Mother of Oceans

Had a great time last night playing Celtic music with "Annie's Romance" at the Freedom Festival in Provo. It was our first gig and people had fun. I pounded away on my D-18 like I meant it.

In my first post here, I threatened a song for "Mother Earth." Here's the begining. It's probably a verse, although the first image will certainly recur frequently in the chorus.

Mother of oceans, mother of skies,
Mother of mountains enticing my eyes,
Mother of thunder, Mother of rain,
Mother of hope and the song in the grain.

It will be a big "stomp-clap" song, not unlike "We will, we will rock you." About that tempo (maybe a little faster), with a heavy back-beat, but not so much in your face. Also, it will actually say something (even if that first verse doesn't contain a complete sentence).

With the ever-hovering need to create a living out of music (ain't easy) and the tenacious recession and the violence in the Middle East and the towering challenge to us all to be "lights unto the world," I gotta admit that the subject that actually quickens my pulse in these days is guitar picks. They all make your guitar sound different, sometimes radically different, depending on weight, shape, bevel, material--stuff like that.

For a hundred years, I just bought handfuls of Fender mediums. Then I went with bare hands for about a decade, and now I'm back into picks--mainly because I have these totally weak fingernails, which I variously reinforce with fake nails, muslin saturated in krazyglue, or just coats of krazyglue. I've tried about everything. It's why my screen name on guitar forums is "frailnail." (Also because the banjo style I play is called "frailing.")

So now I have picks made of shell, stone, ebony, rosewood, palo santo (holy wood), and a plethora of man-made materials (tortex, ultex, lexan, nylon). I'm feeling pretty happy with picks made by the Jim Dunlop company out of what they call "tortex." They're called "Gator Grip" in a thickness of 1.5 mil. (Although just now, checking the material to get it right for you, I saw on their web site that they have 2.0 mil., and that's my next purchase.) What I'm after is whatever will give me the most guitar sound and the least pick sound. In the last few weeks, I've dipped the top half of whatever picks I've liked in "Liquid Rubber," stuff that's really made for dipping the handles of pliers and other tools. It makes for a better grip.

Anna Rasmussen at the Dunlop factory sent me an assortment of about twenty different kinds of picks to compare, so my heart is softened toward their work. Hey, I'm on the Internet. I'm gonna buy some picks and finish this song!