On Our Way To Crazy

My love for Waterdeep is well-documented on this site. I have seen them countless times, all over the country. We had their song in our wedding, my blog title came from another of their songs, etc etc, whatever and ever amen. You would think I would be out of words to say about them, right? How many more ways can I express my love for them? How many times can I write the same blog post?

At least one more, apparently. Because they played a full band show last weekend that BLEW MY MIND. Literally. It’s gone. It was that amazing.

They just keep getting cooler. A lot of the music I loved a decade ago hasn’t held up… I listen to it now and I just don’t see what I saw back then. Or, I go see those bands play their new music and just leave disappointed. Their place for me is in the past. But Waterdeep? Not only could I listen to the old records over and over, but their style and my taste have kept up with each other. I could have walked into that show or listened to the new records with no prior history and fell completely in love. (Sidenote: we brought a friend with us who knew nothing about them and she has not shut up about the awesome for four days.)

It was just a great, straight-up rock show. Loud and big, with massive guitar solos and weird percussion and tracked loops and yelling and a pink glittery guitar. It completely ruled.

They played a lot of new stuff, which I loved, but they also played a ton of old songs. It was like they looked at a list of my favorite Waterdeep tracks and just turned it into the set list. Take a look at this, music fans:

• Everyone’s Beautiful (!)
• I Know the Plans (!!)
• Both Of Us’ll Feel the Blast (Our wedding song! That I requested via twitter!)
• 18 Bullet Holes
• Almost Gone (!!!)
• Wicked Web
• Good Good End
• Sweet River Roll

And then, you guys. THEN. The band left the stage and they did one more as kind of an acoustic encore thing. They were kind of going back and forth about what to play, and I said to our table, “If they play Everybody’s Guilty I am going to have a heart attack right here in this club.” And what did they do? THEY PLAYED EVERYBODY’S GUILTY. Shut the front door.

It was an amazing, amazing show. I was beyond thrilled to be there.

And then it got even more awesome.

A guy we are friends with used to be Waterdeep’s manager a long time ago. He’s a guy Aaron knows through work, and he has been one of my favorite people ever since we met at an industry party and then sat at a table for two hours talking about them. He comes up to us after the show, takes my arm, and says, “Ready?” And drags me over to meet them. I was so excited and so afraid I would so thoroughly embarrass myself that I couldn’t show my face around town anymore.

So we walk up to Lori, he introduces us and we talk for a couple of minutes about the show and the songs they played. And then he told her about how I accidentally stalked them at an open house. She remembered me, thankfully, and even thanked me for saying something because they never get recognized and it makes her happy when people talk to them about their music. So that was good. But I was horrified.

We then met Don and talked to him for a while about the Khrusty Brothers and Remedy Drive. (He writes with them sometimes.) I tried so hard to be cool, y’all. I really did. I just don’t think I have it in me. But even without my complete and total lameness, it was a great night.

Well, kids, we’re on day three of 2010. Here’s what I’ve been up to so far this year.

It’s been a good one so far. I think I might have to actually get dressed and do something at some point, though. Maybe tomorrow.

Happy New Year’s Eve, friends! What are you doing tonight? Got big plans? We bailed on all party plans and are instead grilling fajitas and drinking both the champagne of beers and actual champagne. Should be a good time. I made guacamole.

Was 2009 good to you? Does anyone else feel like it was about three seconds long? We had a pretty good one. A lot happened. Lots of stress. Lots of fun. Lots of taco salads from Baja Burrito.

I was trying to decide what kind of post to write on the last day of the year – introspective? Celebratory? Thought-provoking? (Ha!) I had a whole mess of stuff I wanted to mention, so I decided to go with the old standby. The list.

