I have to start off by saying, I hate(d) Twilight.  And truly there is no comparison between The Hunger Games and Twilight.  If you love Twilight, I doubt you will even like The Hunger Games.  Bella, Jacob and that other guy, Edward are all pale imitations of high school stereotypes.  I read Twilight, forced myself to, because I wanted to see what the hype was all about and I was on a really long flight and had already finished reading Memoirs of a Geisha, which I really enjoyed.  So, you know this was a few years ago.  I have to say that in the first 30 pages of Twilight, the author does a great job of identifying with every girl who has every felt lonely, abandoned, an outcast, or just plain mediocre.  I saw a blog about “Pants” (Bella), that accurately described Twilight.  

I burned through it(Twilight) in a few hours and was highly disappointed.  I was curious about the movie because there were a couple of scenes, vampire fight scenes, that I thought could really be expanded upon in the movie and add some drama.  So we went and saw the sparkly stripper vampire movie at the three dollar theater.  I was so upset that I paid any money to watch it.  I have not read any of the other books or seen any of the follow up movies because it made me sad to see vampire lore, and great character development thrown into the wind and completely ignored.  It’s made me lose interest in a lot of popular novels that people like, because I consider it crap.

I don’t often read a book more than once, because once I’ve read it, I remember almost all of it.  I fully immerse myself in the book when I read it, it gets played out in my head, and I remember those images vividly.  The better the writing, the more time I take in reading it.  If the writing is good and the story is really, really good, I’ll read it again.  But that doesn’t happen very often.  I also get very disappointed with not true to the story interpretations of book.  For example, I liked Dune the movie, until I read the book.  The book is far superior and the movie doesn’t even begin to capture the nuances of the book.  Yes, the movie with Sting in it.

My husband really wanted to see The Hunger Games, and I sort of knew the premise for the story and have resisted really seeking out the books because I was afraid it was going to be yet another Twilight.  As of this blog, I have not purchased or read the books, but I have seen the movie.

If the movie is any indication of the book(s), then I absolutely recommend watching it.  Be aware, this is deep social commentary that begins with our entertainment and creeps into government control.  If you are not aware of the set-up, you are going to be shocked by children killing each other.  This story does not advocate or encourage that violence, and I want to read the books so that I get more out of the society being portrayed.  If we (my husband and I) had children, this is a story that we would want them to read.  It has strong characters, a great plot line, and fantastic social commentary in it.  Twilight is crap and not something we would ever encourage our children, if we had them, to read.  I’m out to go find the books and read them and then comment on them, and I have to say, I’m excited to read something that I’m most likely going to love reading.

Some books that I have voluntarily read and enjoyed and read again:  Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy and The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine l’engle, Animal Farm by George Orwell, The Pearl by Steinbeck, The Tale of Beowulf, A Horse and His Boy by CS Lewis, The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, Starship Troopers by Heinlein, Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink, The Call of the Wild by Jack London,  anything by Roald Dahl, and several others, but these have been reread numerous times.

List of authors I recommend reading:  Ayn Rand, Tolkien, L’engle, Orwell, Steinbeck, Gaiman, Bradbury, Heinlein, Stephen King, Faulkner, Dickens, Dahl, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Poe, Mamet, Jack London, Asimov, Jules Verne, basically all the usual suspects.  The reason you recognize the names is because year after year, there’s something in the story that reflects humanity at it’s fundamental level.

Another strange and bizarre dream.  This time I was at work with people that I know in my personal life that I don’t work with.  And we were doing one of those relay races from gym class.  And in this dream I was aware of what I was wearing.  I was wearing a skirt made of really see through gauze.  Willowy wispy gauze and it tore while I was running and then I had this slit going up my leg and it was showing my underwear, which it was completely see through and people could see it anyway, and my shirt was this flimsy red tank top.  So instead of trying to cover myself up, I just tied a knot in the skirt and starting singing “I Have Nothing”… Quite humorous, now that I think about it.  Any time I feel naked, I’m going to sing that song to myself. Hahaha!

Ok, I am going to blog these, because they are just too damn bizarre.

I have always had really weird dreams.  I mean weird. For example - Like there was one where I was a vampire and then wasn’t anymore.  There was also one where I was trained to be a ninja and then introduced to a giant mob of people who wanted to kill me and I ran.   There was also the dream where Tom Hanks promised me he was going to put one of my songs in a movie he was producing.  And then there was the dream that Adam Levine borrowed my guitar for a gig, (my crappy sticker covered yamaha that’s my first guitar and I still use), and then broke it.  Didn’t just break it, but smashed it to pieces and wouldn’t replace it.  (If there isn’t one thing that makes me mad, it’s someone who breaks something and won’t return it fixed or replace it, even if I say, nah it’s no problem).

