Last Thursday Art Premiers

This thursday I have two month long Art shows opening in two great Portland locations.

Spice Road Market: This will be a solo show at the very cool new Spice Road Market on the corner of 16th and Alberta. If you like to cook interesting food this could be a great resource for you. They have every spice seemingly imaginable, and Todd will be more than happy to give you a hand in deciding the perfect spice to suit your needs. The artist's reception will be from 6-9 on Thursday March 27.

Kelly's Olympian: I will be showing a handful of recent pieces in the side room. It's located between 4th and 5th street downtown on SW washington. They feature month long art showings with two featured artists. They also have a local record label that rotates each month and they are in charge of hooking up music for the month. The other featured artist for the month of April is Ken Rougeau, Jr. you can see his online gallery here. He does photo manipulation - a lot of very cool works there. I'm excited to see how things turn out.

Tune of the Week - Found -version 1

So here is the first attempt at my mission to document and track the progress of songs I'm writing. As I said before this will be a mutli-purpose tool. Another thing this will be interesting to see is how playing songs and their different versions will be respective of my moods or states of mind when they are recorded. It will be an interesting experiment for me, and for now I'm banking on little to no readers of this blog so I can record whatever I want.

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Recorded Tune Info: "Found"

This is my first recording of the song. I have been working on writing and composing this song for a few days now. I recorded it in a home studio with a poor microphone positioned in front of my acoustic guitar, "the mistress", as I played. It was recorded friday afternoon after a long week of bidding at work and a couple beers at home.

Yes, I recognize the background noise and the low sound quality. I haven't had time to do a good set up, but I want to start tracking the progress of how this song comes together.


The song is hosted on Media fire, follow the link and you can download the 1 min 40 sec. song "found"


http://www.mediafire.com/?pxwjlyy9y22

Stage 2

A lot seems to be happening quickly up here. I'm very intrigued by the little bit of Portland that I have come to know in these past months. Musically First Name Michael has been going strong. As March is nearly over, we played 5 shows this month!! Here 21 days have passed and I have come from a stage nervous newbie to fairly confident guitar player of a band that really has some good things going for it. We all play well together, and have a great time. I seem to be noticing that people who have no expectations for us are generally impressed or at least we out do their expectations. Maybe we are just un-assuming or a strange group of dudes but bottom line is when it's go time, we get after it. Check out some of these events if you are interested in seeing some local talent.

15th Street Pub, Vancouver Washing - Great bar w/good stage set up.
Open Mic Night - Hawthorne Balcony (bar attached to the hawthorne theater)
Ash Street Saloon - Downtown bar just south Burnside and 3rd

For now we have a few weeks off then we'll be hitting the stages around the area pretty hard for a few months. Hopefully we'll have the album actually recorded and available for purchase by our next gig. We are getting there! Ryan does a great job keeping up the myspace page. If you want to try to catch a show the calander there has all the information you could need.

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I have come up with an idea for this blog. It's going to take a while to get going, but if you keep an eye on this blog it could be an interesting tool. I'm planning on doing a weekly, bi-weekly, monthly jam. Mostly what I plan to do is at the end of every week or whatever I'll record a riff I've been hanging on, or a new song I'm working on writing. As this blog develops it could prove to be an interesting tool to track the way I develop a song. Maybe it will help take a critcial look at the songs developments later and have some magnificent revelation... or it'll be crap and this blog will have been expired due to the internet turning against people and for once.. making people work for the internet.

Have a nice weekend

First Name Michael - First two live appearances!

First Name Michael in it's latest state has now performed live twice. Both times have had good response and overcome some...interesting (to say the least) situations.



Jakes, Olympia Washington, March 2, 2008

The first show was Queerfest, at a bar in Olympia Washington. This was a long strange night. The beautiful Miss Kimberly and I met up with our Bass player Bill Rensmith at about 4 o'clock sunday night and rumbled up to Olympia. After loading gear onto the stage we got some drinks and waited for the opening act. And waited. And waited... and waited. About an hour and a half late , a singer songwriter came on and nervously sang about a dozen songs.