Things I Loved In 2009

• Twitter. Are you twittering? You should be twittering. It is the best, even though I’m pretty sure it’s to blame for my weak posting action this year. All the little thoughts I would usually try to stretch into an actual cohesive post are instead dumped into twitter where all my random friends can see them. Do they care? I don’t know. But I enjoy reading their little thoughts a lot. Also, Amazon mp3.
• Service projects with the kids. After a rough start, 2009 kicked into high gear for GPYG at MFuge. They spent the week working hard and serving people, and came back with a strong sense of purpose that it didn’t have to end there. Based on that, we started a program called Second Saturday, where we take the second Saturday of each month and use it to serve the community. This fall we packed thousands of food boxes, served food and washed mountains of dishes in a soup kitchen, helped 300 needy families find gifts for their kids and wrapped gifts for the angel tree. I am so proud that the spirit of service has become one of the defining characteristics of our group, and I can’t wait to see where they take it in 2010.
• Switchfoot’s Hello Hurricane. I mentioned this one yesterday in our best songs of 2009 list, but I want to make sure I am getting my feelings across here. THIS RECORD IS AMAZING. Easily the best Switchfoot record. It has a great mix of rock songs (like real actual rock songs, not the Christian music lite-rock version) and mellow ones, and lyrically they completely knock it out of the park. I could, and have, listen to it over and over and over again. I love it so much.
• Sin Boldly by Cathleen Falsani. I read this way back in January, and it stuck with me all year. I don’t do a lot of rereading (says the girl who read all of the Harry Potter books this year, AGAIN), but I think this one might be an annual read for me.
• Glee. The most fun TV show there is. I love Puck, I love Sue, I love Mr. Shue. But most of all, I love the way they portray the kids. It’s fantastical, sure, and you have to suspend pretty much all of your disbelief. But the kids nail it. You really care about them. And the singing is awesome. Plus, it’s influence brought us the Sing-off, and that brought me the Beelzebubs. And they are awesome. (Watch this. And this. And this.)
• My Blackberry. Don’t judge me, y’all. This stupid little thing changed my life. I had a smartphone before, but it totally sucked. The Blackberry doesn’t freeze up on me, the battery lasts forever, my church email pushes through onto it and it has GPS. I know you think your iphone is cooler, and you’re probably right. But my Blackberry keeps me from getting lost, keeps me from being chained to my computer and NEVER DIES.
• The Youth Room. 2008 ended up being kind of a tough one for my GPYG-ers. We lost our meeting space last August and worked really hard to hold ourselves together until we built our building, only to end up with no youth space then, either. At the end of the summer I talked the board into letting us take over part of the church office building so the kids could have ownership over something. It’s not ideal, but it’s ours. We took a boring brown conference room and youthed it up good, and now we have a space that is ours for the first time ever. It’s too small, it doesn’t have heat and if the weather is bad we are crammed in there tight, but our name is on the door. And that is good.
• Shows – Andrew Peterson, Waterdeep, Jennifer Knapp, Counting Crows, Ben Folds, Over the Rhine, Wicked, a ton of youth productions, a thousand Remedy Drive shows, Chris Thile, Andy and the Andys, and a million more I can’t even remember. It was a good year to buy a ticket and see a show.
• My girlfriends. This is kind of a new one for me. I’ve always had friends, and my job comes with kind of a built-in social circle. But I’ve never been that great at letting people in. This year was different, though. I had a lot going on, and I needed to talk about it. So I did. I let my walls down and really talked to my friends. And they talked to me. And we assured each other that the things we were saying weren’t crazy, and that we weren’t horrible people even though we really felt like we were, and that we could get through it and it was okay if we had to have the same conversation a million times. I would have gone crazy this year without them.

This year was a mixed bag for me, but overall, I think it was a success. The good outweighed the bad, and I am thankful.

(Sorry for the lack of capital letters in this list. I typed them in correctly, but they came out lowercase and I don’t know how to fix it. I promise I have better typing etiquette than that.)

Christmas is an interesting time. It’s such a weird mix of the holy and the insane. A beautiful season of waiting and reflection? Check. A plastic tree covered in sparkly balls and twinkle lights? Check.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the ‘everything else’ of Christmas. The shopping and the family confusion and the peppermint and the parties. That stuff is fun and special and kind of the epitome of everything I love. Sometimes you just want to wear an ugly sweater and exchange crap you found in your house, you know?

Kari wrote a beautiful post this week about Christmas being about all of us, that Jesus came for us, specifically and individually. For the world, yes, but also for me. Brandi.

She challenged us to find something that represents us and put ourselves in the nativity. To let ourselves be a part of what’s happening there, for us. For me.

