I have had such a fantastic time on tour, but it’s good to be home! And I’m thrilled that I’ll be back at one of my favorite venues – possibly the best venue in LA for a singer-songwriter – in just a couple weeks! It’ll be a full band show at Hotel Cafe on Sunday, May 13 at 7 pm. You can purchase (discounted) tix ahead of time here! I can’t wait to see your faces and unveil some of these new songs I’ve been working on. See you there!
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just announced – hotel cafe may 13!
/ 28 Apr 2012 -
home and on the road and home again
/ 16 Apr 2012After an incredible trip to France – Mike’s and my first vacation in nearly 5 years! – I’m back in LA getting ready to turn around again. This time it’s for the last of my spring mini-tours, with a stop in Buffalo, NY for the students of Canisius College and an appearance on the Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian Church music series in Detroit. As many of you know, I went to school in Michigan, and I’m thrilled to be going back after quite a long time to share my new set with some old (and hopefully new) friends. I’m also thrilled to be performing a song Saturday April 21 on Ann Delisi’s Essential Music, a great program on WDET. Ann does a ton to support music in Detroit, and I’m lucky to be getting a lil’ bit of that support!
After I return to LA, I’ll be participating in a very special “pop-up concert” as part of LA’s own version of the Play Me, I’m Yours installation. The one I’m participating in is called “Love Letters to LA: Pianos Live” and we’ll be playing at the piano outside the famed Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. It’s going to be so much fun, and I hope you all will come down and sing along!
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whitney
/ 12 Feb 2012At the moment, I can’t think about anything other than Whitney Houston, and because I am sure many of you have similar memories, I wanted to share some of mine.
My mom tells me I was obsessed with Michael Jackson when I was about 3 (I would walk around the house pretending to be him, wearing one white sock on my hand). But I was so young, I don’t really remember. Whitney, I remember. Listening to her sing was learning what a voice could, and should, sound like. At the age of 5 or 6 I loved all her songs, ate up all her videos. I’d look at the way she moved and sang and then dance around my room singing “How Will I Know.”
And she really was everyone’s darling at that time. At my kindergarten graduation, we sang “The Greatest Love of All.” I thought that my music teacher was pretty awesome for having picked that song. I was very shy and a few years away from my first solo, but I have vivid memories of just belting that song out in the choir room under protective cover of the other voices (it must have been hilarious: a 5-year-old deciding long ago never to walk in anyone’s shadow. Inspired by Whitney, I felt it fervently – I might not have gotten the concept, but I could hear her conviction).
In first grade, I participated in the “Book-It” program. I’d get stickers for each book I read until it filled up this button, then I’d take that button to Pizza Hut and get a free “personal pan pizza.” I don’t think my mom had to buy me a pizza until that program ended some years later, because I loved pizza AND books with equal passion. But what I loved the most about those outings was that the Pizza Hut was the only place I ever went that had a jukebox, and that meant that I could get some change from my mom and play Whitney Houston songs. To this day when I hear the first notes of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” I feel the exact same 6-year-old joy that I felt when I heard them come through that jukebox. My song.
My heart just aches for Whitney and her family. And I really don’t care how good or bad she sounded when she sang the night before she died (not gonna watch that video) or for however many years before that. I don’t think anyone’s come close to Whitney at her best. Certainly not in my heart. Good-bye, Whitney – I can never thank you enough.
