Well, will be tomorrow. I finished my analysis on time on Wednesday and handed it in. Then Abi, Emma, Renee and I had a Christmas sleepover party in the kitchen, which was awesome. We watched movies and played Cluedo and drank rose wine, and had a great time. There were also presents! Emma gave me the Good Fairies, Bad Fairies book, and Renee gave me a pretty little purple crystal flower. Love! <3

Yesterday was just lazy and Emma and I slept in the kitchen again cause it’s cozy. We spent most of the day in the kitchen, actually, except I had band at 1pm. Wasn’t much of a rehearsal cause the drummer didn’t show, though.

Anyway, today was laundry day and clean room (at least a little bit) day. Now my bags are packed to go home tomorrow (yay!) and we’re going out to have dinner with Renee cause it’s her birthday (yay again!). Emma’s going home for good on Wednesday, though (not so yay) which is sad… I’m gonna miss her. It’s been lovely living with her for these three months, and I wish she was staying for the rest of the academic year, but she’s not.

Oh, well… I’m sure Abi and I will find ways to have fun without her, as sad and lonely as it’s going to be.

Gonna go get ready to go out now. And tomorrow I’m going home!!! Think I’m getting picked up from the airport, which will be nice. I’m bringing a bunch on Christmas presents, so it’ll be good not to have to carry all my luggage the entire way home.

So, the next time I blog it’ll probably be from Norway. w00t!

Got the vids from the gig today and have uploaded them to YouTube! For some reason Chameleon is taking a bit long to process, but that one should be live soon, too.

I have made a playlist with all the songs. You can also visit my YouTube Channel for more vids. Hopefully Chameleon will be live soon. If not, I’ll have to upload it again.

Anyway, enjoy! Audio versions will be up tomorrow.

The boyfriend found this documentary on NRK nett-tv, called Pyramids of Waste (Norwegian: Garantert kort levetid). Very interesting stuff! Really makes you see things differently.

You know how your computer always breaks down a week after warranty’s out? Or your iPod dies, or your printer stops working? It’s not life being cruel, or the irony of fate. It was engineered to do that.

If you’re in Norway (or if you’re me, apparently, cause for some reason it worked) you can watch the documentary here. You can read about the documentary here.

I just had my presentation of my programme for the performance project in the spring, and it was a complete disaster. Or, I thought I did rather well, actually, and the only comment Nigel Beer had was to voice is concern over me choosing to play primarily original tunes, and how to balance my cover songs so people would still recognise them and find something familiar to hold on to. But then it was Steve Spencer’s time to talk, and he basically spent ten minutes asking me over and over what my “rational” for the programme was.

I said during my presentation, I want to be a rock singer, so I want to put on a rock show. I want to create something unique and interesting, with elements of improvisation and experimentation, trying new things. In essence, I want to put on a good show, and isn’t that what a performance is all about?

But no, that’s not enough for Steve Spencer… He wants to know how the lyrical content is gonna be bound together. Said he didn’t feel I knew what it was I wanted to accomplish or something. I dunno, I blanked out after about two minutes, completely stumped, didn’t have a clue what to say to him… Once they let me leave I just hurried to the back of the room to put away my things, where I completely broke down and started crying in front of Memos and Antitsa.

I just felt so mortified. I could never have imagined that I’d be put on the spot to that extent. I thought it was perfectly clear what I wanted to do. The way I write songs would be the connecting feature, obviously. My sound, my voice, my lyrics, my music.

It’s not like it isn’t hard enough for me from before, coming here a stranger and trying to put together a band when I don’t know anyone, finding, once I know people well enough to have an opinion, that the people I like best and who are the best musicians are all taken since last year. I have a drummer whom I’ve never heard play and a guitarist I’ve never heard play electrically, I lost the guitarist I was originally gonna use which meant I had to reevaluate and recreate my set entirely because it just wouldn’t work the way I wanted it to without his unique style. I need to communicate in a language I’ve never communicated in musically, and here this ridiculous man feels he has to put me on the spot and ask me questions that I’ve already fucking answered!

It’s just not fair. And I’m crying again. Shit.

I need to calm down and keep writing my analysis. I have a tutorial in the morning with the only decent human being on the pop music staff, and I really should have something to show him.

A quick note just to tell you all that the gig went well. I was disappointed not to see more people there, but I guess the weather dissuaded any “maybe”s… I will post to greater detail later, and I’ll probably post some photos from today and yesterday tomorrow (my usb cable’s broken, so I can’t import the photos yet). Abi took some great pics of me and my band as well.

For now, I’m gonna get some sleep. I am so completely knackered I can’t remember when I was last this tired… Good night, world!

