From: owner-believers-digest@smoe.org (believers-digest) To: believers-digest@smoe.org Subject: believers-digest V11 #75 Reply-To: believers@smoe.org Sender: owner-believers-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-believers-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk believers-digest Tuesday, August 21 2007 Volume 11 : Number 075 In Today's believer's digest: ----------------- The report from New Song, part 1 ["Tracy J. Wells" ] The report from New Song, part 2 ["Tracy J. Wells" ] The report from New Song, part 3 ["Tracy J. Wells" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:09:00 -0400 From: "Tracy J. Wells" Subject: The report from New Song, part 1 Ok, so I tried to send this last Monday after my sister and I got back from the New Song Academy/Festival in West Virginia, but I've heard through some of my "sources" that apparently this didn't go through to the list. So I'm going to re-send it in pieces..... (could someone let me know if this comes through by emailing me personally? thanks!) Tracy - ---------------- Hi everyone, Well, my sister Ashley and I are back from New Song. WOW. What an experience! My sister's first real experience playing her songs for anyone other than at small gigs she got (or really, created) through family and work-related stuff, and what an inspiring experience for her. It was great fun for me to just to get to be there -- I told Ashley that because of her, I "got to be cool" and hang out with all these amazing musicians -- hehe -- because otherwise I'd have had no justifiable reason for being there, seeing as to how I'm not a songwriter myself! I joked that I was Ashley's "roadie"... I did drive her up there, all 8 hours from South Carolina! Anyway, so I didn't experience most of the classes and whatnot, obviously, but Susan did let me sit in on a session she was teaching on Friday about singing and I got to watch her critique and coach all these folks on the expressiveness of their singing... and WOW. It was AMAZING the difference she could make with people in just a few minutes. It was interesting to see the various mental tricks/images she'd tell them to get them to think of the song in a different way, or to be more expressive with it, etc. I was sitting at the back of the room doing film work stuff on my laptop and I'd often tune out when they were playing through their songs the first time, but after she'd given them a little coaching, I had to STOP working and LISTEN when they played to the second time because it was THAT compelling. Really amazing. And of course she did it all with her classic humor and high-energy and kindness and generosity of spirit -- I believe she had everyone in the room won over! (People stayed long after the session was supposed to be over to listen while she took the time to finish hearing from every single person in the room -- probably nearly 30 people.) Friday night there was a jam session at the campground that was tons of fun... getting all these talented musicians in one place with a few mics and amps and a few cans of beer, and you have the recipe for some major fun. I even joined in on various percussion instruments of sorts after Susan would come by and shove some maraca into my hand or something. Susan even picked up a flute and proceeded to play the same 2 notes throughout an entire song... hilarious. Saturday night the official concert was A-MA-ZING. They were charging $25 admission, but Ashley was saying that they could have charged $50 or even $75 for the concert -- it was incredible. (Funny story -- so people had sort of seen me around all weekend, even though I wasn't a student at the academy, and so when I went to buy my ticket, this one guy who was selling tickets were like, "oh, no, you don't have to pay... you're with Susan, right?" And I was like, "Um... well..." and he was like, "You're her road manager, right?" And I burst out laughing and was like, "No, not quite!!" LOL -- so they took my money. Hahahahahahahahaha -- watch out, Jane!!!! ;o) .... to be continued .... HELP! owner-believers@smoe.org Send mail to believers@smoe.org Susan's CD's are available on your desktop at World Cafe CDs http://worldcafecds.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:13:05 -0400 From: "Tracy J. Wells" Subject: The report from New Song, part 2 Continuing with the New Song report, picking up with the concert Saturday night... - ----------------- Anyway, back to the concert -- Ashley said it was one of the best concerts she's ever seen, and it was indeed FANTASTIC. The show opened with performances from the top 3 artists in the New Song Academy contest -- the runners-up Sally Spring (www.sallyspring.com) - - from Winston-Salem, NC and Jeff Ellis - from Huntington, WV, who recently got back from serving in the army in Iraq and his new CD is called '"A Front Seat for the End of the World." Jeff played a song he wrote about the WV miners who were killed last year in the mine explosion -- it's called "The Men of Sago Mine" and you can hear it on his MySpace page: http://www.myspace.com/jeffellismusic -- and winner R.J. Cowdery -- she was AWESOME -- she could really pick that guitar! The song she played was "I Believe" -- you can hear it on her MySpace page http://www.myspace.com/rjcowdery Ashley was saying she could totally hear this being the next big mainstream country hit. Susan was saying that "the way RJ writes is the way America talks to itself." After the New Song winners, we heard from a group of local kids who had participated in one of the songwriting workshops with one of the concert organizers... this group of kids wrote a song called "Go with the flow" and they performed it for us -- so cute!!!!!! The lyrics to the chorus were something like "Go with the flow, go with the flow... because if you try to fight against it, you'll go the other way. GO with the flow, cause if you go with the flow, your own imagination can take you away." SO CUTE!!!!! After the kiddies, the New Song faculty -- Susan, Jason Bloom, Craig Bickhardt, and Devon Sproule -- as well as New Song co-founder Ron Sowell -- played in the round. WOW -- what amazing talent -- and I always love "in the round" concerts because they all start jamming on each other's songs. (This was my