We don’t have a lot around our house in the way of figurines, so the pickings were slim. I decided to go with my good friend El Tormento. Partly because he’s the only thing I could find that resembles a person, and partly because I do think he’s a good representation of me, if you squint and tilt your head a bit. Also, my ipod is named El Tormento. So there’s that.

I think he fits in nicely.

It’s 11:00. I am in bed next to a sleeping husband and a snoring dog. My kitchen is clean and my fridge is full of leftover potato casserole and green bean bundles and chocolate pie.

I spent the whole day inside my house. This morning we got up early and had the-turkey-is-finally-in-the-oven celebratory champagne and cranberry cocktails. We watched some of our kids perform in the parade on TV, made a thousand side dishes and snuck food to Miles while everyone else was looking the other way.

The house filled up with family and friends who brought pear stuffing and sweet potatoes and wine and laughter. We sat down around a beautiful (if I do say so myself) table and told stories about Thanksgivings where tables fell to the floor and mashed potatoes were thrown and that one time Aunt Donna’s jello exploded all over the kitchen and she stormed out without saying a word. We ate and ate and ate.

The Cowboys came on and our sweet friends patiently sat through two quarters of a game they didn’t care about while my husband and my father-in-law yelled at the TV. We fell asleep on the sofa. We played a super fun game at halftime that made me laugh so hard I cried. We ate more pie and watched the second half. I changed into my lucky shirt and we won, again. I am made of magic.

Our friends left and we settled in for the Texas/A&M game. Well, they did. I sat with my back to the TV and read a novel that made me cry and want to visit Wyoming. One by one, we went to bed.

And now I am sitting here, exhausted and stuffed and blissfully happy. We all have so much to be thankful for, we know that. And I am. So thankful. For all of those things.

Especially the sleeping husband. And the snoring dog. And the sweet life I get to live with them every day in this tiny house on this tree-lined street in this amazing city. And the intensely stressful jobs full of people we love who drive us crazy. And all the people we’ve met here who have become our family. And our actual family who are our rock and support even though we are so far away.

And the chocolate pie. Oh, the chocolate pie.

Happy Thanksgiving, friends.

We watch Saturday Night Live approximately… never. I am up on it, generally, and I’ll try to catch parts of it if I care about the host of the band, but I’ve never really enjoyed it enough to sit and watch whole episodes.

Last night, though, we found ourselves hanging out at home, so we turned it on. And it was fine. Nothing amazing. (Although Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s opening monologue/song was pretty impressive.) It was just on as background noise, really, while we messed around getting ready for Sunday morning.

But then. The digital short came on.

I’m sure that this sketch isn’t really that funny. It’s too long and it gets obnoxious and gross toward the end. Please know that I know those things. But also, please know that I laughed so hard when Kenan Thompson came on screen that I thought I was going to have a heart attack.

I think you’ll understand why.

TWO EXCESSIVELY GENIUS IDEAS I HAD TODAY

1. Aaron should only sign and manage bands with guys in them who are brothers. Then, he could change the name of the company to “Hey, Brother!”, and have the receptionist answer the phone a la Buster Bluth.

2. My extended family is very competitive. We have always been game players, for generations. There are legendary stories of games of 42 between my great-grandparents that ended with dominoes being thrown and my sweet little old great grandmother calling someone a HORSE’S ASS.

We’ve been tossing around the idea of having a family tournament of some kind during the Smith Family Christmas Extravaganza. Darts, maybe, or peanut, something fairly simple that kids and adults can play quickly. (There are fifty of us. It will take a while.)

Tonight at dinner we were discussing the logistics of the tournament. We decided there needed to be some kind of trophy that the winner would get custody of for the whole year. But what? What would be the perfect trophy idea, the best name for our tournament and our award?

Then we got it. We are going to find a plastic horse, glue it to a platform, spray paint the whole thing gold and attach a little sign – THE HORSE’S ASS AWARD.

Genius.

It’s November 1999. I am a sophomore at UMHB. I wear band tshirts and overalls and part my hair right down the middle. I carry my books in a messenger bag with Christian pins all over it. My dorm room is covered in photographs and fake daisies and has a hot pink inflatable chair (that will meet it’s demise in an unfortunate sandwich-maker accident later that year). I stay up super late with my awesome roommate watching Your Big Break*.

