possibly make. My shows at the Curio were without exception my best ones, with my biggest crowds because they let me focus on being a musician and not a promoter. The Curio did their job in creating a fantastic place for creativity and I did my job creating a show for them.

Every city, especially Los Angeles, needs a venue like the Echo Curio. Of course I love going to see shows at “established” venues like the Troubadour and the Wiltern but there is an inexplicable magic in seeing a band evolve into the band they might be when they play those venues. Seeing an artist in such an intimate setting is invaluable and performing in such a space is transformative. Perhaps most importantly, its vital to allow the arts to thrive in all forms so that artists can ascend and grow instead of being discouraged by a lack of space to display and perform their work. Every band needs that first chance to put themselves out there and the Echo Curio was the spot to be.
Perhaps the best we can all do is to unite together, to support the smaller and bigger venues, to encourage each other to try something new.

The Echo Curio is dead. Long live the Echo Curio.