I love Neil Diamond and I love America. It was quite an honor to be asked to perform this song at The Bushwick Book Club Seattle’s event: original music inspired by Howard Zinn’s The People’s History of the United States. If I remember correctly, this performance closed out the show. I was accompanied by my good friends Wes Weddell on guitar and Ben Mish on piano. What a night. God bless America.
Take a look at this poster for an upcoming Bushwick Book Club Seattle event. Guess who designed it? That’s right, I did! My favorite part is when the bird stands on the stack of books and doesn’t move. He just stands there, completely still, forever…
I brought up an interesting point – stillness. In a world full of video games, and television, and professional wrestlers, and cats, all constantly on the move, whirling all around us everywhere we go, there is something poetic about having to intentionally stop moving to fully appreciate something. So even if that something is just a poster of a bird standing on some books, the combined stillness of both the image and the viewer set to the busy background of the outside world helps make the overall visual experience more interesting.
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I had a lot of fun the other day performing with The Bushwick Book Club Seattle (just take a look at the video!). For those of you who don’t know, The Bushwick Book Club Seattle is a Seattle based non-profit that puts on these awesome book inspired music events (they do lots of other stuff too). The basic concept for each show is:
- a book is chosen
- artists (and audience members) read the book
- artists write an original song inspired by the book
- artists perform their song for a live audience (who have hopefully read the book too)
- audience claps