I am obsessed with music. Luckily, I live in Central Texas, where I am within driving distance to several cities where my favorite bands play regularly. One weekend I forced several of my friends to drive to Dallas with me to see a lineup none of them had ever heard of before. We got to the venue early so we could be right up front, and we held strong and kept our places the entire show. It was one of the best nights ever. Who did we see? The Normals and Waterdeep.

Ten years later, I got to repeat the experience. You know, kind of. Because I am an accidental stalker, I knew that Waterdeep had moved to Nashville from Kansas City earlier this year. And last week, thanks to the magic of Twitter, I got wind that they were playing a show with Andy Osenga and his band. Waterdeep and the guy from the Normals, five minutes from my house, for five dollars? I am in.

So. It’s November 2009. I am a grown up. I wear v-neck tshirts and cropped jeans and part my hair slightly left of the middle. I carry my books in a giant gray shoulder bag. My house is covered in Andy Warhol prints and dog hair and has two white IKEA chairs (that met their demise in an unfortunate mint chocolate ice cream accident). I stay up super late with my awesome husband watching West Wing reruns.

I am obsessed with music. Luckily, I live in Nashville where most of my favorite artists also live and regularly play cheap shows around town. Last night I stood in a room with good friends and watched Andy Osenga and his amazing guitar skills play the best solo set I’ve ever seen him play. Then Waterdeep, who sings some of my favorite songs on the planet, stood on stage fifteen feet in front of me and blew my socks right off.

It was one of the best nights ever.

*You guys! Did anyone else watch this show? It was like a precursor to American Idol. People performed cover songs and competed for a record deal… IN COSTUME. If they sang and Elvis song, they dressed like Elvis. AND it was hosted first by Kid of Kid ‘n Play, then by Carlton. Kid and Carlton! It was the best show ever.

My sad taste in movies has been well-documented on this site. If it involves high school, parties on the last night of high school, music, dancing, or, apparently, Seth Green, I am going to love it. Are they Oscarworthy? Not so much.

Last night Aaron and I went to see Pirate Radio. Based on the previews, we knew it was tailor-made for us. The 60s? Rock music? Phillip Seymour Hoffman? Yes. Yes. Yes.

I expected to like it, I really did. I also expected to be disappointed, in the way that those kinds of movies always disappoint, you know? You want so badly for them to be perfect, to be an addition to your list of favorites. And they so rarely are.

But y’all. Pirate Radio. SO MUCH AWESOME. It was funny and sweet and inappropriate and a little trashy. Full of music and deejays and great lines and really great clothes.

It was dumb, yes, but I love dumb. It was totally unrealistic and the drama was contrived and silly. But it also made me want to live in England in the 60s and stay up late dancing to Radio Rock and wear great boots and tall hair. I LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT.

Some people have a coffee problem. I have an mp3 problem.

You know those ads for charities that implore you to give up your daily cup of coffee? They play a sad song, show you some kids and tell you that your $3 a day could feed those kids for a year.

While they are probably right, and they are definitely worthy causes, they never really sold me. I don’t drink coffee. I don’t have a $3 a day habit.

Or, I didn’t. But lately Twitter and Amazonmp3 have come into my life. My $3 a day habit isn’t a fancy cup of coffee. It’s an album. Or two. Maybe a handful of individual tracks.

Are you following Amazonmp3 on twitter? I would tell you that you should be, but it might be safer if you don’t. Every day they feature an album for around $3, sometimes less, sometimes more. And while sometimes it’s a total unknown, it’s often something pretty great. I bought David Gray’s new album (a day early!) for $3.99. The Away We Go soundtrack? New Weezer record? Phoenix? Damien Rice live? I bought them all.

It’s a problem.

I mean, it could be worse. I could be actually going out and buying these albums in the store, right? They would cost three times as much PLUS gas money PLUS all that wasteful packaging that just ends up stored somewhere. This is good for the wallet and for the environment and for my closet space. I’m actually doing a good thing here.

Plus, I’m supporting musicians. I’m sure they make a killing off the couple of dollars I’m sending their way via amazon and the record company. Weezer was headed toward unemployment before I came along and saved the day. I should get a medal.

Or at least a bigger ipod.