Sailor - Emily Deloach

Emily and Andy do a live in the studio performance of her song "Sailor".

Podcast #2 - My conversation with Emily Deloach

Andy interviews Nashville singer/songwriter Emily Deloach in the second installment of the "Conversations" series.

Three useful things I can no longer live without

#1 - CLICK HERE

The most Pre-Trib entrepreneurship I've ever seen. It's creative, I've got to give them that.

#2 and #3 - CLICK HERE

You don't have to get these for my studio, but I won't be mad at you if you do.

I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok.

So it's been a while since I've had time to post. So sorry. It's been crazy this week. Alison and I are going to take a little vacation starting Sunday, so I've been piling up all the work from this week and anticipated next week as well. Somehow that's going to help me relax?

In typical AO.com form, the most I can handle right now are the glorious bullet points, so here we go!

- First off, thanks to everybody who has sent in ideas for Letters to the Editor, Vol. II. I'm so excited to get to go through them and share the songs, and the process, with you. If you have an idea, I'd love to hear it.

- Secondly, thanks to everyone who was helpful in trying to get me a show in Austin. Stu Smith rose to the occasion, and set up an evening at Austin City Church. Alas, some things came up that forced us to reschedule our vacation to something a good bit closer to home. Soon, though, we'll make it happen. It was really wonderful to get the emails and ideas of you guys trying to get me a place to play. We should do that more often. I should go on tour or something. (More on that soon...) Anyway, thanks again, and so sorry it didn't work out.

- Saturday Christopher Williams, the talented singer/songwriter/neighbor, spent six hours in the very tall trees in my backyard cutting down dead limbs with a chainsaw on a pole. It was awesome.

- Saturday night I made a fire pit, something I've wanted to do for five years, with some of the afore-mentioned downed limbs. We now have a giant pile of firewood, the ability to make S'mores, and a pile of branches on our curb that is bigger than either of our cars.

- I've been finishing up a record for Andy Dolson this week. He's a talented guy and it's coming together nicely.

- Sunday morning our daughter Sadie is getting baptized. We're looking forward to that. A special time, for sure, and both of our parents are coming to town as well.

I guess that's about it for me today. I'm really excited for a little vacation, it will be our first really since we've had kids. And then I'll get to be excited to get back, since I'll get to start on "Letters II". Thank you guys for letting me do this.

And let me know if you need any firewood.

Letters to the Editor, Vol. II - The First Step

Last year I did a little project, an acoustic EP, where all the songs were based off of ideas and photos submitted by readers of this site. Well, that little project turned out to be one of my favorite things I've ever done. At the last minute I decided to add "Vol. 1" to the title, in hopes of continuing the idea later.

It's later now.

And I'm excited.

So here's the deal. I'm going to start working on this project in early July, and for this to work at all I will need your help.

The main thing I'm looking for at this point are your ideas. A poem, a photo, a story that's always inspired or intrigued you; anything you've ever thought "somebody needs to write a song about this..." I want to write that song.

Also, any ideas you have sonically. Instruments you'd like to hear or rules you think would be fun to follow. (Strict "rules" were a big part of the first project.)

You can send your ideas to me at this address:

ideas4andy@gmail.com

Anything you send me I'll read and whatever inspires me I'll try to write about. Two quick things:

1. By submitting your ideas you release ownership of them to me. (i.e. you won't get any royalties or copyrights for songs that come from them).

2. If you send me a story you want to share but you want kept confidential (outside of obviously informing a tune) try and make a note of it. Not that I'm going to say anything like this anyway, but I'd hate to post "Jack Jones gave me this great idea about his really embarrassing secret!" in my blog and find out later that wasn't really for public consumption.

So that's about it. I'm going to annoyingly document the process this time, and I hope you'll join me. It was an amazing experience making music with the people that listen last time and I hope to take it a few steps further this go around.

You guys are amazing. Thanks for letting me play music and try out these crazy ideas.

Here we go!