Lately I’ve been going through major music/concert withdrawal. One of my best friends who moved away temporarily, will be going to a Jimmy Gnecco show next week in Austin, Texas and I wish I was with her. I’m dying for some live Jimmy right now. I’ve read his most recent diary post on his website (www.jimmygnecco.com) and he said he’s been dealing with a lot of stuff recently, and listed one of those items as his mom passing away. I knew about it already, but him saying it out loud made me think of how I’ve been really thinking about my dad a lot lately also. I really wish he could have seen my daughter (”The Diva”) crawl, cruise, & babble away like she does now. Both my dad and Jimmy’s mom died from lung cancer in November 2009. He did a benefit show awhile back to raise money for her health bills, and at a show before that, we talked a little about dealing with seeing our parents with cancer, and how much is sucks. Anyway, all that makes me feel closer to his music right now, so I’ve been listening to a lot of his solo music and Ours. I also have been addicted to a song from Lukas Rossi’s “Unreleased Demos” album, “Wherever You’re Going.” That song hits me like a brick wall and feels like he wrote it through my eyes, or hand rather. It deals with cancer, so don’t listen to it unless you want to bawl or are into that sort of thing. I’m drawn to dark, depressing stuff, so I love it. I’d love to know who inspired that song for him.

I can’t believe my daughter is already 13 months old. Craziness. At 12 months she started cruising, and can now walk “along the wall” by pressing up against it, kind of like a cop in a movie who goes outside the window of a 20-story building to try and talk a “jumper” out of jumping. You know how he presses against the wall for dear life? Yeah, that’s what she does. As for feeding, I was nursing her 3x a day, and planned to stop breastfeeding when she turned 12 months, but we’re a little delayed, which is fine. The trouble was that she would not drink cow’s milk. She spit it out and refused to open her mouth for the cup. Finally this week, after a suggestion from a friend, I mixed in some yogurt or Gerber Yogurt-Juice with the whole milk and now she drinks it. I’m thrilled because I was able to cut out her mid-day nursing and replace it with cow’s milk. So now I just nurse her when she wakes up, and right before bed. I hear these last 2 can be a pain to wean children from, so we’ll see how that goes. Once she’s off of breast milk/nursing for good, I can’t wait to drop her off at her grandma’s house to spend the night! Haha..does that sound horrible? I can’t imagine being able to sleep in, but it sounds wonderful. Today I was playing the piano and she cruised right over and started hitting the keys, so I put her on my lap and we played together. She lasted a good 5 minutes before she kept trying to tear down my sheet music. Oh well. She has a longer attention span for guitar. She loves to pluck the strings and she hasn’t broke any yet, so that’s a plus. I still think she’ll wind up a drummer though. It’s always hard to find a drummer, so we’d be thrilled.

I’ve held off on writing about this for awhile because it’s a sore subject for me and I feel really sad whenever I think about it. The band Live and I have a history - a long, complicated history that involves lots of late nights rocking out, drunken after-parties, “rockblocking” (I’m not naming names), and of course music. BTW, my concert road trip friend and I coined the term “rockblock” (from “coc*block”) to mean a person who intentionally prevents another person from talking, dancing, or hanging out with a rock star. For instance, you’re in the middle of dancing & talking with said rock star at an Atlantic City club, and someone grabs said rock star from the back of his shirt to pull him away from you, and starts dancing with him herself. You, my friend, have been Rockblocked. Before I became a mom less than a year ago, my total number of concerts attended was over 100. For Live specifically, I think it’s somewhere around 50 shows; I stopped counting after 30. My love of the band started when they became mainstream in the early 90s, and just grew from there. I not only loved the albums Mental Jewelry and Throwing Copper, I loved A LOT of their albums, especially Secret Samadhi. With Live, I loved the sound of the vocals, the chord progressions, the whisper to wailing, the lyrics, their high energy concerts, etc. Once I got to know the band over time, I loved the band members themselves, as people. Really nice, genuine, fun guys to hang out with. I slowly saw things change over the years: the music became softer, the lyrics became more literal, the shows became repeats of prior shows, some band members seemed bored, certain egos developed, and the passion of the music seemed to fade. When I found out that Live was taking some time to split and do their own thing, I wasn’t surprised. What did surprise me was Chad Taylor’s (lead guitarist) blog post saying that Ed Kowalczyk (singer) stabbed the band in the back by signing a hidden contract that the other band members knew nothing about. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but either way, their close ties to each other as friends and musicians seem to be over for good. I feel really sad about it, for them as individuals, and for me personally. Besides the music itself, which has been a big part of my life for various reasons, Live has been the source of many different chapters in my life. Let me explain.

Love. When I first met my husband, I wasn’t interested in him at all. He was hitting on me constantly, but I kept ignoring him. He found out I liked Live and pulled out a guitar and played a Live song. I started to like him after that. Haha. The song “Dance With You” was our “1st dance” song at our wedding. Friendship. My closest friends today are people I’ve met at Live shows. When you go to a ton of shows from one band, you see and meet a lot of the same people, and that’s how I met a bunch of my friends; a few of them are my best friends. Death. We all have certain songs that hit a nerve with us when it comes to love & death. In college when I lost a friend from a drug overdose, the music helped me deal with it. Life. Music will always be my life, and once I heard Live I wanted to learn guitar, which I did. Because of Live, I was introduced to many different bands & musicians, and some of them have even replaced Live as my favorite band. The 6 degrees of separation game can go on and on with this, but briefly…Ed Kowalczyk’s brother, Adam Kowalczyk, tours with the band as a guitarist, and also has his own music. One night after a show, Adam introduced me to his friend, Jimmy Gnecco, who he said is in a band called Ours. I checked out Ours after that and OMG, instant love. Ours is now my passion. I’ve gotten to know Jimmy over the years, along with one of my best friends, and now she basically works for them on the side. One night after a show I was telling Jimmy that there’s this awesome reality show on called Rockstar Supernova. I told him how I loved the original show, Rockstar INXS, and this one is just as good because you get to see some great performers who sing some GOOD songs, not just mindless pop. He laughed at me, thinking it was probably cheesy, but I said how there’s these 2 guys on the show that are especially good: Lukas Rossi and Ryan Star. I told him to give it a chance. Well, a few years later I’m at a Ryan Star show wearing an Ours shirt, and he noticed my shirt right away saying how he LOVES Ours and is a huge fan, and how he was trying to get in touch with Jimmy for something. A few years after that, not only do Jimmy Gnecco/Ours have a tour WITH Lukas Rossi/Stars Down, but Jimmy also performs during Lukas Rossi’s tv show appearance in Canada, doing backup vocals on Lukas’s beautiful song “Enya.” It’s an AWESOME performance:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR0lwnO2ZjY  . There’s a million more connections like this that all started from me liking the band Live, but you get the point. So that’s why I’m sad about the breakup of Live- because it was the beginning of so many things in my life, and now the band is ending. Maybe that’s why the song Lightning Crashes was Live’s biggest radio hit. It’s about the cycle of life- death & rebirth, beginnings & endings, and everyone can relate to that at some point in their life. So this is my “Lightning Crashes” moment.