I’m gonna be playing in the second set, so for those who are thinking they can’t make it to 7:30, I won’t be on until 8:30.

There will be a £4.00 cover charge at the door.

Google can give you directions if you’ve no idea where the Newhampton Arts Centre is. And in case you’re too lazy to google it yourself:

View Larger Map

See ya tomorrow!

The gig is tomorrow, and I’m very excited. We’ve been rehearsing today, and we’re gonna play through the set tomorrow as well, before the show, just to make sure everything’s working (our dress rehearsal, I guess). Had a pretty good day playing. While there are still a few bugs to work out, I think they’ll pretty much all sort out if we just think about them on our own and make ourselves aware of them.

The only thing I’m a bit worried about is the length of the set. I recorded the rehearsal today, and we’re only at roughly 35 minutes total. I think we should try to jam a bit more on at least two of the songs. Little Wing could go on for longer, as could Tripping Billies. I guess we’ll just see what happens… We’re meant to be jamming, after all. The point should be improvisation.

Thinking we’re probably gonna do a lot of it on stage. We’re playing more freely now than we did before, and it seems like we’re more comfortable together.

Loz is back and making an effort. We were really surprised when he turned up last week, after having not been there, and we were still pretty skeptical when he didnt turn up for our rehearsal on Thursday, but today he was there again, and seemed a lot more motivated, so it might turn out all right after all. Hope so.

So, once again, hope as many people as possible are gonna be able to come down tomorrow to watch! It’s at the Newhampton Arts Centre on Dunkley Street in Wolverhampton, and I really think it’s gonna be awesome! Apparently, we’ve got a special guest band playing as well, called Bespoke. They’ll be playing last, I think.

Tonight I’ll be watching my other classmates playing at the same location. Same concept, just different groups. I’ll be bringing my camera and my brand new 55-200mm zoom lens. Hope I’ll get some awesome pictures! Will share them with you if they’re any good.

In other news, I’ve had a wonderful weekend with Morten. On Friday we went to Nandos with Abi and Jodi. Saturday we enjoyed a steak dinner at home, just the two of us, drinking wine and whisky and eating Ben & Jerry’s while watching Last Chance to See, with Stephen Fry. Pixie was happy to see Morten, too.

Sending him back home was really sad, but at least I’ve only got three weeks until I go home for Christmas. I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to the Christmas holidays quite so much, even though it means Emma is going home permanently, which is sad.

I’m making myself some dinner now. Gonna leave you with the recording I made of Little Wing during our rehearsal today. Hope to see many of you tomorrow!

Little Wing

That seems to be my limit. That’s how long I can go without seeing Morten. In this third and final week before he comes to see me or I go to see him, I become depressed and irritable. Everything annoys me, even myself. I crave company, but I shun society. All I really want to do is lock myself up in my room and not look at anyone, and I feel impossibly lonely and desolate even if I don’t. Life just seems dark.

I just don’t have the energy to do any of the stuff I need to do. I need to work on my analysis. I need to practice lyrics. I should be singing. But I’m not. I don’t want to, and I can’t be arsed. I feel apathetic and lonely.

I’ll see him in two days, but even that seems like little comfort at the moment. A huge part of me just wants to leave. Go home and not look back. I know I won’t feel this way next week, but I do now. And I keep looking ahead, too. I will be here on my birthday. I will be here, and Morten won’t even be able to come see me cause he’ll be too busy studying for exams. Around that same time I’ll be playing the gig for my performance project. He won’t be able to come for that either, and that makes me sad.

Everything makes me sad. I don’t want to be sad.

Today, on my way home from town, I walked past a house with Christmas lights. Not only does it seem fundamentally wrong to me to put up Christmas lights in November, but the entire front of the house was covered in twinkling, coloured lights.

Now, for my international readers, where I come from this might be considered a moderate amount of Christmas lights in someone’s yard. Most people would probably only do the one tree, and coloured lights are extremely rare. Lights might be put up in the beginning of December. The entire front of a house covered in twinkling, coloured fairy lights to me just feels completely alien. I’m now anticipating the day all the houses on Gorway road put up their Christmas lights with some dread. What a terrifying thought!

So our keyboard player for the Improv project, Brendan, has recently had twin daughters (congrats, Bren!), which means it’s very possible that he won’t be able to play on the 30th (or, more like, won’t have time to rehearse enough before then). If it comes to that, we’ll either have to do it without him, which would suck in so many ways because I don’t think most of these songs are at all doable without the keyboards when we have only one guitarist, or we’ll have to have our performance postponed (dunno how THAT would work, but we’ll see, I guess).

Apparently, Brendan’s already discussed it all with Steve. I’ll keep you all posted when I know more. Oh, and I promise more meaningless blogging about my life later.