It’s Monday and time for another “Mondays On the Move!” This week, Sarah and I quite literally on the move in different corners of the same country. Sarah is on holiday in the south of France with her family. I have been driving around the northern Nord-Pas-de-Calais region with my husband and our big white…
Category: calling
How to overcome fear and just play?
Since parting ways with my music partner nearly a year ago, I have been reticent to pick up any instrument and try my hand at solo composing. Fear is what holds me back. Pure and not so simple fear. As with so many seemingly insurmountable challenges I have experienced in life, I know that I…
Carte Postale no. 6: Tic Toc to Prescott
Malcolm has spent the past several days in Colorado, visiting with friends from our cohort at Prescott College. From Denver to Boulder to Durango, he tasted espresso and sat in a beautiful cathedral and beyond. Update on animals: back in Rockport, on a morning before I departed, across the street perched the largest bird I…
North of the border
It is the final day of April, and I am sitting in a third floor room typing away as the rain falls in a cold, wet blanket outside my window. These past two weeks, I have traveled under the auspice of Story-to-Song to two very different locations, cities, and climes in Canada. Last week, I…
Believe it or not
Last night, I performed at an exhibit opening at the Arts League of Lowell. I had submitted my first recorded album for an exhibit honoring the life of Kerouac called “Travels off the Beaten Track.” I knew that David Amram would be playing earlier in the gallery opening, but I got the go ahead to…
Talk to everyone because you just never know
There are many people who have walked in and out of my life and had a formative affect on the person I am today, how I engage with the world around me, and the values I try to embrace and infuse into the work I do, particularly with regard to sustainability and songwriting. I wonder…
E is for Entrepreneurship, not for Easy
Life does not stop when you become an entrepreneur, and I nearly let life keep me from getting to the Sandbox session this past Thursday night. Class was in Lawrence, and I was having a not so great day. I was moody. I had been sick on and off for the past month and hadn’t slept…
Perfect Pitch
Last night was the much anticipated, anxiety inducing Mid-Pitch for the Merrimack Valley Sandbox Winter Accelerator Program. I spent the better part of the day and week before reflecting and revising my pitch outline. A challenge with selling songwriting products is finding ways to describe something that can be rather abstract and difficult to explain…
Singing the songs of the people.
I grew up in a small town in eastern Massachusetts on the south shore. Throughout my childhood and into college, music was my identity. I played and performed classical piano; I was first chair for the clarinet in the school band; I listened to any and all music I could find. I started plucking around…
Pitch and Pivot and Pitch—Repeat!
I stood up last night in front of a group of entrepreneurs and pitched my business. I had just come up with a new idea for a way to package my product the night before. This shift is what I have heard referred to in my class as a pivot—a change in business plan, product,…
Marieke is Guiding Song 