The NewSong Contest at Lincoln Center is 3 days away!!!

Lefty guitarist Ronny Drayton will accompany me on this one. For more details via Facebook, click here. 

WHAT: 2015 NewSong Music Showcase & Competition Finals at Lincoln Center
WHEN: January 7th, 2016 at 7:30pm EST

FREE SHOW! Seating is on a first come, first-served basis.

For over 14 years, the NewSong Music Contest has recognized truly exceptional emerging performers and songwriters from around the world. Entering the contest is a gateway to all of our programs, which include NewSong Recordings, our boutique record label and 'NewSong Presents,' our live music concert series that take place across the country.

After very carefully reviewing music submissions from all over the world, we have selected ten finalists to showcase and compete in the live performance finals at the David Rubenstein Atrium at New York City's prestigious Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. All ten finalists will perform songs for our panel of judges and a packed house... One music act will be crowned the winner.

VERY Giant Steps by John Coltrane

Who hasn't seen this? It's John Coltrane's Giant Steps, animated and somewhat illuminated.  Because sometimes you have to see it to believe it.

I need a momentary distraction from a sea of paperwork -- rewrites, bits of song ideas and lyrics, applications for workshops and residencies, graduate school and my parlor guitar -- and this Star Wars trailer isn't enough to tip me over in another direction. 

One song escapes me, slowly.  I can't chase it down with food or a heady conversation or a butterfly net. A long walk shakes something else loose, some other idea. Another song to distract me, maybe.  I sing into a voice recorder on my phone and sing it to myself all the way home as it swings back and forth in my head. Eventually, I unravel it on my sofa. Sometimes, I write it all the way down. And somewhere in there, there are phone calls and errands and money to be chased down and tea and solace and sleep and sunshine and work to be had and worry and much prayer and fasting. Somewhere in there, there are rewrites and emails and all kinds of funk and deliberation.  But mostly, there are those songs that escape me slowly and more often than not, they drift off right as I'm going to sleep.  Whenever I feel a song coming on, I hold still in spite of whatever else I'm doing. And I realize whatever else I'm doing is making way for the song to (re)surface.  Kind of like the technique that makes way for "inspiration" as Stanislavski explains it.

Songwriting is always the momentary distraction.  Like a tightly wound bud that is sure to bloom into a gigantic peony, there is always a song somewhere in me, waiting to come out.  All I have to do is wait it out.  And in the immortal words of Tom Petty, the waiting is the hardest part.

bye-bye, piano mine

I'm getting rid of my beautiful old upright piano by the end of the summer. No need to donate it to a church or anything like that. The action is busted and it'll cost more than its worth to fix it.  Needless to say, it hurts a lot to let it go. For all of the songs it pulled out of me. For the songs I could have written on it and won't. For the intervals I learned and the ones I didn't.  For the chords I dug up and dissected for a melody that wouldn't leave me alone. For all the weeks that went by when I didn't touch it at all.  For the one who gave it to me in the first place -- God bless him, where ever he may roam.

Believe me, I'll keep plunking away at this piano until it's all the way out the door. I'm still smoothing out all the wrinkles on a new song cycle for the next Black Americana album. I don't know the chords I'm hearing in my head and the only way I can find them is if I sit at a piano and feel my way through them. Until it goes, here's to the next piano I get.  Hopefully, it'll be another wooden upright.

And yes, that whole declutter the apartment extravaganza is going quite well, thanks for asking.

a quick update

i didn't win in my region for the 2013 mountain stage newsong contest (womp-womp!) but my songs were automatically entered into the general round (the deadline is sunday, september 15th!) and i'm still in the running for the people's choice category. voting will remain open until tuesday, september 17th.

if you'd like to vote for me, please click here. and as always, thank you for your support.

What I Do For A Living, Part 3: "You didn't write that...did you?"

i have always loved to read and write.

i can't remember when expressing myself on paper with words was anything other than effortless.  i'm sure this has something to do with my stay-at-home mother who taught me how to read at such an early age. when i was three, there were letters and then there were small words and then there were dr. seuss books. by the time i hit kindergarten, i could read with the comprehension of a kid twice my age. 

i zipped through one advanced placement english class after another with relative ease, churning out essays and whatnot at will. when i was 12, an english teacher insisted that i turn in a journal as a weekly assignment and i've kept one ever since. when i was in college at ut austin as a freelance writer for a student newspaper, i thought it was kind of kitschy to get paid to write, but that was it. it wasn't until i came to new york city that writing mattered professionally.

what happened?

strange but true: when i came to new york city, i thought talent actually mattered. that's right: i honestly believed that if i did a great audition for a show, i'd get it because i was the best one for the part.  i didn't realize that there were all these other factors at work. like my height. or someone else's height in relation to mine. or if my size 4 body fit into the size 16 costume, or headpiece, or whatever costume i had to wear. or whether or not someone behind a desk thought that i was pretty enough.  or my blackness. yeah -- i know, right? believe it or not, i honestly thought: "this is theater. everyone has the willing suspension of disbelief so it doesn't matter that i'm black. i'll audition for every female role in my age range and my talent will get me the work." it never dawned on me that i could be the best one for the part and not get it because i couldn't fit into the costume or somebody thought that i was ugly or i was the wrong kind of black girl for that part, because the negro doing the casting was colorstruck.  none of that ever entered my mind.

