Yesterday escalated. That started even before the jamsession, with opening my beer and having the beer cap hit my throat with force, like it thought itself to be the Ripper (for all not familiar, it's a weapon in Unreal Tournament that shoots spinning blades). That hurt. I snapped a picture of it, and my girlfriend teased me all night as it looked like a hickey 😅
The Jamsession was nice though, totally different than last week. This time, we were 5 musicians, and no spectators at all. The week before, it was the opposite, full house of people coming to listen, but the musicians were a no-show. I'm working on getting some more contacts together to have at least 3-5 musicians every week. When that is the case, the crowd will come eventually.
We played mostly blues improvisations, but not slow, just the patterns. I prefer that, just picking a key and then see where the fingers lead us. One who was amazing in those improvisations was BB King. One of the musicians I played with, Malkum Gibson, always told us about the great time he had touring with the master of masters. I recently found this video where King performs "The Thrill is Gone" together with Eric Clapton. I mean, imagine seeing those two on stage! And I bet the other musicians there were world class, too.
I wanted to get to bed early, so I could start working on my tutorial on how to use HIVE as a transactional platform in my bakery, but Ellie had the idea to cross the park to a friend's bar, where another friend was having her birthday. That escalated. A lot. Suddenly, it was 2am, and I was quite drunk as I had a couple of tequila, besides the beer. That's never a good idea.
So, I stayed in bed until 11am today, watching a little bit of Netflix and then listening to some music to sleep. One of the songs that came up in my mix was Agnes Obel. I have a fable for Scandinavian singer-songwriters, and she is in my top three. First would be Sophie Zelmani, second Anna Ternheim.
"The Curse" is a great composition in and off itself, and if you watch the video on how the different sounds are made, combined, looped and layered, you can't ignore the incredible art in this song. Besides being unbelievably beautiful. I'm really happy I stumbled upon this version.
After getting up and coffee, I went for shopping. Ellie and her sister with their kids were coming for BBQ. I love Beyond Meat products, but they're quite expensive. 4 big links for $15, two burgers for $7,50. But from time to time, it's absolutely worth it. We also made quite a bunch of veggies and some animal sausages for the others.
The burgers turned out great. I took the time to combine them nicely, with some of my sauces and even lettuce. I usually don't care too much for lettuce on burgers, more work than flavor, yet I thought that luxury deserves to pull out all the stops.
Absolutely worth it. Next time, I'll add some grilled onions and pickles. And yes, I ate both burgers, and yes, that might have been a mistake, but they were delicious! Especially with the pretzel buns... just from heaven.
The afternoon was beautiful, and I went on to harvest the lemons in the garden, which I should've done a while ago. The restaurant wasn't busy, so the girls that own it were happy to use their mega-squeezer to turn around 20kg of lemons into juice. The biggest lemon was 600g. It's Meyer Lemons, and when ripe, they're super delicious, not too sour, but somewhat sweet (for a lemon) and full of flavor.
I'll conclude this post with the last tune for today, I think the genre is called "Postcore". But I might be wrong. There are some bands that I like that play similar, mainly La Dispute and From Autumn to Ashes. One is more hardcore than the other, with a little more screaming involved. A little. But that's not for this post, so here's La Dispute:
I listened to that whole album a lot when sitting in the overnight-bus down to Vilcabamba, where Lily was living for 2 years. It was a total of 16h, the overnight being 10-12h, depending on landslides and such. This music always brings me back to that feeling, looking out of the window, the landscape-shadows flying by. Despite the grind, it's a good feeling. It brought me to Lily, for 10 days every 5-6 weeks. And now, she's living with me. It was worth it.
Post written for the #saturdayselections by Galenkp inviting us to share music in the Weekend Experiences community on Saturdays.