Life By Lindsey Rae

It's been about a week since my last post....I wanted to write more often. I have so many pictures to share with you all! I have just had a somewhat busy week...or at least a week where I have been very overwhelmed and stressed out.

So many things to worry about right now: getting this music stuff taken care of with the publishing and doing all the copyright documents, making decisions about lots of stuff in regards to the music and CD (Ah! I hate making decisions) and just trying to get everything in the right place at the right time. It's enough to drive me crazy! I just don't want to mess up anything...especially not to the point that it becomes an irreversible mess up. These processes are very difficult. So, this stresses me out.

On top of that, my kitchen is making me nearly insane right now...I won't go into details right now on that....but it's a difficult job I am doing...More on that later....if I'm still alive after inhaled so much grout dust.

Next post (hopefully tomorrow) will be more fun. I have some crazy pictures to show. They are very shocking to me! :)

I've been very neglectful in writing anything here in the past while. I have just been either busy, tired, both...or not feeling like doing anything. So basically, I guess what I have been up to recently is:
- Songwriting
- Painting, both a bathroom with Jerrod and an old cedar chest I acquired a few months back. (more on that disaster later.)
- Practicing some recording with my new at home set up
- Playing with my camera and starting to make some videos
- Thinking a lot about what to do for my Primary class
- Planning lessons and shopping and making things for my Primary class
- Reading
- Researching things I am working on for music, art, primary, etc.
- Hanging out with Jerrod
- Doing a little scrapbooking, here and there...
- Sleeping more than I want to and feeling not so great some days.
- And more or less of the usual...It all sounds pretty usual!

This past Saturday night we were able to see the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Concert in Nashville. Jerrod and I went and took Jerrod's friend from work and two other people we know who are voice instructors who Jerrod does computer work for. We had dinner first and then walked downtown to the Gaylord Entertainment Center, where they had the concert. This was the first time the Choir has been to Nashville in over 30 years, so at church, they were really encouraging everyone to go and to tell our friends from outside of church about it too and bring them. I was initially disappointed when I heard that they would do the performance here. There are so many great places in Nashville that would house this type of performance so much better...places that are truly designed for the arts, but the Gaylord is the Nashville Predetors home and other sports and then used for concerts for the big, loud, pop/country type artists. So, I wished that they were going to be somewhere fit for classical type music. I guess maybe either the other places were booked too far in advance or maybe they just wanted to get the biggest place possible so that there would be enough room for as many as could make it.

Anyway, back to the choir. It was really, really good. The only time I could remember hearing them in person, at least in recent years, was about 6 years ago when I went to General Conference with some of my high school friends in Salt Lake. I remember I was blown away by how truly good it was to hear them live. This time was no exception (other than the fact that the sound could have been fuller in a different venue...but enough of that). They started off with the National Anthem. (No not mine...but thoese Americans) and really, it moved me and brought tears to my eyes to be able to hear that sung so well, so close to independence day and feel the spirit tell me that we trully are blessed to be living where we are right now.

They did some really cool pieces; folk songs from other lands that were just so right on. Everyone loved it. I loved the classical peices they did: works by Mozart, Verdi, Rochmoniof. And of course loved it when they sang a couple of arrangememts I had sung before in my own choir, so I knew all the parts; that was fun.
It made me want to just get up and sing...want to be a part of a good group again. Not that I have ever been in a group that good, but I have had some good choir friends and it's just a good feeling to make good music. I miss that and would like to get involved again, but it's difficult to do that when you are not in school.

Anyway, to end, it was a great concert. I think there was a sense of peace and warmness among everyone who attended. I think that the spirit was strong. Witnessing that all this beautiful music, even if it wasn't religous music, it was good and righteous and it testified of the Lord.

When I got married, instead of dropping my maiden name, I moved it in place of my middle name. My middle name used to be Rae but when I moved Osmond up to the middle name place, I moved Rae up with my first name, so now my legal first name is Lindsey Rae. That's where the whole "Lindsey Rae" thing at the top of this page comes from. And also that's what I'm using as a stage name for music stuff rather than my now very long name.

AND SPEAKING OF MUSIC:
A lot of people ask me about it: What I am doing and when my CD will be finished. The basic story is that I am working on it. I have a way to go still...it is a long process, because the whole recording process is done in steps where we write the songs/arrangements, then get musicians in to do basic tracks, then do scratch vocals, then keeper vocals and then go back in and add more musicians and then editing and mastering the tracks and basically getting the finished product from all that. I'm doing my best to get there. Also, for myself, because I am doing some songs in Japanese for this project, I wanted to rehearse them enough to feel comfortable that everything would sound as close to a native speaker as possible and go over them with my translator and that sort of thing. Besides that, because I work with other people doing all this, I have to work around other people and that is difficult sometimes...ok, it's difficult a lot of times and so it is frusturating for me because other people have held things up a lot. So, yes, it is slow, but it is what it is and when it is done, I expect to have a good recording and hopefully I will be happy with this CD!