when it finally did, i was profoundly depressed. i didn't believe that i was pretty enough to do film and tv -- and even if i were, i wouldn't really get to act.  theater and musical theater was my home base. with this realization, it was gone.

and then for some reason, i went to see john leguizamo in mambo mouth at the american place theater, and that's when all the lights came on. i had never seen a solo show.  i didn't know that such a thing existed. as i watched him work, all i could think was, i can do that. i went home that night and wrote a monologue, almost as a reflex. it just fell right out of me. the next thing i knew, i was performing it at ps 122. two one person shows and a ton of showcases, workshops and festivals later, i've got a sold out run at joe's pub for my newest idea, queen esther: unemployed superstar.

all of a sudden, a whole world of options opened up to me. i was no longer at the mercy of a casting agent.  i didn't have to wait for the phone to ring.  if it did ring, that was terrific but if it didn't, i could employ myself. i came up with ideas, i developed them, i performed them. boom-POW, just like that. ideas oozed out of me all the time.  keeping that journal since childhood shook a lot of them loose without my fully understanding what was happening. eventually, i shifted gears, started writing lyrics and songs -- and that meant more work.

last april, several performers and i -- francesca harper, charles wallace and keith thomas, respectively -- performed the billie holiday project, a show that i'm still developing, at the apollo theater's music cafe.  how strange was it to chat with people in the audience afterwards, so genuinely surprised that i wrote it.  for those who don't know me at all, getting accepted to nyu's tisch school of the arts mfa program was an astonishing feat. the real coup will be finding a way to pay for it.

what happened? all at once, i realized that i'm an originator, not a replicator.  there have been rough moments, sure -- but i haven't looked back. i can't change who i am.

(to paraphrase paul harvey: "...and now you know the rest of the story.")

so...

now that the jazz cd is almost finished, i'm already hard at work on the next album in my head. i honestly can't help myself. maybe that's why i'm usually steady at it, making lists and drawing things and jotting down ideas. there are about three different projects popping off in me all the time, at least. there's music, always music - and all the stuff that goes with it, like guitar/piano/theory/voice lessons. there's a really good book in me, somewhere.   i think i  started looking for it sometime last year.  and yep, i'm still working on the book and lyrics to the jazz burlesque musical that i mentioned awhile back. the treatment/synopsis is done and i'm just about finished with the polishing and the spit shining of the first act. yikes.  if i ever get any real money to produce the things i'm dreaming of, i'm going to be in big trouble.

for awhile, i thought about not doing a country record, and then one day i thought why not? and i seriously couldn't think of a good reason.  and then ideas came at me like schrapnel and everything started happening. and then i ran out of money.

maybe the black country record is a love letter to the south. i do so miss austin, texas. or at least the austin i knew when i was an undergrad there.  i miss breakfast tacos! and i miss charleston, sc too. but that's going to be a different country album. that one is brighter, it's country gospel, that one happens later.

i can hear the songs in their fullness - what they sound like all finished, who's playing on them, what i want my voice to do.  it's like my head is a radio and the sounds are happening all the time.  it's really fresh and uncomplicated. and thankfully, it's halfway there - the black country sessions. i suppose it's the kind of stuff you're most likely to hear on boot liquor radio. i'm still trying to find the right way to phrase the title but thankfully, the songs are wandering towards me slowly, slowly - belligerent, unrepentant, melancholic.  it hasn't been a struggle to remember how miserable i was when i was living through these lyrics - though now that i'm this happy and there's this much joy in my life, it honestly feels like it happened to someone else.

i"ve recorded half of it already. whenever the spirit moves me, i'm sifting through lyrics and melodies with my bare hands. every so often, i wallow in it, but since that's the kind of thing that's apt to make me weepy in all the wrong ways, i tend to avoid long jagged songwriting sessions with this stuff, especially when the place is quiet and i'm alone in bed.

mostly it's songs about me getting my heart ripped to shreds by what was ostensibly the very epitome of what could only be described as a really nice guy.  it's really super catchy happy sounding sing along stuff. i can't wait for you to hear it.

sunday's gig

here's a cool photo of jef lee johnson and naisha watson at soundcheck. the gig on sunday at the brooklyn museum was stellar, for many reasons. read more about it on my rock and roll blog here.

the one reason i couldn't stop dwelling on was that this was the first time that i could hear the new songs -- material that i'd written all by myself -- out of the confines (and the safety) of the sofa in my living room. not that i'd never written a song by myself before but i've written so many all at once this time around that they're starting to tell a story that reflects a lot of what i've been going through recently. i know that as an artist, what you create is supposed to be a reflection of you, but this is much more transparent than i expected, and all of it sounds better than i'd hoped for.

after awhile, whatever brought me to the song is what i leave there inside of it when its done. i've gotten it off my chest, as it were. the emotional weight that brought it out of me only exists when i sing it, and that's a passing momentary thing. i left it in the song for someone else to feel. and so i'm on to the next.

i didn't mean to write about these things in such a direct way, i never meant to be so deliberate about it. i didn't think to myself, let me write a song about that situation. i just happened to be thinking about or reliving a moment in that situation and the song came out.

i realize now more than ever that this is the way it works creatively. to be inside the moment-to-moment work as this process is unraveling inside of me and all around me is overwhelming and humbling and strange. the songs are becoming jigsaw puzzle pieces that, when placed together just so are a complete picture, a snapshot of whatever i was going through at that moment in my life.

actually, i'm still going through it. i'm still writing it all out of me. it's not over yet.