The Dream Journal – February 2023
Hello!
Hoo boy, we’re on a wild weather roller coaster here in NH these past few weeks! Multiple snowstorms piled on each other, with ice, heavy snow, fluffy snow, you name it. Several days of higher-than-normal temperatures, then record breaking low temperatures. Mount Washington, up in the White Mountains a bit further north and east from us, tied their all-time low temperature at -47F; their -108F windchill broke the US record! Our -21F temperature and -47F wind chill from that night seem almost balmy in comparison. And now, just 2 days later, we’re at a much happier 36F. Yee ha!
We’re having great fun with our Midweek Song Swaps so far this season. We continue the fun this Wednesday, February 8th as we swap songs with Rick Drost. Rick’s songs paint exquisite mental pictures akin to Van Gogh or Monet, and it’s always a treat to hear him! Tune in live on Facebook or YouTube at 7:30pm Eastern time (00:30 UTC) when you can interact directly with us all, or you can listen later (we leave the links up).
Open mics can be magical, and we love to stop in on local open mics when we travel. The folks at Open Mic America carry that spirit online, and use it to promote open mics in general, and local open mics in particular. We’ve played on OMA before, and we’re back on there again on Sunday, February 12th. Ten acts, 2 songs each, starting at 8pm Eastern time (01:00 UTC) on YouTube. If you miss it live, the links stay up. The lineup looks to be a good one.
And then we’re off on the road for a bit! First stop: My Dead Aunt’s Books, in Hyattsville, MD on Friday, February 17th. This wonderfully quirky used book store is a favorite of ours. We’ll be splitting the evening with the contra dance trio Petrichord, which should be fun! Combining Old Time, French Canadian, and Scottish fiddling, Petrichord creates a unique blend of high energy music for the dance floor and the concert stage. There may even be a bit of collaboration! Music starts at 7:30pm.
From Maryland, we head a bit further south, stopping off at WLRN Radio in Miami, FL on Sunday, February 26th to chat with host Michael Stock. Michael has been hosting “Folk & Acoustic Music” on WLRN, South Florida Public Radio for over 30 years. We’ll talk about our early March show in Miami, and likely play a few songs. If you’re in the Miami area, you can tune in to 91.3FM, or you can listen online at www.wlrn.org/radio (click the play button on the page). The show runs 2-5pm Eastern time (19:00-22:00 UTC).
We’re both taking part in a crazy thing called February Album Writing Month (FAWM). It’s a challenge for songwriters to write and do at least a demo recording of 14 songs in 28 days (effectively an album’s worth of music). Don’t know if we’ll both pull this off (28 new songs total!!), but we’re both writing, which is what counts! We have a number of songwriting friends who have done this for years, and this year we decided we had the mental bandwidth to consider it. That, and neither of us has written many songs since Covid, so this is a nice boot in the behind to get us going again. We’ll report back next month on how we did. We’ll probably have a few “keepers” in there, so expect to hear some new songs from us over the next several months! If you’d like to hear a few of the early demos, we’ll be putting some up on our Patreon page, where you can give us some early feedback.
Our albums Then and Now, Seeking, and Simple Grace are available from us on our website, through Bandcamp, or you can find them at iTunes and most other online music stores. Our music is also available streaming on Spotify and Apple Music.
As always, you can find additional schedule information on our website. For additional content and stories from the road, follow us on Patreon. For more frequent news updates and information, check out our Facebook fan page and follow us on Twitter (@danandfaith).
If you have a local venue (coffee shop, library, whatever) that hosts live local music, give them some love! And give some love to the folks who play there, too.
Dan & Faith