grammy nom nom nom




If you're going to create art, you have to develop a thick skin. No matter how great your work is, someone, somewhere won't like it and with the advent of the internet, we're no longer shielded from all the snarky comments. I don't read reviews anymore, too many of the bad ones depressed me for days at a time. Somehow the good ones slide right by, but the bad ones, man they stay with me. Making art for the public feels like standing naked on a pedestal in a museum and people wander by and discuss you. It can seem so arbitrary, some days they hate you and suddenly one day you find yourself at a grammy nominee party.

I've been in the studio pretty much non stop for 3 years and my lack of socialization showed. They herd the nominees through a media line and do brief interviews. Our first stop was channel 5 which everyone from Chicago knows is NBC. They asked how it felt to have our music in so many films and TV shows and I made a point to talk about how amped I was to see Steve Carell over one of our songs in a recent NBC promo. The interviewer didn't react at all when I said it, so as we moved on, I asked our management girl if channel 5 was NBC. She said yes. She's from Chicago though. Turns out in Nashville, channel 5 is not NBC. It's CBS. Woops.

Later that night, my management introduced me to Trace Adkins. I'd watched part of the Celebrity Apprentice because my former road manager ZIto was on it with the Backstreet Boys. Trace was a contestant and he came across as a really nice, decent guy and my first thought, was : Wow, that's Trace Adkins, I have to tell him how much he impressed me on the Apprentice. Unfortunately, I had just seen that youtube clip where a college student, interviewing John Cusack compliments him on his work in American Beauty. If you want to see awkward awkardness, google it and you can see for yourself where he tries to tell her that she's thinking of Kevin Spacey. With that scene fresh in my mind, I was suddenly terrified that it wasn't Trace Adkins on the Apprentice and so I said nothing about it and was about as eloquent as a potted plant. In fact, Tyler Hilton, India Arie, Steven Baldwin, Johnny Lang, Robert Randolph, Kerri Walsh, Bob Christian, Evander Holyfield and a bunch of other people all probably thought I was either deaf or mute when they met me.

BTW Trace Adkins is really big. I mean huge. He's like he-man in a cowboy hat. He was very nice.

I'm off to the grammys next weekend, thanks everyone for all the support.

Posted: Mon - February 2, 2009 at 02:54 AM          

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