Trying to tell this story of my year+ of traveling & performing in Europe/ Wales, UK/ Morocco, it’s hard to put the early elements into any accurate sequence.
It was Covid, for sure, 2020—and NO music (gigs, practices, collaboration, singing near anyone else) was possible (you remember, sigh). I was crazed by that and everything else (we all were), and I decided I had to make music no matter what. So I would engage my wonderful accompanist Fefe (Santiago) Lee (who badly needed work) to record some songs in his garage-studio, & I would figure out how to record vocals at home.
All my friends + have asked me, How did this trip happen, how could you do it? The trip was a long-time dream, as evidenced by these songs I chose to work on during lockdown.
But the driving thought for the songs was, If the world is dying all around, this is the music I want to sing, this is what I want to do—now. I came up with seven, and right from the get-go I thought that they both expressed and relieved those Covid times. To me.
What’s funny about the story is that I’d given up on performing in Europe, part of that longtime travel dream. Over years dreaming it, I saw that booking myself into gorgeous jazz clubs in Europe just wasn’t gonna happen. So this is also a story about how your dreams (an essential part of who you are) can sneak around and come in the back door.
Until I got those tracks from Fefe—and then it hit me with a thwap: These tracks (of these songs I’m hungry to do) are fresh, lively, original, fun, killer. And I can sing to them!!! Alone, outside, with very little equipment—and staying safe! Sola and Safe, I called my Santa Monica concerts. Pop-up Concerts, high-class karaoke, Takin’ It to the Streets, to the people—in the tradition of street performers for millennia. My kind of tour of Europe.
But I must also unearth for you deeper personal reasons for the trip (besides being sick at heart of isolation in my apartment). A Big Dream trip might entice me to leave my wonderful apartment, my beloved family, and sweet southern friends—to leave LA. That might finally be the way, the time, to move back north, after 19 years. And so it was.
Next month: the First Song Release!!~! And my first home in Europe—Sicily!