On That Note

Josh Kincheloe, lead singer of the high-energy rock band, Glasslands, met me at a local coffee shop to chat this week. We each drove down from separate mountain houses to talk about music and his band—the other members of which are scattered all over the country. In...

When you open yourself to something new, opportunities seem to open themselves to you. At least, that’s how I felt when I met Sarah Bauer at a Conifer coffee shop to hear about her musical journey, including her band, Sarah Bauer Band, and Grass on the Gulch Bluegrass...

Young motherhood was an interesting phase for me, having ultimately created... life!—yet otherwise suffering through a creative dry spell. I was filled to the brim with so much love and so many needs yearning for an outlet, for time to share, the words to say. Then,...

When I was a little girl, visiting my grandparents in the Quad Cities, I used to spend the hot Iowa summer afternoons in their cool musty basement. I had a little white rocking chair that was just for me, and I would pull it across the orange shag carpet to sit in...

You know it will be a good tale if it begins with someone running away to join the circus—and so I’m going to begin Janine De Lorenzo’s story by telling you that’s what she did. But the story really begins much before then, when she was a young girl in Australia,...

Rodney Bennett I’ve written often in this column about “the way things used to be,” mostly because when I’m able to connect with longtime local musicians, there’s a lot of nostalgia for it: everyone at the one bar with that one stage every weekend, gathered around,...

Around this time last year, I found my way over to Center for the Arts Evergreen, only to be blown away by an impressive line-up of aspiring musicians betting on themselves in Evergreen’s Got Talent, a local musical competition for young artists. I heard many...

The testimony of music and arts is the way the names and sentiment live on, legacies passed down through stories and song, through the voices that deliver both so well. The mountain area was blessed for decades to have such a gifted storyteller in John Davis, who...

I’ve written before about how music dissolves the imaginary lines we draw between ourselves and others, so that whether it’s swaying with your seat neighbor at Red Rocks or joining a block party dancing in the streets, as long as you’re moving to the same beat, you’re...

Every writer loves a deadline, and if you’re the sort to wait until the last minute, I know you’ve got some j-school leftover in your blood. This is why, for us professional procrastinators, publishing cycles are particularly useful. Each year about this time, though,...

If you Google Eileen Koenigsberg, you might stumble upon her life mastery website and peruse the books she has written. Or perhaps you’ll come across Moore Koenigsberg Architecture, where Eileen and her husband, Jon, have been serving up residential and commercial...

Jane Austen once said, “Without music, life would be blank to me,” which poetically and accurately points out how music fleshes out life. It’s a thing that we might not notice unless it’s missing one day, and the next, a song could stop us in our tracks. In a sense,...