Yesterday I had this incredibly strange dream about Ray LaMontange.  You know the guy who sings ‘Trouble’ and that other song.  I haven’t even listened to a Ray LaMontange song in a few months, let alone can pronounce his name half the time, even though I’ve heard it a lot.  I know his songs, his music and can barely scrape together what he looks like, although I mix it up with a young Joe Cocker for some reason.  I had this meeting with Ray LaMontange about some of the songs that I’ve been working on for my new album and he contacted me because somehow, in my dream, he heard them and wanted to play on them.  He looked like a combination of Elvis and Elton John.  Strange weird white guy with a PaulyD hairstyle (I don’t even watch the Jersey Shore, I watch the Soup and know who he is) in a white jumpsuit with a deep neck V on the front and no beard.  So he meets with me and wants to be on my songs and wants over half the credit for just putting his name on it.  Weird strange dream.  And he met me at some conference center, you know the hotels where people get together and there’s hundreds of people milling around talking about whatever.  Actually, since I’ve had the dream, I know how to pronounce his name.  Bizarre.  

Can’t I just have normals dreams, about being an elf, running through the forest, flying, having conversations with ghosts… So here’s to all you famous people, STOP invading my dreams!  You have all been given notice.

On the other hand, if I have another weird dream, which I’ve been having quite a few lately, I’ll share, unless you all want to hear about how many takes it took for me to do a song….

So it was my plan to have an EP released this winter/spring, and well… the collection of songs has rapidly grown.  From thinking how I was going to round out a project with about four tunes, it has exploded into about 10.  

Some things I’ve found out doing this, about a million singer songwriters out there in the land of singing and songwriting have a song titled ‘Carousel’.  I will be adding to the plethora of songs with this title, because the world needs another song with this title, and really, I just like the song I’ve written.  

I’ve decided that emoticons are silly.  I prefer being ridiculous and describing the emoticon seems much more awesome and practical than using the actual emoticon.  Winky face.  Plus, winky face is way more fun than a semi colon and half a parentheses.  So stick out tongue face.  Hehe.

When I write songs, it’s a snippet after snippet until I find a snippet I like and then work it into a full song.  Sometimes it’s a chorus, a line, a catchy rhthym, however, it all works towards the song being completed.  The more I write, the easier it gets.  I’m much happier with my lyrics this time around, and I don’t think I’ll be rewriting lines as I’m out performing, as I’ve done with some songs.  

This ep, now album, is going to be different than the last album.  Much less instrumentation, more space, and some experimentation.  I will be recording, mixing and all that stuff myself!  Scary territory.  It was a huge learning curve with the Christmas EP, and I felt I learned a lot from doing that.  Not totally happy with how it turned out, but that’s the artist in me wanting it to be awesome, and I feel it’s good, not great, but good.  I’ve finally figured out how to record vocals appropriately, and how to use compression, which is kind of important when it comes to vocals and acoustic instruments.  I’ve been recently recording The Family Meeting and Ebb and Flow’s inhouse recordings along with the snippets inbetween the songs, which has really helped me narrow down what I’m kind of doing.  So, I know enough to get a pretty decent recording.  I won’t get into all the technical stuff, it’s kind of boring for people who aren’t into it.

So yup.  Plan on a cd release party later on, it’s going to be awesome! 

Alright, so now you’ve read all the industry bios, but you still want to know more….

I think that I will write this more as a letter to the fans, instead of the standard third person bio.  Because you want to know who I am, and it’s better coming from my mouth than sounding like a novel.  I’ve resisted doing something like this, not because I don’t want to, but because I’m shy and I’ve been hurt, and between those two things, sometimes you’ve got to take a risk in putting yourself out there, you never know what you’re going to get in return…

I am from the Seattle area.  When people outside of Washington state ask where you live in Washington, you say Seattle, because all the little towns in the surrounding area, although they are their own place, no one knows what you are talking about and it’s difficult to explain the smaller communities and how different (they are) than Seattle itself.  Sure we have rain and weather is different, but when you live in Stannwood, Marysville, Woodinville, Mount Lake Terrace, Everett, Des Moines, or any of the numerous towns, you have a connection to that small burb.  It is it’s own thing.  So when you meet someone outside of state and they say Seattle, you then ask, ok, where are you from really…?

I lived in the Stannwood area for a while, on Camano Island.  No ferries, no boats to ride in, it’s separated from the mainland by a slough, which is basically a ditch with brackish water in it.  We had a view of the sound and I could see this place across the water, which I found out later was Whidbey Island and not Canada.  When you’re a kid, geography is not high on your list, for most people.  We didn’t have much in the way of new fancy toys.  We had friends that had all the latest thing, but mostly what we played with was mud, sticks, a couple of dolls and our imagination.  Our closest neighbor at that time, with someone our own age, was about 3/4 of a mile away, so it was pretty lonely, but ignited our imagination.  I have very young memories of being interested in music, writing songs for my stuffed animals, and wanting to play music.  I loved singing and memorized a whole host of songs from the hymnal at church, and every Christmas song I came into contact with.  When I was very young, I remember seeing a Shirley Temple movie as a child and thinking, that is exactly what I want to do, sing and dance.  I would beg my mother for piano lessons, dance lessons, and the answer was always, we don’t have the money for that.  I wouldn’t say we were poor, because poor, to me, means that you don’t have food or a place to live, or a family.  I am the oldest in my family and I wore hand me downs from garage sales and second hand clothes.  I was asked by a couple of kids at school if my family was poor because of my clothes.

