Getting ready for India! Vaccinated and everything 😉
Two weeks from now, I’ll be on a plane headed to India! It’s getting real, in great part due to the help from my lovely friends who donated money to make this trip possible.
So excited for my first solo show in a long time — a send-off party with Russell James Pyle! Russ is headed to his month-long residency at Big Bend (wow!) and I’ll be heading off to my month-long trip to India for an intensive yoga course.
Plus, this guitar is almost finished. Maybe I’ll be able to play it live for the first time! *fingers crossed*
Things have been pretty quiet around here lately at the Happy Gland Ranch—we’re slowly putting the next album together and just got back from Austin where we played our very first house concert. It was a great show and we can’t wait to do more! If you want us to play at your house, let us know for sure. Email me at gland@sageharrington.com and we’ll chat. 😉
Plus, I’ve been in yogaland, getting my 200 hour yoga teacher training completed and looking for places to teach regularly. 😉
I wanted to let you know about a show I have coming up with two lovely ladies: Meredith Wilder and Kristina Jacobsen. It’ll be…drum roll please…the second ever house show I’ve done! It’s bound to be a sweet, tender, funny, intimate little songwriter in the round show (i.e. not a Happy Gland Band show, lol!).
Please email me (gland@sageharrington.com) to RSVP, and I’ll send you the address to Kristina’s house in the South Valley where the concert will be held.
Apparently we have a lot of stuff. So says my sister, who helped us schelp it out of the house and into the vehickles then out of the vehickles and into the new house. I wouldn’t know. It seems like it’s an appropriate amount of stuff to have? But I do kind of have to stumble over the second thrift store juicer to get to the kitchen sink, maybe that’s a problem?
Jared left for Africa again this week, and before that we were still unpacking boxes and boxes of stuff from the move, so we were too preoccupied with where to put the bath towels and the underarm deodorant to have made a Happy Gland video last month. I know, we were disappointed too. Also, where is my salt rock again?
In other news, there have been not-so-secret rumblings of Sage launching her own Patreon page sometime soon. *GASP* I know, we’re excited, too.
This holiday weekend, the Harringtons shall journey northward in the direction of Mt. Rushmore to gaze upon the visages of the four dead white men. In a caravan we shall roam the I25, with nothing except hummus, baby carrots, homemade granola bars, a ukulele, suitcases packed to busting, and each other. So, really, we’ll have everything we could ask for and more.
And finally, the dogs were bathed last evening. One was shorn. Daphne is now lion-shaped. With little curly tail and paw tendrils.
With love and tiny dog cuddles,
Sage (and Jared)
This guy.In our yard, this exotic jungle tree grows.
General Fro, destroyer of worlds. And potted plants.
Jared and I are excited to try something new. We want to do house concerts! What does this mean? We want to come to your house (if invited, of course—we won’t, like, come to your place without chatting with you about it first) and play music for a group of your friends.
Want to host a house concert? Email me!(Subject line: I want to host a house concert!)
We’ve heard this is way more fun and fulfilling than club shows, and I’d wager my first-born chihuahua that’s true.
What would you need to host a Sage and Jared’s Happy Gland Band house concert?
A “house”: The concert could actually be held in a living room, backyard, garage, photo/dance/art studio, any place that people could gather and sit to enjoy a concert.
A minimum of 20 adult friends to come: This show will be an exclusive private event for you and your community of friends, neighbors, and family.
What’s not required? A bunch of money. We’ll do our concerts on a donation basis. It doesn’t have to cost you anything to host a concert!
If you’re interested in hosting a house concert please email me (subject line: I want to host a house concert!)—we’re so excited about this and can’t wait to get started.
The gazebo in Old Town Albuquerque, where the “American Idol” auditions took place, and where I have played ohsomany times. Yeah, it felt weird to be there on different terms. Photo courtesy of Joel Kramer.
I’m not sure if the internet needs my American Idol audition story. (This American Idol audition story already lives online, after all.) I don’t know if you need me to recount a day I spent mostly standing in a line that was not as long as it would have been in, say, 2004. I mean, they brought the American Idol bus to Albuquerque? As one of my friends said, “Their ratings really must have fallen if they’re coming here.”
My mom was the one who told me about the American Idol audition. Of course my mom thinks I should go to the American Idol audition.
Tons of people think that American Idol is one of the only surefire ways to a career in music. Ain’t necessarily so, and I’m assuming you also think there’s more than one way to skin a cat. Er, earn a living making songs.
But I kept thinking about it. I thought about how Amanda Palmer promoted a contestant of The Voice in her blog. And I thought, hey, if Amanda Palmer is endorsing a certain lady competing in a teevee show and if other independent artists are using it as a platform to increase their visibility, it might be worth looking into.
So I read the gross waiver they make you sign. They say things like this, but in legalspeak:
We are allowed to say defamatory things about you!
We may require you to sign other creepy documents!
We own any video taken of you and will pay no royalties on any original material you perform!
So this is where the hey-I’m-an-indie-I’m-in-control-of-everything-including-my-extremely-small-mailing-list thing butts up against corporate-town. Who’s in charge, if they let you in? Not you.
Oh, and they also encourage you to bring the waiver yourself, because they have “limited supplies” of it at the audition site. Bullshit. They want to cut down on their paper costs. I can’t blame them for this. I want them to cut down on their paper costs, too, but not for the benefit of their coffers, but for the benefit of, you know, the earth.
I decided to go in spite of this.
I got up early and stood in a line in the rain, feeling waves and waves of nervousness crash down upon me. This happened because I am no expert at taking auditions. I hardly ever feel nervous performing in my little town of Albuquerque anymore—our community is so small, and the venues I play at so familiar, that I can hardly ever get my adrenal glandsworked up, ironically enough. So it was nice to practice managing that type of anxiety. I don’t know that I did that great of a job.
At the end of the day four of us were there at the head of the line and we were—gasp!—sent before one of the two ominous tents where the—what to call them?—magical glowing beings sat, who bestow upon you the blessing of Talented! or Not Talented!
You are a singer. You stand on painted tape. You step forward and hand your creepy paperwork to the magical auditioner being, who is really just a person. The other three step back onto their strips of tape. You stay, plink your ukulele, sing this song, and you quickly realize that you don’t know jack shit about auditioning.
I chose exactly the wrong song, I think, to sing in front of exactly the wrong judge, (need I say this next part?) in exactly the wrong competition.
Of course I spent the next day or two mulling over the auditioner man’s comments. “You have a soft, pretty voice, but we are looking for more developed voices…” What does this even mean? What am I supposed to do with this information? I tried to take it as constructive criticism, but I really don’t know if I even should, when it’s certainly a canned phrase he uses endlessly in his line of work.
Here’s the moral of my story: I realized that if I actually want to audition for something again, I gotta get my shit together. I gotta practice and talk to people who know what the fuck they’re doing. I gotta go to auditions, and take them, and get rejected, and then do more. This iswhat actors doall the time.
So, I’m not sure if I’ll want to, or feel the need to, do a cattle call audition like this again. Honestly, makingDIY videosin my home is probably a better use of my time. But if I do, at least I’ll know a little bit better what I so didn’t know this time around.