Next Up was Tin Sprocket, who played a real good energetic set. A 6 pc. group that included your standard singer, guitar player, bass player and drummer then had two ladies singing back up vox. Great set all together, as a guitar player I must say their guitar player had some serious skills. Nice work man.


Third to take stage was the amazing 3 pc. group Audrey Howard and the Hussies, I must say I was blown away by the leadership guitar and vox abilities. She had everything dialed and knew how to use her guitar and equipment as if it was the feet she walked on since she was born. The band as a whole was amazingly tight, and all together played an incredible set.


We were fourth and our set started two hours after it was supposed to. We ran through our 9 songs in just under 40 minutes. I had some volume problems here and there, most of it seems to be logistics. I need to get some different equipment and get a hold of my pedals and their settings a little better. Overall we played pretty good, especially considering it was my first stage appeance and all.


The long sunday night ended for me, strung out, at 3 am talking to my brother online about what it's like to be on stage. It's incredible. Work at 7 the next morning however... was not.



15th Street Pub, Vancouver Washington, March 8, 2008

The second gig was this past saturday. The 15th street pub is a great small venue for a band like us. They had an awesome stage set up and brought in a good crowd for a saturday night. We were supposed to go on second, but the opener had to share equipment with the last act so we ended up playing first. It worked out well as a lot of my friends who were in attendence had quite the drive back to corvallis after our set.


We played and sounded great. I had one mishap when I stepped on a cord that unplugged from one of my pedals. With so many chords running around and it being dark it was difficult to quickly fix the problem. Another example of why I need a solid pedal board of sorts as I missed the first half of the song due to this problem.


From what I can tell people who have never heard of us started to get into our music, it's encouraging for us moving forward. If we can get new comers interested in us we can start to develop a following which is kind of the first step of being an established act. We can start nailing down some cooler venues to play, overall seems things are going really well.



New songs from our last performance are now on the myspace page!! We have our third show this week, then we'll take a small week long break before hitting the town hard in April!! Full calander, as always, is available on the myspace page.


Cheers Portland!

The Colors of Music

I recently have finished up the second set of my Colors Of Music Series. They are currently getting their final touches then it will be off to the East Burn for showings.



This series includes:



"Roadhouse Blues" - Jim Morrison



"A little bit of Green" - Elvis Presley



"Purple Haze" - Jimi Hendrix




Rock and Roll man, Rock and Roll

Each peice is 3' x 3' asking price is $350 if you are curious...

First Name Michael

So we are under two weeks until the first Gig. From the little I know we are playing a set somewhere in the line-up of 5 or 6 bands on a sunday night at Jakes on 4th in Olympia, Washington. We had rehearsal last night and we are increasingly tighter every practice. Next week we are going to attempt to get a good live recording that can be mastered to be album ready. There are a couple things that need to come together still but we are quickly making headway.

Last night we actually moved on from our standard playlist of Ryan's original songs. We are practicing a few covers because towards the end of march we have a 3 hour gig that will require we play more music than we have been practicing. The guys have been working on a few great songs to cover and then put together some medley's that will be very fun and entertaining to see.

To find out more about current and upcoming shows hit the myspace page. Add us as friends if you haven't already!!

FIRST NAME MICHAEL

Professional Status

This past weekend marked a milestone in my life. I have considered myself an amateur artist now for a few years but this weekend I have reached a goal that allows me to consider myself a professional. I sold my Frank Zappa painting to a woman who is going to make her husband one happy Frank Zappa Fan. Very exciting!!

I'm still working (slowly) towards a website, biz cards and the whole maketing shabanga to get really set up to sell art here in Portland. Craigs list has allowed me a lot of great leads and showings in restaurants, cafe's, bars and design studios but my goal is real showings at reputable galleries. Having this sale was a push in the right direction.

I've only been here a total of 4 months, watch out Portland.