ben wakeman : : Journal

Faster Than the Speed of Documentation

November 1, 2007

It seems that time has folded in on itself. I can't believe how little time there is for navel-gazing these days. There's is no way to possibly catch up a blog after four months of pixel silence, so I won't even try. Let's live in the present.

Work has been intense --- I've been extremely busy keeping the wolf away from the door lately. My parallel existence as a web monkey/musician has been listing heavily to the web monkey side for some time now because web monkey puts shoes on feet and mortgage payments in the bank. My creative alter-ego (also confusingly named Ben Wakeman) has been nibbling on a crust of bread in a dark corner of the room lately. It's really weird to go a couple of weeks without even being able to pick up the guitar -- because it's always been my umbilical cord (chord ;-).

I have been listening a lot lately even though I have not been producing any noise of my own. That is in part due to another job I gave myself: host of the podcast: Take Me to The Bridge where I interview songwriters who are traveling through Atlanta. I've had the chance to talk with so many facinating folks and gather more data in my endless quest of what makes a good song. I think to me it's striking how many ways there really are to make make music, or even to make a life. When I look too hard into this well I learn a lot about myself. I see how other musicians approached the same obstacles in front of them that I face and took a totally different path up the mountain. Whether it's Kristian Bush with his Sugarland adventure or Kevin Leahy with his part-time drummer/part-time web developer gig or even my old college friend Robert Martin who is playing in a wedding band and teaching guitar to keep the dream alive, it's not an easy road by any stretch.

Speaking of Robert Martin... he and I are headed out to the Variety Playhouse tonight to see an old friend open for Josh Ritter. Eric Bachmann was the first person I met a college orientation. We were both foolishly on the path to major in music -- him with saxaphone and me with guitar. We found we shared a lot of the same tastes -- at least compared to the pool of other music nerds there. He and Robert had a band together that they carried over from high school. Eric later migrated to Chapel Hill and eventually dropped out to pursue his alt/punk project Archers of Loaf. Now, after all these years, his music has settled into some very beautiful, lonely and striking stuff. It will be good to see him after all these years and maybe learn a little bit about his road.

As for me, what's next? I don't really know musically speaking. At times I am compelled to put together another band of some configuration, but that's always a struggle because I'm spoiled and want the best players and can't afford them. In the meantime, I think I might try to record some live video of the last batch of songs I put together just to get them out there and renew the connection to the outside world.