Songwriters Hall of Fame

Its been quite a week for me. Last week I finished mastering the record with Nathan James at Jigsaw Sound, started rehearsing for my solo stuff, did prepro on a new Valeze song, got a new roommate and began reorganizing my life. I realized this week that I am a "hyper-organized micro manager". self diagnosed ;) Seriously - I am highly OCD about odd little things like alphabetizing all my records, color coding my closets, putting all my adaptors and cables in their special places - I separate everything into little piles and end up with a big mess to clean up at the end of every day b/c I get WAY too detailed. The weird thing is - my piles don't make sense to anyone but me. Really if you tried to figure out the order of piles, you'd never get it. and to be honest, I probably would have a pretty hard time explaining it to you as well. lol. In any case - workin on that ;) So yes, much of my week was spent obsessing over how to get organized, moving shit out of my apartment, throwing things away, & making new piles ;) I think the spring cleaning illness caught me this week.

Aside from that truly exciting piece of news - the rest of my week was amazing. Songwriters Hall of Fame had an event on Tuesday where they acknowledged a bunch of up and coming writers, including myself, Matt Kanelos, Jodi Shaw, Benji from Marwood, Wendy Starland, The Dramas, and a bunch of other writers. Jimmy Webb taught a master class at the event and we all got to ask him questions, so I asked if i could come up and play a song. teehee. i figured - you only get one chance to play a song for Jimmy Webb. Plus he said something along the lines of "nowadays no one writes songs with lots of chords" - so I played "Kiss me Kiss me" - which btw is up on myspace now - check it out.

Thursday was the SHOF Annual awards ceremony. Dolly Parton, Jackson browne, Little Anthony, Mark Cohn, John Legend - all these incredible artists performed on one stage in honor of some of my favorite songwriters of all time - Bobby Weinstein, Michael Masser, Dolly, Don Kirshner and Irving Burgie (who was so unbelievably adorable... he got the entire audience singing Day-O in this campfire like version of it... it was amazing) Seeing Dolly perform was one of the highlights of my life - she's so damn lovable.

Afterwards people were milling around and I got to meet just about everyone except Dolly. The after party was a little tricky to get into, but Mr. Tony Orlando snuck me in! lol. He is seriously the shit... One of the highlights of the night for me was hanging out with Bobby Weinstein, Tony O and Toni Wine and hearing them talk about songs that they had written over the years. These are songs that inspired me to be a songwriter - these are people who changed my life and truly played a part in creating who I am today.. It was incredible to be in the presence of so many inspired individuals... I am so grateful and fortunate to have had that opportunity. Love you all...