14 Juillet, Aux armes les enfants de la Patrie!!!
Hiya friends, enemies & neutrals,
So it's time for a quick update. In a nutshell, I've been in Paris recording with my long-term musical idol Ken Stringfellow. And it's been going well so far. I didn't know what to expect, because, well, how can you know these things in advance? I can't, I'm not a clairvoyant even tho I've had just a few promising moments of clairvoyance over the past times, enough to make me believe that such a thing might be possible to exist. However, I didn't know what to expect from meeting someone who is a musical genius, like, I always had a good vibe about him via emails etc. but to actually meet a genius - are geniuses psychos, narcists, or... what I mean is, if someone is a true genius, what kind of a person are they to work with? I can imagine van Gogh might have been a difficult person to work with although it's hard to say what is cause and what is effect - anyone with van Gogh's genius and NO acknowledgement from anyone apart from one's own brother would probably make anyone go slightly insane, to say the least. However Ken Stringfellow has had some serious acknowledgement for his work, although nowhere near enough, in the sense that, you know, everyone in the world should be aware of this guy's work instead of... Cheryl Cole's, for instance. If it was for musical quality. Or if I want to be more provocative, I would replace Cheryl Cole with Joni Mitchell. Tho that's not fair cos Joni's done a lot for a female of her era, being one of the first real singer-songwriters of her gender so I'm actually being a bit unfair here. Maybe I should say Bob Dylan... All the forecoming death threats will be received at liisa(at)liisamusic.com.
However, Ken seems like one of the most grounded people I've ever met. Which makes me think of the seeming etymological similarity between the words 'genius' and 'genuine'. Also génial in French is so close to 'genuine'. So it's been a positive week sociability-wise, as I also stayed at my friends Miska & Emilie and they are very grounded & genuine people also, something that is harder to come across than one would imagine at first glance. I haven't been so prone to humming "I hate everyone equally" recently, which is nice.
About the music - well, I'll write something about it another time as I always prefer people to hear the results as opposed to hearing about the results... Who was it who famously said that talking about music is like dancing about architecture?
Also, I had some massive sinus pain every day for the past months, and that finally pushed me to become vegan, which had reduced my sinus pain attacks to once-a-week; clearly there's still something to work on sinus-wise but I can't tell you how relieved I am about this considerable reduction of physical pain in my life.
Life was very kind to me in the sense that my friends who I was staying with, live in the 12th arrondissement of Paris which coincidentally is THE area of organic 'bio' shops - there was an amazing amount of great-tasting easy-to-cook vegan food, and I never imagined that becoming vegan would be anywhere near THIS easy. So far so good... here in England (came back yesterday; going to Paris again on Sunday) they don't quite have that many options, especially when it comes to vegan cheese - here it tastes of rubber, but in France...it was as good as the best animal-derived cheeses.
Now I'm working on 'stuff, you know' (no you don't, but feel free to ask), and spending quality time with my Fiancé and our Son-shine. And catching up on the missed episodes of Desperate Housewives.
All the best,
Liisa w/2 I's
