On with the show this is it!

*** UPDATE ***

The webcast I mentioned at the bottom of this post will NOT be broadcast live tonight. It is being recorded tonight but will be broadcast sometime in the near future. You can be assured that I will post a link when that happens.

So, those of you on the other side of the globe can now go to bed at your usual bedtime.

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Holy crap... our concert is tomorrow night!

This show is going to be a blast, there's no other way to put it.

I haven't been this excited about something since I was five and waiting for my birthday. In fact, I clearly remember putting a giant calendar up on my wall and marking off the days with big Xs. I remember it so clearly because I did it last month.

Anyway, the CD is out, the band is ready and the keyboard player is psyched. Just about everyone we know is going to be there.  Can you tell I'm hyped? Is that fact that I woke up at 3:30 this morning and didn't fall back asleep again any indication?

In related news... THANK YOU to all of you who are buying our CD on our web site and those of you who are posting my widget on your blogs. We've actually sold quite a few so far! Watch for yours to arrive next week. I'll be mailing out the first batch out this afternoon.

Speaking of CDs... the local music reviewer wrote this in our paper yesterday as well.

With the exception of the fact that he didn't single me out as the single most talented musician he's ever heard, I'd say it's not too shabby.

Finally... BREAKING NEWS! I just found out this same paper is testing a new webcasting software and have asked if we would like to have our concert broadcast tomorrow night on their web site! So if everything works out you can watch us live from the comfort of your own home. How cool is that? Check back here tomorrow and if it's a go I'll update this post with the link to the broadcast.

Now, please excuse me while I go pace back and forth for the next 30 hours or so.

I so don't have the patience for this.

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2014 - a very good year

Ever since my kids were babies, I've fantasized about lying in bed on weekends all morning and getting up when I feel like it, but of course the inescapable demands of children prevent that reality. You just can't simply lie around on Saturday morning when your toddlers are up putting Fruit Loops in the toaster for breakfast.

But of course now that my kids are finally old enough to take care of themselves and leave me alone in the morning, my body decides to wake up at 7:00 instead and say:

"Hey Jeff - time to get up! We haven't peed in like 7 hours and my back is killing me from lying down all night."

Grrr.

Other than that I don't have any real complaints about this "phase" of my life (*cough* middle age). In fact, my wife and I are actually looking forward to the milestone summer of 2014 in only 7 more years. This will be the summer:

• My daughter turns 18 (See ya baby. We love you and all that good stuff but it's our time now.)
• My wife turns 50 and I can throw a huge surprise party and everyone will bring "black" gifts and it will be really funny. No really.
• I quit my job and we sell our house and move to someplace more non-dead than St. Cloud and more conducive to being 50-something hippies.
• We celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. And don't bother with the silver crap, just bring big cards filled with lots of money - you know, to help fund the health insurance that will no longer be provided by the job I used to have.
  

And speaking of middle aged, here is another one of our original tunes from The Receders called Middle Aged Man. This is a fun tongue-in-cheek tune written by Pete about becoming ... yes, you guessed it - middle aged.

Hmmm, what do ya know - at 45, it appears I'm right dead smack in the zone. Ok, scratch the "dead" part. Anyway, at least I would hope that I'm going to live to be 90.

I just wonder what time I'll be waking up then!

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Monday Night Live - Blues Don't Get Off At Night

Well, it's Monday again and time for another (and final) installment of Monday Night Live.

Even though we performed 12 songs that night, I've decided that this will be my last feature post of the Monday Night Live blog series. I'll still be posting the videos in my sidebar every Monday (under our Receders logo), but I just won't be writing about it. I sorta figured that when I only post 3x a week, using one of them to tell you a new video is online is kind of redundant.

So that being said, for this post I've decided to show you my signature tune - the very reason I used the name Harmonica Man as my screen name in the first place nearly two years ago when I started this blog.

When I chose that name I worried that people would think I was being conceited and thought of myself as "all that." No, that's not who I am. I hope by now people know what kind of person I am. I'm a middle-aged nerdy dad who just happens to LOVE playing the harmonica and am fortunate enough to be able to do it on a regular basis. I chose the name because it is an identifier of something I truly love to do that is different, and sets me apart from other people in my own special way.

And you'll know what I mean by "special" when you see this clip. This isn't your average "camp counselor playing Oh Susanna" kind of harmonica - this is dirty, gritty serious mean blues kind of stuff.

One thing you'll notice is that I work my harp pretty hard on this tune. In this style of rock/blues harmonica, you have to inhale aggressively for a long time to bend the notes and keep the riffs flowing. So when it looks like I'm suffocating and my neck is straining like a Russian weightlifter - it's because I literally am running out of air. You see, the whole time I'm playing I'm actually sucking air through the reeds of my harp, which causes my lungs to say, "Hey dude, dying here! Do you think you can get that piece of scrap metal out of the way?"

But then all I have to do is exhale and I'm good as new and ready to rock.

So, crank it up and enjoy my tune Blues Don't Get Off At Night. It starts out slow and kicks into gear later on.

Oh, but do not try this at home. I am a professional.

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The Receders Live - Got it Good, Got it Bad

Check it out. Another clip from our Monday Night Live event.

This song, Got it Good, Got it Bad was written and sung by our guitar player Pete. Yeah, he rocks.

Enjoy!

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Monday Night Live - Baby Baby

Ever since I was 5 years old music has been my life. I studied piano my entire childhood, idolized David Cassidy and the Monkees as a tween, sang in choirs from 6th grade through college and toured professionally on the road for 10 years.

Now, thanks to The Receders, I have the unbelievably good fortune to keep making music as a grownup.

Recently, we spent an evening at St. Cloud State University playing for their weekly Monday Night Live program. This is a cool TV/radio simulcast that features local (and some national) acts every Monday night (duh) and rebroadcasts the show multiple times over the week. We were lucky to be the last act in the studio before summer break and now our show is going to run multiple times per week - ALL SUMMER! Yay for us. People are either going to really like us or be really sick of us by the time school starts again.

Anyway, now that I have the YouTube thing all figured out I'd like to share some of the tunes we played that night, and I figured what better day to post these than on Monday. So, for the next several weeks, I'm going to feature a new song from The Receders every week.

This song, Baby Baby, was written by our guitar player Pete and sung by our most excellent bass player Mike. It's a standard stock blues tune but one of my personal favorites, because it gives me the opportunity to do my very most favoritest thing in the whole world - PLAY BLUES HARP!

By the way... Mike is an admitted closet reader of this blog who has yet to leave a comment, so feel free to give him a shout out.

And who knows, maybe if we all ask nice enough - we can convince him to come out of the closet.

Heh.

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The Receders Live - Turn It Around

*UPDATE...

I finally figured out how to convert my video. As Ashley said, she wants the lips IN sync next time. The good news is, this video no longer looks like a bad Japanese science fiction movie.

Now I know what I mean by this song. I really DID have to turn this around!

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Well then, here is my first ever video of our band The Receders, playing our original material for St. Cloud State's Monday Night Live program on KVSC.

I apparently need a better DVD converter because the audio and video aren't in sync here. It appears I'm going to have to actually spend some money to make this look good. At any rate, I thought it would be fun to share one of the songs we did that night. Once I get the video thing figured out, I'll post the rest of the songs about once a week.

Here I am singing Turn It Around.

Welcome to my world!

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