Over a year ago I made my biggest residential move yet — from Seattle to beautiful Whidbey Island. Not that far, I know– but being an old-school Seattlelite, it’s kind of a big deal. If you weren’t born & grew up in the city decades ago, you might not understand, just bear with me…
Without getting much into how Seattle has gone down-hill since the 1980s, I’ll just say that moving to Whidbey has been good for me … mostly. The attitude and pace of the island is much like how Seattle was as so many years ago. Island-living is familiar to me as my family has history here and I spent a lot of time visiting while growing up. This made for a comfortable transition also enabling me to move closer to my parents and to help support them. Then there is the matter of having dealt with 2 burglars, 1 car prowler, and a few uncontrolled threatening dogs and one of their idiot owners … hence ‘mostly’ … but I digress.
A large portion of my move occurred relative to employment — and my gross lack thereof. This came with the projection of starting a baking business for myself, which I’m excited to say looks to launch soon. I have many ideas of how I want to develop this company as employment for myself and others and as an extension of my creativity. Keep an eye for Whidbey Island Baking Company and my biscotti, in the mean time look up Biscotti Journey on FaceBook.
When I moved from Seattle to Whidbey I told myself that I wanted to keep current as a Seattle musician — I wanted to keep working with musicians I’d already connected with along with gaining new experiences. I also wanted to keep gigging with my band and being of service to private events.
A year+ later I have found that this has proven to be challenging and costly. Frankly, when I moved to Whidbey I was broke — which included no longer having a personal vehicle. I’m grateful for public transportation and the use of crash space at friends’ places, but the dividends of doing most-things-musical in The Greater Seattle-etc Area I’ve found to not be worth it. Mostly what I mean by this is solo gigs.
The long and short of this is that I’ve been wrestling with what I want to do and how I want to do it. The greatest expense to my playing in the Greater Seattle Area is my time. I want to still play with my band, I want to work with other musicians, and I want to do some solo gigs though I imagine I’m going to be much more selective about my private gigs. More than anything I want to focus on developing my playing and work on my album concepts — I’d also like to try and start performing house concerts. In truth, with a company about to launch, that’s also going to take a lot of my time, and I predict I’d have to direct prospective clients for private performances to other qualified pipers. I’d like to further develop what I’ve explored only a bit before — building my presences online with video broadcasts, YouTube videos, and e-marketing my albums.
Mostly, I see this as a shift in my existence as a musician an opportunity to direct myself on what I’ve most wanted to do. It is an interesting question to ask musicians thought — if you could only do one which would be, only record and not perform or only perform but not have any recordings to sell or get played on radios or stereos?