Val Esway + El Mirage: Home

Howdy all,

June has been relatively quiet, but July has plenty in store, including a couple of fun and star-studded events, including Val playing solo at a benefit for the East Bay Humane Society at the Starry Plough on Sunday afternoon, July 11th, and the ladies of Loretta Lynch singing a few tunes at the Farewell to Jimmy Sweetwater event at the Great American Music Hall on Thursday, July 22nd.   Sandwiched in between, El Mirage will pop out of hiding to play at the Rite Spot.  Hooray for July!  Click on the calendar page for all the details.  Hope to see you soon!

April was quite the whirlwind, flying right by just like all the months do.  Besides enjoying a wonderful birthday and two glorious, relaxing trips to the ocean, I had a lot of fun sorting through old demos and posting them here.  And if all that wasn't enough, the month ended with an incredible show at the Great American Music Hall as I sang w/ Joe Rut and his most excellent band.  I can hardly find the words to describe what a truly special night of music that was.  What a joy to share the stage with such a vast array of talented musicians, playing Joe's excellent songs on that gorgeous stage.  It was very dreamy. Fortunately it was both recorded and filmed, so if you weren't one of the nearly 500 people there in the audience, fear not - you'll eventually have your chance to see the show!

Speaking of Joe Rut, Loretta Lynch is looking forward to playing a show with him and our pal Danny Allen and his High Diving Horses on May 22nd at the Starry Plough - it's going to be a great night of music and we hope you'll join us!

Howdy friends!

Could it be that Spring has finally sprung?  It sure feels that way to me.  I'm feeling like there's lots to look forward to in April, like Loretta Lynch at the Starry Plough on April 1st, and heading back to the Great American Music Hall to sing harmony w/ Joe Rut at his CD release on April 30th... and planting my garden... and getting out of town on no less than two vacations!  I'm not sure how I'll find time for anything else, but somehow I'm going to find a way, because I am working on a new-ish project that has me kind of excited!

I hope you'll join me for A Song A Day in April, wherein I sift through and dust off old songs, new songs, and demos that have never seen the light of day (and perhaps, a few that never were *meant* to see the light of day!). 

I'll mostly be posting previously unreleased demos, most of them largely unedited, many recorded moments after I wrote them, or even AS I was writing them, thanks to my participation in the Immersion Composition Society.

In some of my previous years of living, I've begun each year by writing one song each day for as long as I could manage to keep it going. But at this particular point in my life, I'm doing a lot of looking back. 

April is the month of my birth, and possibly it’s purely coincidental that I'm turning 41 this month and so, perhaps, you could call this a part of my mid-life crisis, who knows? I've been feeling pretty creatively blocked over the last couple of years, and this project began in part because I was revisiting some of my orphaned songs in an attempt to get myself unstuck. In the process I realized that maybe I wasn’t stuck after all – maybe I was just working on finding my way. 

Anyway, I discovered a few gems – and a few turds too – but mostly just had a great time revisiting the orphans! Some of them I may never want to revisit again, others may find their way into my live performances. For now, I'm just having fun digging through the old stuff, taking stock and working on finding a place from which to spring forward. I'm hoping that perhaps there are a few people out there who might appreciate this process and want to listen in. 

Not sure where we're going to end up, but am looking forward to the journey, and would be delighted to have you riding shotgun with me.