by beachraven | Mar 30, 2019
On a recent trip to Mexico, we met a woman who worked on a foot-pump Singer sewing machine with hand-tooled silver inlays. The machine had to be a hundred years old. She sewed beautiful, handmade vinyl bags, purses, and wallets; the whole shop was full of items she’d...
by beachraven | Mar 22, 2019
Years ago, I was walking through the halls of a small record company in Hollywood and bumped into the CEO. An artist friend of mine, I worked with from time to time, was signed to the label. The album he was working on was late, and the CEO wasn’t happy about it. “I...
by beachraven | Mar 15, 2019
My dad hated rock music. He tolerated it, but mostly he scoffed at it, even the Beatles. We were watching the Lawrence Welk Show one evening, one of his favorites, and the orchestra began to play an instrumental arrangement of “Hey Jude.” When it finished, he said,...
by beachraven | Mar 9, 2019
Sonic expressions have been tumbling out of humanity for a long time. We have archeological evidence that humans have been making music for fifty thousand years. There’s a museum in Vienna of renaissance & baroque instruments, called the Kunst Historisches Museum...
by beachraven | Mar 2, 2019
Staring at an empty garden space in a yard, at the blinking cursor on a computer screen, or a musical instrument with a blank canvas, what’s next? Walking down the street, I passed a guy smoking a cigarette. The smell filled my mind, hanging with me, and I...
