The Unsigned Mind……. Busy as Bees….

If you follow Cliff’s personal page you would know there’s a new batch of critters around our house. Not to be confused with the normal parade of animals that pass our window. There are the hummingbirds that flock to the feeders on the front porch in the morning. They create such a stir you would think it was Black Friday at Wal~Mart. There are our dogs…. they don’t exactly pass by the window that often. Mostly they sleep…. and eat…. then they wander out into the fields to do what dogs do after they eat. Then more sleeping, more eating, more wandering. Rinse and repeat….

Cows…. lots of cows…. we see them more in the winter when they come up to be fed but we see them a lot….

Coyotes….. well, we don’t actually see the coyotes. We hear them… A LOT…. especially just before dark. Apparently we live at the crossroads of the coyote party line. When one of them howls they ALL howl…..

and cats…. we’ve got a bumper crop of farm cats too…… all I know is there must be upwards of a thousand of them based on how much food we put out…

sorry, got lost in all that just now….

We have BEES. A whole hive of them and they’re not just interesting, they are busy. I know this because I’ve stood next to the entrance to the hive and watched them come and go. A Bee is a very busy critter. Twice a week I open the hive up and feed them. (2 cups water, one cup sugar) This is when I really notice how busy they are. The feeders go into the holes that are shown in the picture and the bees all seem to be really fond of these holes. They certainly get busy when I pull the jars out to refill them. It was during a recent feeding while I was watching all the milling around that it struck me. The comparison between those bees and our musical family, The Captain Ledge Band.

School has just started and mornings are once again busy. Jeana, Tristan and Baylee all leave at the same time. Me, I’m the lucky one. I get to sit in the quiet and finish my coffee. Recently I’ve been condemened to decalf so it’s not as fun as regular coffee but this is MY morning routine and I’m sticking to it no matter what.

At least I will until the Admiral tells me otherwise. (I may be Captain Ledge but Jeana is the Admiral and has the final say on all things important.) I only am allowed to make decisions when the possibility of something bad happening is involved. I could be wrong but I have some suspicions about this whole authority thing.

I know….. my mind is wandering and there’s a point to all of this somewhere.

So, I’m watching these bees all crawling around and flying and doing all the normal stuff bees do when it occurred to me. Our life is not so different than the bees. I’m not going to get in trouble by stating that the whole purpose to my life is to keep the queen happy… or Admiral or….. yeah, that.

The youngest member of the crew, she’s 7, will get home and do homework, go outside and play, come back inside, go back outside, come back inside, eat, eat some more, take a bath and go to bed exhausted. I’m pretty sure there’s the same sort of pattern at school.

Tristan, percussionist extradornaire and full time teenager, wallers out of bed, groans about school, primps for …. well, as long as it takes, goes back in his room to lay down taking the time to breathe between bites of what ever (seriously, he’s reached the age where he doesn’t really seem to care what food is aimed at his mouth as long as it’s food. I don’t even think he takes time to chew it long enough to taste it and I’ve often wondred why we don’t just put everything in a blender and feed him with a funnel. LOT more efficient that way and less dishes)…. yeah, off topic again. He then is aimed at school where I’m pretty sure he goes “off” all day, probably into the preverbial lala land, comes home, complains about school between shoveling bites of food into his mouth, does homework. Rest before bedtime cause he’s worn out from all that eating. Eats dinner, then more resting then a bedtime snack. In the midst of all this there’s constant texting and complaining about how dull and boring school is. THEN we somehow manage to interrupt his busy schedule with a nightly practice with The Captain Ledge Band. Yeah, it’s that busy…

Jeana, aka MOM, aka The Admiral, gets up an hour before everyone else so she can have some quiet time. Some mornings I think she just sits there waiting for the coyotes to howl. She has coffee, does some reading then simultaneously is able to get both her self and the 7 year old ready for school. Drives into work, tolerates all sorts of “stuff” in her office, comes home, cooks, laundry (which is a NEVER ending thing in our house), overseas the completion of all the aforementioned homework then does the band practice thing followed by a few minutes of time with the Captain in which we both set there and stare off into space like brain damaged zombies. Sleep and repeat.

As the Captain of this zoo I manage to observe this whole circus of the brain dead, go to work, get home, take care of all the assigments from the Admiral, PRACTICE followed by the aforementioned “Zombie” period then off to bed and repeat.

As I was feeding the bees today I began to wonder what the bees would think of our routine? I know there are normal families out there that don’t have a band practice every night. I’m betting there’s some other sort of “activity” they participate in and I’m betting they might just be as tired as we are when they finally crawl into their repective overnight hibernation zones. At least I really hope that someone else has as hectic a schedule as we do.

This week us bees are even busier! Yeah, hard to believe…..

On top of everything else we did a show on Saturday and now have two more days of practice before we pack mule it off to New Orleans. I’m not sure just what we’re thinking though. If we have a successful trip we’re going to become even busier and we’ll start looking more and more like those bees.

Yeah, didn’t think that one through before we “jumped” at the opportunity did we? Lol……

But, being busy as bees is a good thing. The alternative is to sit around and do nothing and I’m just not a big fan of that. In fact, if I were to sit around doing nothing I would end up feeling rested and we can’t have that happen can we.

So, I’ll keep feeding those bees. Practicing music with The Captain Ledge Band on a nightly basis and coming soon, we’ll begin recording the next album. It’s kind of our form of the honey those bees work so hard at. Only, our honey is music and just like the bees, it’s pretty sweet stuff when shared with friends!

By the time you read this we may be back from New Orleans at which point one of two things will be happening. Our lives will be different or they will be the same. Unlike the bees though we’ll have all that experience to share on our website.

We’ll be taking lots of pics in New Orleans and posting them online. There’s a feed from Flikr at the bottom of the main page of the site where you can catch glimpses as we run past the camera doing our very best bee imitation.

