Soon after acquainting myself with the city, I realized that it was time to for me to immerse myself back into my creative zone and work on some music. During the day, I spent my time in between my friends’ apartment and a studio space playing guitar and trying to develop different riff ideas into full-fledged songs. As much as I tried, I found difficulty in trying to make myself write during times when I was probably feeling more inspired to do something else. This often led me to dissatisfaction with many of the things I was coming up with. After accepting this, I decided to take a break from writing and again extend my attention outwardly onto New Orleans, hoping that something would spark my imagination along the way.<\/p>\n
I left the house and resumed wandering around Uptown New Orleans. The places I found myself frequenting became more or less facilities for my creativity. While out seeking my morning cup of coffee, I would go to either the nearby gas station or Rue de la Course coffeehouse, where I would get my fill of coffee, sit outside and knock out my daily reading. From there I found myself hanging around outside a church down the street. I don’t know what it was that attracted me to this place. I have no religious affiliations of any kind and the church seemed very old and dilapidated but for some reason I was drawn to it. I would sit outside on the steps and jot down notes and lyrics and occasionally capture some field recordings of passing streetcars, church bells, pedestrians, and other general ambiance of the neighborhood. Eventually I found myself walking back towards my friends house and along the way pass by the neighborhood cemeteries, one in which I would later attempt to record music in. By this time I had some musical ideas brewing and when I got home, I tried to translate them onto guitar. Through this casual excursion, I began to find the parts to my compositions but had not yet realized the whole.<\/p>\n
Later that evening, I found my friend Buster editing recordings on his laptop. Excited by my curiosity, he began to play me chunks of music from a rather prolific collection of songs that he had been working on. His music was largely based on 1970’s style Funk but with his own stamp on it, in which he recorded bass, guitar, drums, vocals and programmed horn and synthesizer parts. Although, the styles of music we make are very different, I felt inspired by his overwhelming enthusiasm towards what he was doing. I think it was at this point that I had finally caught the certain type of creative energy that New Orleans harbors. He had kept on telling me that along with other things, making music in New Orleans feels better than anywhere else. After he had left the house, I had taken over the living room as my personal practice space and spent the rest of the night, playing guitar and piecing together one of my compositions. I was beginning to understand what he meant.<\/p>\n
That was one of the first nights when I chose staying in and working on my own music over going out to watching somebody else play music. Although I tried to make a balanced schedule that would include doing both things, my own music was certainly a priority during my stay in New Orleans. Although I usually designated my evenings for songwriting, my morning walks around Uptown became a part of my daily routine as well as a part of my creative process. I found it important to establish a work environment and and schedule in a place that was new to me and far from my typical comfort zone used for writing.<\/p>\n
On a side note: Near the second half of my stay in New Orleans, my cellphone got nearly destroyed after being dropped onto the street after a concert. However, I was recently able to back up some of my data and recovered photos and audio from my trip. I will be posting some of those shortly. Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Soon after acquainting myself with the city, I realized that it was time to for me to immerse myself back into my creative zone and work on some music. During the day, I spent my time in between my friends’ apartment and a studio space playing guitar and trying to develop different riff ideas into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[],"tags":[99],"geo":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}