allison's blog

1. This past weekend, I went to Birmingham for concerts.  I am kind of obsessed with live music, if you couldn't tell.  Kacie, Liz, Alan, Kendrick and I went to see the Cardinals at the Alabama Theatre on Friday night and I loved it.  Our seats were in row T, which is kind of far away, so that wasn't awesome, but it was still a really good show.  I have decided, however, that it's pretty close to impossible to be prepared for a Ryan Adams show.  He has so much music that you have to be a die-hard fan to know all of it.  They put on a great show, however.  The gorgeous encore of "Oh My Sweet Carolina" was more than worth the $46 I paid for the ticket.   The Blitzen Trapper show on Saturday (at Bottletree, my favorite venue ever) was pretty phenomenal as well.  I highly recommend their music if you have never heard it - it's really infectious and I feel like it would be hard to find someone who would not love it.  

Also while in Birmingham, I went to Samford and laid out on the quad and printed like 200 pages for free in the library.  I kind of miss that place.

2.  I impulsively bought a harmonica yesterday.  I am really awesome at playing it.  I am not even exaggerating here.  If you want to feel really musical and good about yourself, buy a harmonica.  Learning to play guitar is really painful and it sounds like crap for the first month or so and it is really discouraging.  But within 10 minutes of picking up the harmonica, I was able to rock a mean "Jingle Bells."  It's also kind of a fascinating instrument.  Did you know that breathing in and blowing out produce different notes?  Crazy.  I'm still working on the whole not-hyperventilating thing, but give it a few days and I'll basically be ready to join a band.  When I get a little better, I plan to buy a little bit nicer instrument (although the $5 version is working out quite well for me at the moment) and one of those neck holder things so I can play hands-free.  As Liz remarked yesterday, I could play the harmonica and drive at the same time!  How awesome would I be then?