By Thank you Seattle!
What an awesome crowd and venue to close out the Fire Within Tour. I had to fight through a cold, couldn’t breathe that well, and sounded more congested than I would have liked, but I did my best and still had a blast!
Thanks again to Jennifer Thomas for having me open several of her amazing shows. Although our forms of artistic expression (piano and poetry) are different, we see the world with similar eyes and hearts and thus it’s always easy and fun to work with her. Her husband Will was also a powerhouse on the lighting, sound, and video for EVERY show. We couldn’t have done it without him. 👏👏👏
More takeaways from this whole experience:
I loved connecting with people face to face. When you’re the opening act, there’s always some (often large) percentage of the audience that has never heard of you. For me there’s the additional hurdle of performing something that there’s no established genre for. If I was a violinist or singer/songwriter for example at least people could be like “I’m not familiar with this person but I’m pretty sure I know what I’m in for here”… but in my case there’s always an element of having to win people over. I’m sure not everyone is won over, but it is cool to see some faces change. And I’ve gotten so many comments about things I said touching people and resonating in a way they’d never felt before. I always love hearing that, because that’s what this is really all about – finding intersections of truth on this long road of human experience.
I rehearsed a lot, and the preparation paid off. That doesn’t mean I was perfect, but unexpected things happen during performances – technical difficulties, someone walking around, kids making noise, getting emotional when saying something or seeing someone else get emotional, just to name a few. And when that stuff happens it’s easy to crack. I was always able to keep going through whatever distractions came up, and I attribute that to being well prepared – even though I didn’t even know what kinds of things I was preparing for. I think that’s a lesson for anything in life.
Most of all I just liked the experiences. Opening doors to new venues to see what wonders the night might bring. Opening hearts and sharing spaces with new people. Getting out of my comfort zone and being stretched a little. Learning things that I didn’t even know I didn’t know.
Another thing I don’t know is where this takes me next.
But I know that I’m going.
