setting my dials to "rock"

I played a show here in town last night.  My friend Cole Slivka hosts a weekly night over at the Family Wash in East Nashville called Short Sets.  It's exactly what it sounds like.  A handful of performers fill the roster each week and do about five songs apiece, or twenty-five minutes of music (which, scarily, can be comprised of what may be only one song).  Anyhow, I shared a bill with my pal Josh Fuson and his friend Patrick Rickleton.  The night was book-ended with performances by Cole herself and the owner of the joint's most recent project, The Carpetbaggers.  Jamie's great, and not nearly as visible as he should be in the music scene around here... But, that's a rant for a different day.

I've been exploring the whole being-a-grown-up thing lately, in the area of playing with just regular folk.  By regular folk, I mean people with whom I have no familial or friendship-based history.  After an eternity of playing music with my closest of kin, I decided it was time to try out the Other Thing.  I have to say, it's pretty great.  Sure, the feels are all different, and there's no mind-reading involved (was there ever?), but there's something to be said for having short and sweet interactions with your band that exclude side dramas about anyone's personal life.  I've been very lucky on both ends of the spectrum, however.  Both my Family Band and my group of Grown-Ass Strangers are killer players, so I've never been without brilliant cohorts.  I usually feel like I'm the one who needs to polish my chops, just to keep up.

I learned to play guitar and write songs while playing in a band with my brother and oldest friend.  We called ourselves 33 Slade, and spent about eight years terrorizing the very limited rock scene of the Boston area.  My brother Bo Bertold played drums and my pal Levi Fuller rocked the bass while I sang and did some stuff on/to electric guitars.  I had next-to-no inhibitions, and thought nothing of playing super loud, fuzzy guitar and yelling at the top of my lungs.  For years.  On top of that, I was also wearing war paint and almost nothing else.  I love that girl that I was back then.  She was a total bad ass in every way.  Yes, she may have been a touch insane, but she had one thing that I sometimes lack: guts.  Somewhere along the Maturity Pipeline, fear gets introduced to our psyches.  In some areas, this is good.  Perhaps we no longer drop into twelve foot skateboarding ramps, ensuring that all of our bones will still be in tact by the day's end.  We pay our bills on time, now caring whether or not our credit score is any good.  We go to sleep at a reasonable hour at least a few nights a week, because our jobs matter somewhat now...  The basics.  But, for me, it also meant trading in the war paint and the Tube Screamer for an acoustic guitar and a sundress.  I'm not sure why or how that happened, but it surely happened.  I went from being Buick Prentice to Buick Audra, and that change was physiological.

I didn't start playing until I was twenty.  That goes ditto for my songwriting.  You hear about these twelve-year-olds who are already running their own bands and playing all kinds of instruments...  I'm here to tell you: I wasn't one of those kids.  At twelve, I was playing clarinet in the school band, obsessing about my then boyfriend, Jay Murray, and listing to an eclectic mix of music that ranged from the Chili Peppers to The Deele (nothing has changed there).  I wasn't sitting in my room with a Strat playing Metallica riffs, I promise.  I've actually still never done that, and probably never will.  (Who cares about Metallica riffs?)  Because I'm self-taught, I oddly never went through that phase of learning a bunch of songs by other artists on guitar.  Fifteen years in, I've still only played a handful of songs that I didn't write.
They are:
1. 'Wildflowers' by Tom Petty
2. 'Would' by Alice in Chains
3. 'About A Girl' by Nirvana
4. 'Round of Blues' by Shawn Colvin
5. 'Skyway' by The Replacements
6. 'Weakness' by McRad
7. 'If It Isn't Love' by New Edition (Jimmy Jam/Terry Lewis)
Oh, and a weird (maybe terrible) version of 'This Little Light of Mine'.  No comment on that last one.  In each of my "covers", I've COMPLETELY re-written the guitar part, if there was one to start with at all.  (New Edition's arrangements are pretty devoid of guitar, typically.)  I have no idea how to listen to and lift the exact part that is played on the albums, and I'll take that even further: I don't care.
It's art.  It's there to be interpreted.  At least, that's my opinion.  I say this to admit that I've been basically winging it on my instrument since the beginning.

When 33 Slade finally laid down the guns, and I became Buick Audra, I lost and found a few things.   I explored an entirely new sound that involved layers of acoustic instruments, vocal harmonies, and winding melodies.  That was really the point at which I became a producer.  While I had co-produced the Slade's second album, Harmonies For One with Matt Squire, it wasn't until I was on my own that I allowed myself to run with every idea I'd ever had.  I started co-producing my solo music with an old friend, and we had a blast doing things that we'd never allowed ourselves to do before, in our respective rock-based pasts.  It swept me up and drove me to get educated about the worlds of Americana, bluegrass and folk.  I've been eating that information for breakfast for years.  I've since performed with ukulele, mandolin, autoharp and an assortment of acoustic guitars on my own recordings.  I even moved to Nashville, for sobbing out loud.  But, on the flip side, I have a very distant and cold relationship with my electric guitars, my Ibanez Analag Delay pedal and my amps.  They've just been sitting around probably harboring major resentments towards the Taylor guitar that has been so prominently in my favor since it came into the fold in 2006.  Who can blame them?

Well, life just gave me some pretty amazing opportunities to try something else for a while.
A. My beloved Taylor isn't long for this relationship, I'm afraid.  She's being re-claimed by a gift horse any day, and we can barely look at one another.
2. My lead guitar player wasn't able to make my show last night, and I felt suddenly inspired to embrace the moment with some of Buick Prentice's piss and vinegar.

For five years, I've played the Taylor live.  If I've played with a band, I've played acoustic rhythm and had some fancier player than me do all of the electric stuff.  I know where that came from, too.  It came from working with a particular musician who made me feel like I didn't play very well, surely not as well as him.  And I believed it...  Until now.
When my guitar player canceled last night, I just snapped into an old mode and got out my 1960 Fender Duo-Sonic that has been in it's guitar case, untouched, for literally six years.  We talked it out, and she decided to forgive me for the night.  I played with only Tim Marks on electric bass and Paul Griffith on drums, and we ruled.  We were loud, we were happy and we were playing rock music.
I think I smiled through the entire set.  Everything in my mind and body was saying, "Oh, right... We know how to do this."  We want more.

I dare say that I'm starting to "get it".  I have such resistance around certain lessons in life, especially when they hurt, but once in a grand while I actually get the clarity around the real message.  It's time to change, again.  I've made the beautiful records with my loved ones, with hollow wooden instruments of all shapes and sizes.  I've told the stories of those relationships and how they shaped who I am today.  I have loved that Taylor guitar and all she has taught me about myself as a writer and a musician.  And now it's time to move on to the next chapter.
And friends, the next chapter involves getting loud.  Stay tuned.

Thanks for listening,
buick audra prentice

P.S.  Here are the songs I played last night, and the dress I wore, which is made of a vintage tablecloth (dyed peach by me) and a dish towel.

younger all the time

strong as you think

northern star

brilliant mistakes

your best friend

 la front

 la back

 la pal, Josh Fuson

la bodice

 la skirt