3 Shows and a Month's Rent

As usual, I'm way behind, so I'll get right to the recapping, and spare you any jokes. Two weekends ago I had the big show at the Palace. You know, the one I talked about here. Well, it went amazing. There were about 300-350 people there, which surprised me about as much as anybody. On Saturday, I had a great house show in Houston with some of my old college friends, and on Sunday morning I had a gig at First Baptist in Bryan. The short version is this: I didn't charge a single solitary dollar for any of the performances or any of the CD's, and somehow, after paying several musicians, and a few other expenses, I came away with enough money to pay just about all my bills for the whole month.

I know things like "calling" shouldn't be muddied up with monetary concerns, but it is cool to see that God is allowing me to pay the bills doing this. I mean, when I do worship gigs, I have contracts that guarantee that I'll make a certain amount of money. And at those gigs, I almost always charge $10-12 each for my CD's. And I hardly ever make as much money at those gigs as I did in that weekend. I don't know. It's just really encouraging.

So here are some pics from the really fun show at the palace. These were taken by Lynsey Kramer who, as you can see, is an amazing photographer. Check out her pic blog and let her know that she rules.

That last pic features Brady Redwine (on dobro) and Wesley Lunsford (background vocals), two of the super-talented dudes that helped me out that night. Craig Weaver (percussion) and Josh Smith (violin, keys) were also there, making everything beautiful. Staci sat in on a couple of tunes as well, and of course that was awesome as always. How cool is it that I have a hot wife who sings with me sometimes?

Oh, and we recorded it. I've listened to it already, and I've got at least 5-6 tracks that I'm really digging from the evening, including some older stuff. So I think I finally know what to do with those extra tracks that I recorded for the record. Some of you may remember me mentioning that a while ago. If not, the skinny is that I recorded 5 songs (some demos, some full productions) that I didn't end up using for the new project. I really like all the songs, but I just didn't think they fit the project, so I shelved them. Now that I have these live tracks, I'm pretty sure I'm going to take the holidays to tweak all of it and hopefully release some kind of odds-and-ends thing sometime in the spring. In other words, it will be a CD of 10-12 songs, about half of them brand new, and the others live versions of songs from 2-3 different CD's. Since it's kind of random, I'll make it really cheap.

I don't have pics from the other two shows, but they were both really great. Thanks to Aaron and Heather Hendrick, for helping to host/promote the show at the Palace; to Tray Mounce, Kyle Fox, and several other dudes I hung out with in college, for hosting the Saturday show in Cypress; and to Toney Upton, college pastor at FBC Bryan, for giving me a whole hour on a Sunday morning.

I'm basically done with house shows until the new year, so most of my upcoming blogs will be, shall we say, not very business-like. I've had some requests for a few stories from my weird and random past. So be looking for that within the next few days.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.