My family moved from the Stannwood area to the Lynnwood area just before junior high school for me.  This transition was exceptionally difficult.  My family, due to circumstances beyod our control, had to move into the family business, a boarding kennel.  While this sounded amazing to my siblings and myself at the time, taking care of other peoples pets while they’re on vacation, it ended up being a curse socially.  I had no problems telling other kids where I lived, until they asked the inevitable question, ‘but there’s no house there, where do you sleep? in the dog kennel?’  

True.  There was no house, there was a 300 sq foot building that had a 3/4 bathroom and a tiny kitchen attached to a living area, much like a stand alone studio apartment, and five of us were living in this room/house thing.  After a few months, my parents moved us kids into a storage room in the cat building.  So three of us, my sister, my brother and I, lived for almost two years in this room where just on the other side of the wall were other people’s cats waiting for their owners to come and pick them up and take them home. 

I still didn’t consider us poor, because we had food, and a roof over our heads.  It wasn’t conventional, but it was stable, and it made our family stronger as a unit.  My parents saved up their money and put a down payment on a double wide and had it placed on the property, and we were all very excited to be living in a house again.  

You know, having a house there, the kids didn’t care.  They can be so cruel.  My sister likes to bring up the time that this one kid found a pile of dog poop, a stick, and smeared dog poop on my coat while we were standing there, just because he could.  I hadn’t said anything to him, done anything and this is what I get for living in a dog kennel, poop smeared on my coat.  I think it made a serious impression on her.

Things seriously became horrible for me in junior high, I was physically beaten by my peers, tormented, on a daily basis.  I eventually begged my mother to home school me for a year.  I just wanted them to accept me for who I was, and I was not going to change my behavior, thoughts, feelings, or ideas to fit theirs.  I wanted them to accept me for who I am.

So, no, I was never the popular kid at school.

In high school I became obsessed with drama and I wanted to be an actress, but I kept coming back to singing.  I found that I had a knack for writing songs and lyrics due to a couple of class exercises.  I took songs I knew and just changed the lyrics around so that they fit with the assignment.  I even convinced my chemistry teacher to let me rewrite a song instead of writing a paper on moles.  My love for snapple as a teen was so great, I wrote a jingle for Snapple, that I keep telling myself that I need to record it and find a way to pitch it to them, but then again, it seems silly now.  I also had an English assignment where we had to create a radio ad as part of a mock up marketing pitch, and I convinced my group that we could write a song about toothpaste in less than an hour.  They were scared and I said, I can do it, just let me do it and in 15 minutes I had it completed.  We got an A.

I put myself in talent shows and some competitions as they became available through school, and 4-H, but was limited to that.  It wasn’t until I went to college that I actually got into  writing.  I remember my first semester, I made a friend who happened to strum a guitar.  I was so facinated by this, that I went home and emptied out my childhood savings account and went and bought my first guitar.  I checked out several books from the library that had chords written above the changes in the songs and started accompianing myself and learning a whole host of new songs to sing.  I didn’t see the guitar necessarily as a primary instrument, but as a means to back me up while singing.  I also signed up for keyboarding, choir, music theory, and got involved with playing guitar and singing for the church group I was in.  I began writing songs, a few worship songs, on piano and guitar.  I didn’t really start applying myself and writing songs that I felt could connect with people until after college and after I stopped attending church on a regular basis.  I found church to be unfulfilling and not really representative of what my beliefs are, and decided that I needed to stop attending something I felt was misguided.

I started filling notebooks with lyrics, chord charts, thoughts, feelings, journaling all sorts of things, attending open mics, etc.  I got involved with community theater, but found I was drifting closer and closer to singing and performing.  I’m at home behind a microphone, I always have been, and for a while I viewed writing as a means to an end, performing, but it has been becoming so much more to me.   Eventually, making an album became a reality and my first album, “Stay Close” was made. Since then, I’ve been working on writing and recording on my own, mostly because the costs with a studio album tend to be very high, and all them musicians have bills to pay too.

So this music thing I do, it’s been in me my entire life.  I have memories of making songs for others as young as 8 and since I’m tenacious, I’m not planning on going anywhere soon.  

I’m married, have no kids, but our pets are handfuls, so it seems appropriate at this time.  My husband and extended family are supportive of my music and performing, which makes the wheels move pretty smoothly when it comes to scheduling. 

#10yearsago TMZ didn’t exist and Kardashian was only associated with OJ (not a juice blend)

So… Have a mighty merry Christmas!!! I took a picture I want to share, but must wait until after the 25th, it… http://t.co/UHu2oLFm

Check out Rebekah Ann Curtis at Goldbergs’ Famous Delicatessen on Thu Dec 22 - http://t.co/CLWJo3VK 6:30pm to 8:30pm! See you there!

We like us some Voxxy Vallejo! :)

As soon as I figure out where you can download the first episode, if you missed it, I will share :)

Quickie… punk band rocks. lead singer is dressed up like rudolph… weird or cool? #tacoma #stonegate #punkrock #nwczradio #hashtaghell