Category Archives: Music related

Oh, the weekend . . .

I’ll never understand how the weekends come and go so quickly.  Due to last weekend being a celebration of my 31st birthday and impending adulthood, JT and my family took me out for a good time.  I don’t know if I’ve fully regained my hearing after going to see 4 bands in the span of 3 days.    It was a great whirlwind though!

Friday we had “80s Night” at the Pageant, seeing Tom Tom Club and Psychadelic Furs.  Both groups were high energy and still have it 30 years later. 

But first JT had taken me to dinner at Winslow’s Home on Delmar. 
Not only was the food yummy and you could order wine from their wine room, it’s also a “New American General Store”.  I’m not 100% sure what that means except that I like it . . .   I had to really crop down the picture on the right as Mr. T doesn’t necessarily want to star on the blog, but look at all the fun things on the shelves behind that handsome man in flannel.  I didn’t make it out of there without treating myself to a few items.

Saturday and Sunday was the Taste of St. Louis.  I had never been before so I wrongly assumed that it was a poorly attended event (because if I wasn’t there, then probably nobody was there, right?).  Whoa was it crowded.   I saw Fitz and the Tantrums on Saturday and The English Beat on Sunday.
(Have I mentioned before that my photography is horendous?  Plus there was a 7 foot tall man in front of me at the Fitz show.)
The Peabody Opera House is about to reopen and was hosting a preview night.  Somehow my sister and her boyfriend pilfered tickets on Saturday night and instead of being down in the crowd looking up at the Peabody balcony, we ended up on the balcony, looking down on our subjects below.
It was a pretty awesome weekend!

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming. . .

Start Me Up . . .

Once I started changing up the office/music room, I just couldn’t help myself.  So Thursday, after a discussion with JT, I popped out and bought a can of paint . . .
When I paint (lefty), I don’t know what to do with my free hand and I always end up with it on my hip like so  . . .

Here’s what’s gone down so far . . .
Elvis lives!  We really just have that taped back there to amuse a friend who spent the night on the air mattress one time.  Who can’t resist a little Elvis? (This girl :: points to self with thumbs::).

The “During” shot still needed another coat which I did yesterday.  My fabulous iPhone photography makes it hard to really see the color all the way, but I love it.  JT wants it for the bedroom as well so we’ll have a nice little sleeping cave.  It’s Bosporous by Sherwin Williams.  I’ll get some more (and hopefully better pictures) once the tape is down and the shelves are pushed back into place.  Because the office is such a dumping ground for all my furniture orphans, right now I am painting it one half at a time and shoving everything over to the other side. .  .

In other update news, my Missoni arrived!  Well really only part of it so I’m still skeptical as to whether the rest will ship.  But it works with the color scheme perfectly.
I think most of it will go to the bedroom but with me, it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings. 

Speaking of singing fat ladies and Mick Jagger and Elvis, I saw 4 bands in three days this weekend and my legs are aching from jumping up and down for three hours straight.  I’ll post more about that later (maybe tomorrow, dunno it’s BUSY at work).

Have a great week!

Music Room comes (back) to life

Because I seem to have decorator’s A.D.D., I jumped from the bedroom makeover to the office.  The bedroom is still moving forward but I am waiting on some swatches and my MISSONI to ship in.  I don’t want to pick a paint color until I have some of the larger objects together and so . . . . I got bored and looked around the house for another project.  (JT and I have also started drinking coffee in the evening which has prompted much more caffeine-fueled work than I ever thought possible, which may be a big mistake.)

So, the office.  When we first moved in to our house back in 2005 (yes it’s been that long and I still haven’t accomplished anything!  But I’m working on it!)  it was our bedroom for about two weeks.  But we realized quickly that the front room was more private and moved things over.  The office had gone through many many iterations since then, mainly a furniture warehouse for all the things I drag in and out of the house. 

Case in point — these pictures I unearthed from a few years back when I started doing the Apartment Therapy Cure on this room.  It didn’t quite stick.  Here’s the embarrassing evidence though —The desk and vinyl MCM sofa have already made their way into the living/dining room.  Those two dressers are currently in the bedroom but headed out of Dodge to make way for the armoire and dressing table.  The lamps have also relocated to the living/dining room as well. (PS – I’m not a huge fan of guns, like at all, but those were my dad’s and right now we don’t know quite what else to do with them.)
For the two weeks it was a bedroom, we had painted it Sherwin Williams Decorous Amber, which is a nice burnt orange color.  Then I painted back a few of the walls to Amazing Gray (the color of most of the walls in the living room) and I thought I would paint the ceiling too.  It has since been painted back to white.  What a disaster!  As you can see, the office is really a music room and there is a lot of gear that needs a home.

