Skiing is fun. Lots of fun.
From time to time, people who ski fall and get hurt. This week unfortunately, it was my turn. Jesse and I were coming down Mr. K at Big Sky (which is a green run, aka beginner) at the end of an awesome day of skiing up in some more challenging terrain. Bombing down towards the base, my right ski caught an edge and spun me around. It was quite the yard sale, and the result was a Tibial Plateau Fracture. After close analysis of the xrays and CT scan, the doctors determined that I am a border line candidate for surgery, meaning I don't necessarily need surgery. So right now, I am faced with the important decision of having the surgery, or letting it heal on it's own. Both options have their pros and cons, and it's really a hard call. My case is right in the middle. Tough one.
Every year, we play a fun festival here at the Big Sky Resort in Big Sky, MT. We'll be here for a week, and needless to say we'll be skiing the whole time. This is a beautiful place with world class skiing. Here's a little bit of the first day here. The song is one written by one of my best friends who I grew up with, Sal Napolitano. He's a fantastic songwriter, and this is part of a song that we recorded during the winter break 2010. He wrote and sang it, I played the instruments and produced the track. Hope you enjoy.
So, we all went to the Grammys and had a blast. Flew in on Saturday, which is when they have a reception for the nominees.
At this reception, they give the nominees a medallion, which is made by Tiffany and Co..Pretty bad ass souvenir.
Sunday is the big day..It starts with the famed Red Carpet. You walk down through this gauntlet of press people, and at the end you stand in front of about 50 cameras for a minute..then make your way in to the awards show. First is the pre-telecast awards show, where they present the award for which we were nominated..We lost to Marty Stuart (congrats man!), but what an honor to be nominiated.
After that comes the televised portion of the show..Highlights for me were: the opening Aretha Franklin tribute, especially Christina - I don't care if she messed up the words to the National Anthem at the Super Bowl--this lady sang the shit out of some Aretha songs. Also, Eminem was incredible, Dr. Dre, Usher, and Mick Jagger rocked the house. The production of this show is really incredible.
and then, there is the after party, which had a Studio 54 theme and the Roots played an amazing set there.
A few drinks, late night hang, and then off to Big Sky Montana!
And that's where I am now, deciding whether to ski or not to ski today. Hope you enjoyed this little Grammy summary.. Thanks so much for all the supportive facebook and twitter comments. Post at ya later!
So, I'm officially a resident of Charlottesville, VA. With a little construction and creative shelving, my apartment is pretty much done and I'm loving it.
Only a block from the downtown pedestrian mall, I'm in the middle of everything. My pad looks like it could be a Greenwich Village studio apartment (except for about 1/3rd the price if it were in the Village lol!). Our amazing management team, the Artist Farm is right next door. My other neighbor hosted a great little 'In the Round' the other night with some great local C'ville musicians, where Pandolfi (who also moved to C'ville) and I participated playing a couple songs together. Pandolfi found an incredibly cool apartment just on the other side of the pedestrian mall, and we'll move him in this weekend. Last night, we sat in with our good buds, Love Canon..They play all 80's music on bluegrass instruments, and we jammed on 'Centerfold' and 'Money For Nothing'. This morning, we did a radio show with most of the Love Canon dudes to promote a show we are doing here in C'ville with Love Canon and the Infamous Stringdusters on April 29th at the Jefferson.
Great hangs all week all over this amazing place. So glad I moved here. And the best part--I'll jump on a train to visit the fam in NY on Monday before flying to LA for the Grammy Awards next week. Life is good.
I will try to use this as a place to post videos and pictures from the road, share music I record at home for fun, as well as the usual blabbing that is inevitable on a blog.. I feel very lucky to be able to do what I do for a living with the people I do it with, and this will be a little window that I'll call 'A Day In A Life'. Sometimes, I'll blog weekly. Sometimes, monthly...hell, I might blog daily once in a while, though I doubt it.
So, as they say, Welcome to Cresty's Place.
You might ask, "Who the hell is 'Cresty'?"
For those who don't know, in our band we all have nicknames. It's rare for someone in the band to address a band mate by their real name. So the name "Cresty" comes from:
Falco-->Falcon-->Falcon Crest (80's TV show)-->Crest-->Cresty. Now you know.
I move around a lot. I travel for work. I live in Nashville (for another few days anyway). I'm moving to Charlottesville VA, but my family is up in New York where I'm from so I spend a lot of off time up there. I take pictures and videos with my cell phone when I see things I think are cool.
We had six weeks off for the holiday season, and so to be able to spend a good chunk of time with my family in NY and still be productive, I brought my project studio and all of my instruments up to NY and recorded a bunch of music.
Here's a video collage of some things I had in my phone from late fall '10 through January '11. Some family images, and some from the road. Both songs are ones I did while on break in NY, the first during a huge blizzard. This vid started as just a little project for fun while bored in the van, but then I thought it might be worthy of a blog post. Originally, the second song selection for the vid was a great song by Danny O'Keefe ('The Road') that I was turned on to recently by my good friend Mark Lotito. The video was actually edited to go with that song, but with no license to use his song I had to replace it for publishing publicly..So it is what it is now. I don't claim to be a film maker by any means, but thought it would be a nice way to present a snippet of my life over the last few months. Hope you enjoy, and please come visit me here at Cresty's Place for more if you like.
