the Challenge

One of my closest friends right now is Dominique Fricot.

He is great because he and I have a lot of things in common and he's not afraid to spout opinions that I agree or disagree with.  We are both musicians, we both are fairly outspoken/opinionated, we both have similar tastes in music, and we both have similar belief systems.

I may have said this in my blog before but one of the things I love about Dom is that he isn't afraid to challenge me.  A few months ago he made a suggestion that impacted me so deeply that I took a step back from booze for just over 2 month.  I stayed sober 60 days.  He also challenged me to continue to write this blog and always know the difference between "then" and "than" (which I'm still working on btw). 

So last week Dom & I were hanging out and he asked me to play a solo show with him.  I was given this advice from another friend about shows:  always say yes and THEN figure out how you'll do it.  So I agreed that I should play my songs live.  Get the project off the ground.  Let the songs organically grow into something new.  Live energy can inject something into music.  Every time I've ever played a song live for a while whether on a tour or locally in various projects, something always happens to the song.  It matures.  My feelings towards a particular song change.  Usually for the better but it also tends to weed out the bad stuff from the good stuff.  The good material gets better and the weak songs either get honed or fall off the radar and no longer stay as part of the set.

So here we are.  This event (details tba) is a small benefit show.  Dom seems to like to play these types of events fairly often because he's so philantropic or something but I'm glad to get a chance to play some of my songs and maybe I'll even have a few suprise guests/songs for the crowd that night.  All in all, I'm completely scared out of my wits.

Dom's quote to me was, "everyone should do something that scares them once a day.  After about a year, you would be invincible".  And when I asked to borrow his guitar he said, "No nirvana shit". 

I might cover in bloom just for him.

Check out Dominique's music/blog/web here

Check out my favourite song I wrote here

Love,
Marty
@martyzylstra