Mountain Top Music Festival- where everyone knows your name

This past weekend we had the pleasure of playing at Mountain Top Festival at Indianhead Mountain Resort in the UP.

This was one of my favorite festivals we've played to date. Some of our favorite bands were there such as The Last Revel, Sans Souci Quartet, Horseshoes and Handgrenades, and Charlie Parr. It was amazing to see so many of these people in one place. I've noticed that everyone plays a little better when there are a lot of musicians in the room.

The festival included music, music, music, skiing, a bikini ski race, lots of jamming late into the night, and a few inches of snow the night that we were there.

As a band we're in a very interesting place right now... we're all holding our breath a bit I suppose. We've been traveling and gigging and pursuing things in our own personal lives. We've been fundraising for this album, thinking about it...taking care of flight tickets and instruments...

And yet it seems completely surreal that in three weeks we'll be getting on that plane.

A good friend wrote to me about the correlation between risk and freedom. I've been focused on how excited I am about this opportunity, and I have a feeling that the boys would agree with me on that. However, as the date draws closer, I think we're seeing other sides of it... such as the risks we're taking, what we're really investing.. not just financially, but also how we're investing our lives in each other. There's a lot of other things too-- the pressure to make the album as good as it can be (and what is good art, anyway?) to be most all honest.. to handle the stress in a healthy way, to treat each other the right way. And in the midst of all of this playing every weekend and working throughout the week, dealing with one thing after the next.

I feel incredibly blessed to be working with Dan, Tim, and Pete. We had coffee together last night and talked about the things we're approaching.. we were honest with each other, said things that needed to be said.. grounded each other and ourselves in what we're doing and how we're functioning. It was a conversation that definitely put things into perspective, that gave me affirmation, and instilled some genuine excitement about the future.

And at the end of the day I find myself reminding myself to not take myself too seriously here. There's a million different ways to look at a picture but really what I keep saying is that I just want to play music. Dan reminded me the other day, "None of this is bigger than ourselves." And honestly there were moments last week where I felt like I was falling apart...like it was bigger than me, than us. It is in these moments throughout my life that I've learned to lean a little on others and to breathe... to fly out a bit for a different and maybe broader perspective.

"He is enlightened who joins in this play knowing it as a play, for man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun."
-Alan Watts