Category: Music

Rest Easy, Friday Night: Vol 19: David Nash (ME!). County 9 – My Third Album

If you are looking for some new music, especially some to make the new Bon Iver album sound a little better, check out my new CD. You can listen on Spotify or get it on iTunes.
There are only 8 tracks, but I feel it is a good album considering my amateur status. Honestly, it is better than the first two.
So this fall/winter, when you are sitting down with your favorite cold or warm beverage and searching for inspiration while staring at the naked hook clamped in your vise, try playing this CD in the background. If nothing else, you won’t be sitting in silence.
 
Click HERE for a link to iTunes
Click HERE to listen to “Fertile Ground” on Youtube
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A Sneak Peak at the New Album Cover Art

About 2 years ago I made a CD and put it on the internet (follow this link to see it on iTunes).

After I put out that album, I kept writing songs. Over the past few months, I was finally able to record them in our basement. Sometime next month, I’m hoping to get the album available online (maybe a Christmas release with a November pre-order option?). Sara helped me put together the new album cover. The back of the album really won’t be on anything since I’m not making any hard copies, but it is still fun to make have.

I’ll once again put the album on CDbaby, but it will also be available on spottify and iTunes. 

Something Special for the New Year

So, do remember that person in college or high school who would always grab the guitar as the night was fading? You thought, “Oh great. This guy again.  Maybe I can refill my drink or find somewhere else to be for the next 10 minutes.” They might play a couple bad versions of “Wonderwall,” Bon Jovi, or Jack Johnson, eyes closed, looking way too serious. You could sing along a bit but then they’d play an awkward “original” and you’d be stuck, on the sunken couch, too afraid to just get up and walk away.

Well, guess what? I was that whiney guy with the guitar, but, I whine a little less these days. I started playing during high school and got pretty into it for while. I’ve written probably close to 100 songs. Heck, I wrote one for the Owl Jones Rise fishing contest back in 2011, the contest that got me into making fly fishing videos. Thank you, Owl, by the way. (See the whiney song here).

This year, for my 30th birthday, my wife encouraged me to record some of my better songs “just for fun.” Mostly she wanted me to record a song called “I Love July” that I wrote for her early in our relationship and played at our wedding. We had some friends visit this fall and one of them brought some recording equipment. We turned the living room into a studio, and the Dormroom Sessions was born.

On the CD, you’ll find original songs, all written and preformed by me. I personally feel tracks 4, 5 and 6 are the strongest, “Little Red Squirrel” being the one that turned out best, but feel free to prove me wrong.

I hope two things come of this. One, I hope my friends and family and you all enjoy the music. I’ve enjoyed playing and writing for years, and it has been great fun for me. Secondly, I hope this album gets huge in Eastern Europe or Asia
and 2014 is the year of the Dormroom Sessions and I become famous like Jake Bugg or Psy (oops, looks like I dropped a few names there… I might have to pick those up before this page gets associated with those more popular search terms…. or I might just leave them).

Anyway, Happy New Year! I wish you all the best!

Rest Easy, Friday Night: Vol 12. Saturday Night Edition

That’s right, I acknowledge that it is not Friday, but I just stumbled upon such an awesome video that I had to make an exception.

I give you “Three White Horses” by Andrew Bird.

Reasons I like this video/song:

1. Andrew Bird has a cool voice.
2. Andrew Brid can play the violin and sing at the same time. That takes coordination.
3. The change in tempo at 2:15 is nifty.
4. Andrew Bird has a nice scarf.

5. Bald bass player has a nice sweatshirt.
6. Guitarist has a nice plaid shirt like the one I got for Christmas.
7. I like songs that express melancholy in a fast-paced manner.
Happy New Year!

Rest Easy, Friday Night: Vol. 4: Neighborhood Edition.

It occurred to me that I grew up next to some very musically talented people. So, for this edition of Rest Easy, Friday Night, I thought I would share some music from my “neighbors.”  I’m using neighbors loosely.  I went to high school with each of these people and we lived less than 5-10 miles apart.
Bret and I go back to little league baseball. He is a wonderful writer and has a sense of humor to rival Andy Samberg. I used to grab a mid-run glass of water from his house on those humid Minnesota summer days.