Here’s what the office looks like more recently:

( You may have noticed from the photos that JT has revolving guitars going on, so he can’t really give me any grief about revolving furniture.  We’re a good match like that.)

We got that giant white/wood drawer from Warehouse of Fixtures — it used to be a sweater drawer in the Gap I think.  Great storage and JT’s speaker cabinets look nice sitting on it.  The mahogany piece sitting next to the drawer is on the way out and next to it is my future dressing table, which currently holds JT’s recorder/mixer thing and needs to be painted/made pretty before its debut in the bedroom.

Remember a while back I dragged home some more furniture from Craigslist?  Well on a coffee-adled binge last night, I convinced JT to help me start assembling/moving/changing the room around.  AGAIN.  And he agreed.  What a good husband.
It doesn’t look like much just yet . . . but it’s gonna!!! 

Here’s the plan —This New & Improved Music Room/Office has me excited for two reasons and they are both things I had on my 2011 New Year’s resolutions.

1.  I have always wanted a proper place to display our books (a library!) and now with the new shelving they can sit out instead of languishing in storage bins.  Also, all our vinyl will have a home too, yippee.
2.  I want to have a piano/keyboard/organ in the house to encourage me to work on my music more and for JT to master (he masters all instruments almost immediately).

Before we get the shelving all bolted together and settled along the one wall, this room needs a coat of paint desperately.  I’m on the fence right now between A) a creamy white that will blend the shelving into the wall B) the deep turquoise/teal/sapphire blue color that I’m digging right now or C) a nice gray color that I am leaning towards for the bedroom.  I think if I do Option B I may have to paint the ceiling as well, so that makes me a little nervous.  Anyone want to vote as to what color it should be?  I’d love to hear some input!

Bedrooms are Back

Here is my next installment of music turned room scene that I have lamely nicknamed “Set the Scene”.


Ione Skye’s bedroom, featured in Domino magazine.
Photo by Paul Costello, Domino, Sept. 2005.

You guys remember Ione Skye, right?  No?  Let me refresh your memory.

Okay, so that’s not her, but she was the actress receiving the boom box serenade from Mr. John Cusack (whom I love) AKA Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything. 

This bedroom is so light and airy yet spirited and dare-I-say-funky that it’s a hard one to pass up.  Also, I am obsessed with bedroom images right now as I work furiously (at the pace of a 100-year-old tortoise) to reinvent/refresh/reinvigorate the JT/CT bedroom.

So, what music do you hear playing in this room?  For me, it’s the bad-ass Leona Naess song “Mayor of Your Town”.  You don’t want to piss this chick off . . . or get this song stuck in your head — it’s catchy!

Catchy, right?  Everyone needs some “lipstick to kiss kill”.

Mini-Blinds Get Some Love

JT and I unplugged from our cable a while ago and now just have the basic channels along with Netflix.  With the switch to digital, there arrived some extra channels — one of them is 30.2 “Cool TV”.  Music Videos are back on TV.  Don’t tell MTV, but some people actually like to watch music videos . . .

So we were tuned into the 90s video block (I’m a 90s music girl at heart) and this awesome vid from Veruca Salt popped up – “Number One Blind”.  I had never heard this song back in this bands heyday (click the picture to see the YouTube video – I figured out the video upgrade for this tiny little blog would cost $60 — not quite there yet, sorry!). 

It made me smile — it’s about mini-blinds (among other things).  I got a sample package from Levelor just the other day – we use them all the time at work. 

Too funny.   Anyone else have some good stories of the design world crossing into the real world?

My very own Fantasia

As a child and young adult my favorite Disney movie was Fantasia.  I loved how the music was visualized in such a unique way.

Reallly, even the way they showcase the actual musicians was so visually interesting . . .

When I get the chance to hear a live orchestra, which isn’t often, I like to close my eyes and make my own “Fantasia”.  So . . . . I have issues and may or may not need therapy as already mentioned in previous posts.  But it got me to thinking about doing it in reverse — seeing an image or space and imagining the music that would play along to it.  I know this has been done all over but what the heck, I thought I would throw my hat in the ring.

