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Dear Friends,
I trust you had a blessed Thanksgiving Day and didn’t get into any political arguments. Once again, since Thanksgiving is a holiday uniquely tethered to a Thursday, the Black Friday edition of The Square Inch will be taken up with, well, thanksgivings.
Last year’s reflections were pretty comprehensive, as I recall. So maybe this year I’ll narrow some things down. What am I thankful for as I look back over 2023?
Let’s start with tonight.
Tonight I have the privilege of taking to the stage to perform a two-hour concert with my two eldest daughters. This is the culmination (or, perhaps, initiation?) of what has easily been the greatest blessing of 2023—perhaps one of the top five blessings of my entire life if you include marriage and fathering three girls. The Bailey Band, as we are called, is the blossoming of decades of preparation and work—well, decades for me, anyway. Years and years for the girls. I have written and played songs for 30 years, and the thought never really occurred to me that I would finally figure out how to really do it well just when my own daughters’ musical competence and musical IQs began to burst into bloom. It was pure serendipity. And their skills and contributions have spurred my own creativity to whole new levels.
I am thankful that we were able, this year alone, to write and compose enough material (“keepers”!) to nearly cover two full-length studio albums—which, if we can find the time and money, we plan to do. Mostly because of my long experience, I currently do the bulk of the songwriting, but it is so fun to have this platform provide space for the girls to work on and develop their own contributions. The final melodies are Bailey’s department; Olivia never just plays the chords of a song—she painstakingly orchestrates breathtaking and technical piano pieces; and our arrangements are completely collaborative. I love and am thankful for the technical achievements; you might think a band is a matter of an ensemble just playing chords off of a lead sheet, but I can say that in a Bailey Band performance, every single note on every instrument has been intentionally plotted out and executed. It is a lot of work, but the polish of the final product is simply worth it.
Most young up-and-coming bands pay their dues playing cover songs—and I’m not knocking that!—but I am thankful that tonight we’ll play twenty and only three were written by someone else. 2023 was that good to us. We play covers only when we want to, not because we have to. And, of course, the key to this strategy is that your music has to be such that people don’t feel any urge to leave the show early. (We like to think it unlikely.)
I am thankful for extraordinary tools. As regular readers know, 2023 brought me the gift (literally a gift!) of a new and absolutely elite guitar—my custom dreadnought built by Rebecca Urlacher. And as the year comes to a close, Rebecca is so very close to delivering Bailey’s new instrument, for which Bailey has long scrimped and saved because hers is not a gift. Adirondack Spruce and West African Ebony. Behold!
My Hufflepuff girl got a guitar with the perfect colors, that’s for sure. I cannot wait for us to perform onstage with these “twins”!
The trouble with Thanksgiving posts is that they can be redundant year after year. A friend recently mentioned, however, that that is rather the point. Thankfulness for blessings you hope would be redundant.
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