Second: Enter Jeramiah Nelson, also here, and here. A prolific troubadour who plays with many midwestern musicians including Brad Hoshaw (RE,FN: Vol 3). A year ahead of me in school, we took the bus home together in 5/6th grade. He was a bit of a rebel even then.

*note, “nothing to lose” was covered by Brad Hoshaw in the previous friday music post. That’s right, the dots are connecting.
Lastly, we’ll go with Nathan Miller and the Unstoppable Company. In all fairness, he is my brother’s age, but we still overlapped in high school.

http://cache.reverbnation.com/widgets/swf/40/pro_widget.swf?id=artist_532099&skin_id=PWAS1002&border_color=000000

 

There is also Mark Noseworthy of Pink and Noseworthy who lived a mile or so away from us. He was in my brother’s grade as well. Great guitarist. To be honest, I don’t know his stuff as well. But the link is there if you are interested.
So ends the Neighborhood Edition of Rest Easy, Friday Night. That’s a lot of music.

Rest Easy, Friday Night. Vol. 3

I first saw/heard Brad Hoshaw and the Seven Dead Lies at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Ne. We listened for about 45 minutes and I bought their self-titled CD. It is outstanding. Here is his newest project. It is the “rough draft” of his upcoming CD. He will put the sales money from this rough album towards a fully produced studio album.

A slower sound. A step away from the light hearted. Calming and refreshing.

http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/album=1528300760/size=grande3/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=4285BB/

He also dose a pretty decent version of a Ke-(money sign)-ha song.
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On a separate note, here is a paragraph from yesterday’s Writer’s Almanac, a daily email/radio short by Garrison Keillor on Minnesota Public Radio. The segments include a daily poem and noteable events in history that occurred on the day.
This blows my mind. It amazes me to think what this man has seen and heard.
“Today is the 98th birthday of Joseph Medicine Crow-High Bird, best known as Joseph Medicine Crow, who was born in 1913 into the Apsaalooke people — the children of the large-beaked bird — near Lodge Grass on the Crow reservation in southern Montana. Joseph Crow is the oldest living man of the Crow tribe and the last traditional Crow chief. As a writer, he has produced seminal works on Native American history and reservation life. But it is for Medicine Crow’s writings on the victory of the Cheyenne and Lakota warriors led by Crazy Horse and Chief Gall over the U.S. Cavalry and George Armstrong Custer that he is best known.

Joseph was the first member of his tribe to attend college and was in the middle of graduate studies in anthropology when World War II began and he joined the Army as an infantry scout. He’d learned from his grandfather that a warrior must have the strength and intelligence to carry out four traditional military acts, a process called “counting-coup,” in order to qualify as a chief, and Medicine Crow completed all four during the war. One highly prestigious act was to make physical contact with an enemy and escape unharmed, and on one occasion, he fought and grappled with a German soldier whose life he then spared when the man screamed out for his mother. On another, Medicine Crow led a war party to steal 50 Nazi SS horses from a German camp, singing a Crow song of honor as they rode away.
After the war, Medicine Crow returned to Montana where he was appointed his tribe’s historian and anthropologist. He began writing academic works, collections of Crow stories and the Crow creation cycle, nonfiction books for children, and his memoirs, to mention just a few. Medicine Crow’s step-grandfather had been a scout for George Armstrong Custer and an eyewitness to Custer’s Last Stand along the Little Big Horn River, and as a boy Joseph had heard many stories of the battle; today, Medicine Crow is the last living person to have received direct oral testimony from a participant of Little Bighorn, which he has written about in Keep the Last Bullet for Yourself (The True Story of Custer’s Last Stand) and other works.
Medicine Crow has been awarded the American Bronze Star as well as the French Legion of Honor. A White House press release naming Medicine Crow as a recipient of the 2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom praised him for his “contributions to the preservation of the culture and history of the First Americans,” saying that those achievements are only matched by “his importance as a role model to young Native Americans across the country.” 10/27/11 Writer’s Almanac