I've probably told you that this band does not practice. We play a lot and that doesn't leave a lot of time to devote to getting together. Besides, Michael and Jerry are in Sacramento and John, Steve and myself live in the foothills. Steve and I meet with John every week, but that is more about learning from John than it is about band practice. We are so grateful to continue to learn and grow and have someone who knows SO much to teach us. Steve is learning to play guitar and I am learning the bass and we are both continuing to grow as singers.
Michael and Jerry are seasoned performers and they don't need to practice all the time. Last week we DID have a band practice to incorporate a bunch of new songs into our show. John gave the songs to Michael and Jerry ahead of time to work out their parts. Steve and I worked on our parts with John. All that was left was to get together and put all of our parts together.
John is in charge of our music. We all agree on that. It's not that the rest of us don't have opinions or ideas, we all do! And John listens to all of us and most of our desires are added in to the show. We are just so lucky that John knows how to make it all work and still give us all what we want. It's kind of a miracle to me.
We all had songs to work on and we all had things to add in to each song. I am amazed at all the wonderful things that are going on in each song...each instrument...each voice...it's such a collaboration! And, I am so excited that we are going to get to enjoy DRUM solos! Woo Hoo. How fun! As usual, our songs are from many different eras and genres. We are a variety band after all!!
So here we all are in John's living room with all of the equipment (I wonder what his neighbors think?). John is organized and has a list and we all follow along working out the kinks along the way. I think that we all figured that this would probably be 4 hours or so. We took a break a couple hours in and tried to order pizza, but everything was closed. We all voted to power through and finish our list. All in all, we were there for over 7 hours!! Yep. That's the truth. We were all tired and HUNGRY (at least I was!).
I think that the most incredible thing to me was that here we were all tired and probably cranky and we all just worked through and got along up until the moment we drove away. I appreciate how well everyone gets along. I, for one, really look forward to seeing everyone when we have a gig. Someone recently asked us what our secret is for staying together happily. I told them that I knew the answer...find the right people. We all just like each other. And, we all do our part to make this band work. It's a group effort.
What did we get out of our 7 hours? I made you a little "sample" of the new songs we worked on. You will be hearing these at our upcoming shows. I hope you like it:
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