Sezio

My favorite art is the art that my friends make.  I am connected with the art because I understand the artist and I understand the art because I am connected with the artist.  I think that the primary purpose for art is to share with people that we spend time with.   When Karli Fairbanks called me to set a show up in town, my first impluse was to set up something at an established venue but after thinking through the possibilities and where I had been playing, a house seemed perfect.

The day I moved to San Diego was the day my high school band in Oregon ended.  Moving down the coast was the start of a great amount of thought and change and in the middle of it I found myself still needing to write and music seemed to be the best way to make it memorable.  The songs I was making weren't necessarily for anything, they were a means of processing and documenting what I was watching.  When I did play the songs outside of my room, it was for friends and it was very infrequent.  For me, it was my true introduction to writing because I was also just getting back into reading, having picked up Steinbeck and Salinger, and I originally didn't intend for those songs to leave the safety of my own walls.

Taking my music out into the open has been a bumpy and somewhat intimidating process, as I'm sure it is for anybody, and I liked playing in a house again.  I spend extensive hours crafting the language and rhythms and melodies that make a song and I feel charged to work hard towards that communication.   Generally, there is a difference between listening to a record and going to a show because when a band plays live, you usually only catch some of the lyrics and there's a lot going on in the environment and part of the experience is meeting up with friends.  Sometimes I like the context of a record better because you can study it a little more, pick out the lyrics, and hear the little details in songs.  The setting of a house seems to bridge the two a little bit.

House shows are a refreshing break from bars and venues because it is a different kind of experience for both the musician and the audience.  A living room has more tangible process involved; you can hear people breathing, you can see the guitar strings rattle, and you can hear the words bouncing off the wood floor like they did when they were written.    The audience gets to see the bones behind things and there is a cool sense of participating in something together.  It was good to get friends together in that setting again and play some new songs with new people.  Many more to come.

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