The Unsigned Mind….. what you don’t know can’t hurt you…

Whew….

it’s been an amazing couple of weeks on every level. Work, Music, personal… just amazing. BUT, you have to take the good with the bad and there have been some bad things come this way also.

The good……

I have incredible people that I work with in an office environment and we tend to stay very busy. The people I work with have demonstrated so much kindness and willingness to help that just saying thank you will never be enough.

There is our Web Developer/art department/social media guru. Greg (or Web Greg since he and our guitar player share the same name) has been amazing in keeping up with everyting that is involved with promoting The Captain Ledge Band. I’ve never met him in person but we’ve accumulated hours and hours of time on the phone. I truly look forward to actually being able to shake his hand and today we count him as one of our good friends.

We now, thanks to another good friend, have a bee hive at our house. Well, it’s not IN the house but it sits about 100 yards in front of our house. We’re very aware of the health benefits of local honey in our home and to be looking at a hive that represents hope for those benefits is something else we just can’t say thank you for enough.

Musically we’ve passed a few milestones. We’re being asked to book a few gigs here and there. We were invited to be a guest at a radio station. It turned into being guest at TWO different stations. We were asked to perform a second show in New Orleans. LOTS of awesome and exciting stuff is beginning to happen.

And the list goes on and on…… Yes, it’s an incredible blessing to our band, our family and our lives.

But life isn’t all a bed of roses and there have been some bad things that can really take the wind out of the sails….

I wish I didn’t pay attention to or care so much about peoples perception of the things we’re involved in. It’s almost as if there are people that just don’t care how their words or actions affect us or those around us. It can be a tremendously depressing thing when people you trust turn on you in ways you never imagine possible.

And so the title to this post. What you don’t know can’t hurt you……

If we didn’t pay attention to these things or didn’t know about them then it wouldn’t be so depressing. Depression…. that little thing that caused one of the great comedians of this generation to feel so desperate and hopeless that he took his own life. If I didn’t know about what happened and didn’t have some understanding of those feelings it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

We know, for instance, where our support for our music comes from. We know where most of the people that listen to us are AND we know, thanks to social media, those that mention us in their post and where the people live that “Like” our page.

It’s not coming from those that we would be most hopeful that they would take notice how hard we try.

If we didn’t know these things then it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

Yes, there are some around us that are VERY supportive and we truly have a very deep appreciation for each and every one of them. Then there are those that have tacky, rude or snide remarks to make. It’s almost as if they hate that good things happen for us.

If we didn’t know these things then it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

Maybe we’re just sensitive to our envioronment. Maybe in our effort to put emtions into word and song we’ve become overly sensitive to our surroundings and the people that we would hope might express some minor acknowledgment of these things are not comfortable expressing anything positive to us. Maybe……

Maybe if we didn’t notice these things then it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

In fact… there are lots of things we notice that cause us pain. I’m sure that everyone that reads this has this experience. I hate seeing pictures of women that have been beat up by some jerk. It disgust me to see pictures or starving children then drive past a large church all landscaped with stained glass windows and large concrete parking lots with “No Skateboarding” sings. It makes me wonder how much good could have been done or how many of those starving kids could have had a meal with the money spent on all that.

Maybe if I didn’t know these things then it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

I know we can’t save the world. Heck, I can barely keep up with saving or protecting our little corner of it but I can guarantee you it’s not from lack of want to or lack of trying.

Maybe, if I didn’t know how much I cared it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

So, we get up every morning and continue our walk down the road that is life. We experience the good and the bad. The joys and the sorrows. We bury good friends and watch people that are determined to cause others harm continue to walk along committing their atrocities against those that are in their path.

We hear about terrorist beheading children, raping and killing their mothers and hanging their fathers after they force them to watch their families being tortured. It’s a terribly sad thing what one human is capable of doing to another.

Maybe, if I didn’t know about such things it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

Well….. I think that for now I’ve gotten this off my chest. It was something bottled up inside me that I had to get out someway. I had to tell someone that I DO CARE…. and that I’m feeling a little helpless.

We have an amazing couple of weeks ahead of us. In fact, it could be life changing. At least that’s our hope! BUT, no matter what happens as we move forward it seems important that I say this to everyone that is reading.

We care. We care A LOT. If ever you need to know if someone cares PLEASE shoot us a message and just hang in there. There are a lot of people that care and we are just a few of them.

I apologize to those that were expecting humor or musical topics today. I know this isn’t what you expected. However, please consider taking the time to let someone know that you care today.

what happens when Hillbilly Roots Music meets Bob Marley

137 in the Nation and 141 in the world on Reverb Nation…
moving on up…

We continue to be amazed at the support and encouragement from fans and friends. It’s a very humbling experience when people share the love! Thank You for all the help.

We’re still raising funds to travel to New Orleans to play for music industry professionals…

Happy Birthday to the youngest member of the crew!

Not going to bore anyone with the details of the “week from H***”….

SO….

let’s post positive stuff and you can make fun of me for looking at site statistics…..

On Reverb Nation today we are ranked #141 in the nation and #148 in the world out of all Americana bands on their site. We’re also ranked #5951 over all genres in the world out of the approximately 3 million bands on their site.

On the #1 Music listener charts Threadbare is #47 in the world on the Country charts and #37 in the world on the Folk Charts….

We could really use your help with the cost of traveling to New Orleans to play in front of representatives from Record Companies, Booking Agencies, Music producers and Promoters. Please visit Captain Ledge dot com and purchase a t-shirt, cd or digital download. Time is getting short and we really need your help!

If you can’t afford to spend anything would you please share this status. Maybe someone you know will like our music and want to help!

We hope you get to spend the weekend with the ones you love!