performing

About a Musician

by Gerrit Walter a.k.a. The Song & Dance Brigade

Gerrit Walter


I am kindly asked to write something about my musical life, which has now spanned several decades. No one had ever asked me that before. Well, I have been making music since I was 13 years old. My mother taught me how to play the guitar, at least the rudimentary playing she mastered. That was when I was thirteen.

Since then, I’ve been playing the guitar. It’s the instrument I desire in terms of beauty, sound, and challenge. In school, they told me I couldn’t sing. I did it anyway.

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Getting Back My Wings

by Jessica DeSimone of Warren Teagarden and the Good Grief

Warren Teagarden and the Good Grief
Photo by Mr. Dodgy

Since I can remember, I’ve been performing. My earliest memories are dancing around my childhood home, singing along to my mom’s records, or doing what I can only describe as a cobra pose inside the giant planter boxes at our local shopping mall, pretending I was Ariel from The Little Mermaid. I used to feel like I could fly when I sang, like I had tiny wings sprouting from my back.

As I got older, my grandma taught me how to play piano, back when my hands were so tiny I couldn’t hit an octave. In school, I added choir, theater, and dance team to my repertoire, and I was sure I would be a big theater star one day. But of course, pragmatism won, and I went to college for something far less fun and ended up in a career even less fun, leaving a part of myself behind.

For years, my creative self was suffocated. I was dying to tap back into the freedom that came with being on stage, that rare out-of-body experience when you get to leave yourself behind and become something else entirely.

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Music as Magick. Magick as Music

by Dusty Santamaria

Music as Magick. Magick as Music. by Dusty Santamaria
The Sun looked like a prison break. I woke up in a suburb of Seattle and stared drowsily out of a stranger’s bedroom window. My wife was talking to an admirer of hers around the scattered ashes of a campfire from the night before. There was a mysterious text message from an unknown number on the blue screen of a broken iPhone. It was clear that the veils to what folks call the spirit world were perceptibly thin. Little hints of future memory flickered with mischievous honesty through the cracked wallpaper in the shadows of the room.

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