mini-Falcon Ridge substitute for this year since I didn't get to go to Falcon Ridge this summer.) By far, the best part of the whole evening was when Ron Sowell's turn came up again toward the end of the concert and he said he'd just pass and let the faculty each play another song, and then one of the academy students yelled out from the audience, "Ron, do your tomato song!!" Apparently this was something he'd played in one of the workshops, sort of a joke song, but everyone loved it so then all the other students started yelling, "tomato, tomato!!!" And so he gave in and proceeded to do this blues song called "I luvs my tomato" in which he talks about how you can touch and eat all the other veggies, but don't mess with his tomato cause he gets really upset cause I LUVS MY TOMATO (you have to like, SHOUT this line). HILARIOUS. He was getting red in the face (Ashley was like, "he was as red as a tomato!" as he got so into this song) and all the other musicians started jammin' out -- beating on things, strumming their guitars -- Susan got up and ran to the piano and was going to town back there with a blues piano riff -- it was all I could do not to get up and start dancing around. It was AWESOME. The whole concert was an emotional roller coaster -- from that silly and ridiculous fun of the tomato song to poignant, touching songs that made us cry to Jason Bloom jamming out to a song he wrote that was on Scrubs and Friday Night Lights called "Show me the honey" (totally mainstream pop with RIDICULOUS sexual undertones -- totally not the type of song you usually hear in a "folk" setting!)... just amazingly eclectic and tons of fun. And sorry this whole commentary hasn't been entirely Susan-centered, since this IS a Susie fan list -- but let's see... in the concert she played "Why is Your Heaven So Small," "Sunday Mornings," the Our Father, and finished with "I Can't Be New." And she was TOTALLY digging the piano they had on stage there -- a full-sized grand Fazioli that someone was saying cost $180,000!!!! After the show she was still up there on the stage just playing all kinds of things on the piano and we went up to talk to her and she looked up at us with her impish grin and yelped, "Look!! Susie new toy!!!!!!!!! Susie BIG new toy!!!" Hilarious. During the show Craig Bickhardt was saying that before the show Susan had been in there playing for a LONG time while everyone was getting ready for the performance. He was like, "I was privileged enough to be sitting up there in the back of the theater while Susan sat there and went through like, every song she knows on the piano." He looked at Susan and goes, "Man, I owe you some money for that." ..... to be continued .... HELP! owner-believers@smoe.org Send mail to believers@smoe.org Susan's CD's are available on your desktop at World Cafe CDs http://worldcafecds.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:14:52 -0400 From: "Tracy J. Wells" Subject: The report from New Song, part 3 ok, this is the final bit of the email! - ------------- After the show we went out to a bar with Susan and the rest of the faculty crew as well as some of the students... and they were passing a guitar around and people were doing some of their songs... and then one of the other students who had taken a real interest in my sister was like, "Pass that over to this little girl here. She's going to be a star!" My sister then played two of her songs for them (Sinner's Blues and One Big Us... you can hear them at her MySpace, although the recordings there are pretty old and she sounds significantly better now -- http://www.myspace.com/ashleywellsmusic) and they LOVED them -- especially Sinner's Blues. She had people coming up to her all weekend saying how much they liked her voice and after the Saturday night episode, she had several people (including Susan) making contacts for her with people in the music business who could help her record something. She was thrilled. I've been telling her for about a year now that she's really got some talent, and so have our friends and relatives, but to hear it from people IN the industry was just the encouragement and motivation she needed to really start pursing this. Ok, I'm almost done now, but one final note -- one other other folks at the academy was Dennis Caraher from Northampton, MA (http:// www.denniscaraher.com) -- he was one of the finalists in the New Song Academy contest, and WOW. The two songs he did were polar opposites but both simply fabulous. The first one was called "Kindergartner in Love" ("I was attracted to the first girl I knew, kindergarten crush/ I was struck by cupid so I called her stupid and I gave her half of my lunch / I was never so happy when she threw it back at me, so I gave her a shove / She was all I wanted, I was in nirvana, kindergartner in love." HILARIOUS. PERFECT.) Then his second song was an AMAZING, POWERFUL, ARRESTING song called "Beyond the Blue".... I can't even describe it because any description would rob it of its power. You just have to HEAR it. Unfortunately... he told us it's not recorded yet! My sister and I were both saying how we felt we NEEDED that song. Just THINKING about it afterwards would bring tears to our eyes! But anyway, defnitely check out his CD, "Radio Boy." "Kindergartner in Love" is on there, and has TRACY GRAMMER on backup vocals and fiddle and JIM HENRY on mandolin, dobro and guitar. Ashley and I listened to it most of the way home on the long drive. REALLY excellent stuff. Just had to give him a shout-out in case some of you weren't familiar with his stuff... Alright, that's it for now, folks. Thanks for listening. It was an incredible weekend. Makes me wish I was a songwriter!! Hope you all are well! Tracy HELP! owner-believers@smoe.org Send mail to believers@smoe.org Susan's CD's are available on your desktop at World Cafe CDs http://worldcafecds.com ------------------------------ End of believers-digest V11 #75 ******************************* ------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------- -------------------------- This has been a posting from the Susan Werner believers-digest To unsubscribe send mail to Majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe believers-digest" in the body of the message