Let’s “Set the Scene”

For starters, this sexy man bedroom:

I could not for the life of me find where I clipped this image from.  I’ve been using www.tineye.com to do a reverse search on images.  Over the last few years I have started right-click-saving any images I loved or that have great ideas.  Now if I want to blog about them, I want to credit them like a good little blogger.  Boo me.  But I couldn’t resist this image so if it is yours, let me know.  And well done.  (I’ll probably get a cease and desist order after this, who knows.)  At any rate, JT and I went to the My Morning Jacket concert last Tuesday night at the Pageant and they rocked our socks off.   So for this space, I thought MMJ Lay Low off their album “Z” would be its song of choice.


08 Lay Low
 This image looks like a perfect place to “pass out on the bedroom floor” as Yim Yames croons about.

I also snapped one quickie photo at the concert.  It’s not good because, well you’re not supposed to take pictures and I didn’t want to get kicked out, I wanted to rock out.

Enjoy your weekend!

T 001

While I’ve been “crafting”, JT has been hard at work in his secret basement lair that is so cluttered and disgusting that I will never, ever, ever, ever photograph it.  (Got that — Ever!)

Get this — he made a guitar!   This will be his third Telecaster . . . there’s a story in there about the revolving door of guitars but I don’t even have a full recollection of all of them and I don’t know if JT does either . . .  At any rate the first two were purchases but this one arrived like this . . .

Then JT had some fun doing test pieces of poplar to decide what stain and oils to use on the body.  I did an experiment with steel wool and vinegar for a black-ish stain that was less than successful.

Next came the sanding.  Sanding, sanding, sanding.  And whiskey, an integral part of the home guitar-building process.

And the body was done!!   

Next he cut his own design out of the block-o-wood headstock.

Then I got to do my part — the branding!
I have a small obsession with the letter T.  Since this was JT’s first guitar-build attempt, I named our Baby T001.  However I was using the soldering iron and it all needed to fit in the spot where the back plate would go, so it ended up looking like T–1.  Whatever.

Wiring and other stuff I don’t know how to do.


And then the first-born was finished.  Yeah, I put out champagne.  Here’s a secret at the T’s house:  I always keep a bottle of champagne in the fridge because you never know when you might need to celebrate.  I find there are many moments in life worth celebrating.  JT completing all his hard work and ending up with an awesome sounding guitar is definitely one of them.

For T001’s YouTube debut . . . click here.  I’m still a novice blogger.  Sorry.   But I’m pretty proud of the husband for completing guitar #1. 

He now has #2 and #3 in the works simultaneously . . . we’ll see if I’m still so proud of this hobby when it takes over our house . . .

Dad’s stereo, still rocking

I hate wires.  Everything has at least 40 wires these days.  Case in point:

The living room has been in a constant state of flux due to some flat screen TV changes (i.e. we actually joined the new millennium and got a flat screen only to realize it was super tiny and got another, larger flat screen.)  As a part of all this craziness, the audio equipment has also been moved around and around. 

Here’s how it landed . . . at first — this wall used to be the “tv wall”. 

Then the little flat screen moved into the bedroom and freed up my $3 Value Village metal cart to be used for other media . . .

Then JT got busy and hung some Ikea Lack shelves for me above the desk.  It’s starting to come together . . . some of the picture frames are still empty because I’m not a big picture displaying person, so I’m working on that.  Worse case, we’ll put in an image of two of Elvis and that will finish it all off nicely.  The large image is a certificate from the Union Army that is addressed to JT’s great great great(?) grandfather.  Definitely something I would grab in case of a fire, methinks. 

You can start to see my obsession with the letter “t” slip out . . . and also lucite and white vinyl, but who’s keeping track . . .  I have all the wires corralled under the right foot of the desk and everything has been banded and painter’s taped to the back of the desk like you wouldn’t believe.  Wire problem solved!

My dad built the speakers from a kit back in the day.  Everything had been hanging out in my parent’s basement for a while, being badly abused by us kids.  Thanks to Craigslist, I ended up with a visit from Zaw Win who owns Alpha  Tech Electronics.  He restored the set back to life and we’ve been enjoying it ever since. 

Here it is, back in the day . . .

I’m assuming this picture is circa 1977.   Is that a bright yellow bean bag I spot in the corner?  The reel-to-reel is still in our basement, waiting for some more funding to give it a trip to see Mr. Win.    I’m pretty happy to have this family relic in our living room.   It is meaningful, functional and beautiful.   Plus, it gives us an extra incentive to cruise the local vinyl stores . . . that along with the vinyl burner that lets us put all that great vinyl sound into our iTunes.  Life is good.