Ways in Which I’ve Slowly Become a Hippie

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Courtney

Are we still calling the crazy tree-huggers hippies these days?  I’ve never chained myself to a giant oak to stop a bull dozer from tearing it down, but I’ve gotten crazier and crazier over the years, and I think it’s rubbing off on Grant, too.

We refuse to eat GMO if we can help it.  That means we mostly avoid corn because GAH it’s hard to find non-GMO corn.

Very little processed food.  Cereal? Probably not, especially the sugary neon kind, certainly not anything with a recongizable giant brand name. Cookies? We bake them ourselves. Tortillas? BAH. I can’t help myself. We’ll learn to make our own, one day, when neither of us has a life.

We gave up meat three months ago. WHAT. We decided we felt super awesome after doing so, but I think my initial energy buzz is wearing off.  We’ve discussed adding locally sourced, free range organic meat back to our diets, just once or twice a month.  There are a few restaurants we trust to put the right things on our plates, or we can go to the butcher down the road.

We’re cutting processed, chemicaly “beauty” products one by one. The last tub of moisturizer I bought will sadly probably go to complete waste.  Organic cold-pressed coconut oil. That’s the stuff. Use it as mouthwash (no, I’m not kidding. There are several purpoted benefits which I can’t speak to, but my teeth feel JUST BEEN TO THE DENTIST CLEAN when I do this (with a quick brush afterward, of course), with the added bonus of OH HELLO CLEAR SINUSES, nice to breathe in you again), facial moisturizer, and I even found a recipe for coconut oil DEODORANT.  I haven’t tried that one yet. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious.  Apparently you can also mix coconut oil with eucalyptis oil and use it like Vicks Vapor Rub. The things you learn when you google weird shit.

We planted vegetables. On the balcony in pots. Because we don’t have a yard.  Certainly not enough to be self sufficient for a season or anything, but I’m new at this, and we’re trying.

We pay attention to miles per gallon when we buy our cars. We carpool when we can. We ride our bikes when we can. We try to recycle, though admittedly we sort of suck that that lately.  We do lots of little things to keep our bodies and the earth healthy, and, well, certainly we’re not doing a perfect job, but I like knowing that I might be doing just a little better than I was last month, or last year.

What kind of weird hippie habits do you have?

 

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Thanks to Lori McKenna

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Courtney

Many moons ago, I bought tickets to see Jason Mraz perform in Minneapolis. At the time, I completely and totally idolized him. I talked to everyone at work that day about how nervous I was to see him.  NERVOUS. I was working at a record label at the time though, and that environment was full of people who totally understood. It’s really easy to be disappointed by someone you love from afar.

I needn’t have been anxious, though. Up until that point, it was the very best show I’d ever seen. Jason performed the music flawlessly, and on top of that, HE was wonderful. The venue was packed full of sweaty, slightly intoxicated 20-somethings and he made us feel like he was talking to each of us individually, all while feeding on the collective energy.  That night he was even bigger than his music.

It was a long time before I found myself in a similar situation, but just a year or so ago, I had the chance to see Mindy Smith at a smaller venue in downtown Nashville.  I actually went in without high expectations.  I love her for her songwriting and always have. I didn’t know how dynamic she might be live. If she’d sit on a stool and sing and not say a word, if she’d rock, if she’d be sweet and demure. I didn’t have expectations at all, but that didn’t save me from disappointment, that time. Her voice was perfect, the songs were lovely as always, but her personality was, I’m afraid, a bit off-putting.  I’ll still listen to songs she’s written with appreciation, even her own records, but I can say with much certainty that I’ll never be seeing her live again.

And so I went in with careful consideration a little over a week ago, with tickets in hand to see Lori McKenna.  Talk about an idol – this woman has done with her life everything I’ve always wanted to do.  She’s second only to my own mother, at this point, on the list of women who influence Courtney’s life in order of importance. So… going to see her live? I was terrified. If I ended up disliking this show, I was going to really end up with an existential crisis on my hands. (side note: I throw around the term “existential crisis” a lot in the name of hyperbole. Rarely do I mean it and rarely am I even using the term correctly – but here, trust me. Existential crisis it would have been.)

Once again, though, I was relieved and even pleasantly surprised.  What I found out about Lori McKenna is that she is DELIGHTFUL.  She sounds better in person than on her records, her personality is real and inviting and effervescent. And her songwriting is truly some of the best in the business.

She invigorated me. She inspired me.  I spent the next week doing nothing but listening to music and wishing I could just go home and write. Or sing. Or sing and write.

Everyone looks to music for different reasons, and the same reasons, all at once.  But if I were to articulate what makes music resonate with me, it would be just that.  She made me want to be in it again.

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Corners

Posted on March 23, 2013 by Courtney

Part of getting married and combining lives is, of course, combining stuff.  I’m legitimately jealous of couples from ye olde days of yore, who lived with their parents until they were married, and had no things of their own, and had to start, as a couple, from scratch.

Not so jealous of the being traded for goats thing, however, so I’ll take what I’ve got.

Anyway, Grant and I have both been single, independent entities for some time, and even though he was living with his parents when I met him, he had an awful lot of stuff in storage and has managed to acquire even more since he moved into his condo nearly two years ago.

There is stuff coming out of our EARS at the condo.

This causes me to freak out at nearly every other moment I’m in the condo. Where are we going to put my things?! I find myself screaming. There’s not even enough room in here for yours!

Of course, that’s not really it. It’s that Grant buys really cool stuff without having any idea what he’ll do with it.  He’s got several Hatch Show Prints, which I honestly adore and am glad he owns, and he’s bought antique pin ball backgrounds and prints by local illustrators and and and and.  Most (maybe all, but I won’t admit to that right now) of them are really quite cool, I might even say charming. BUT HE NEVER HANGS ANYTHING UP.  There are three things on the wall in the entire condo. It’s not a big condo, but three things? C’mon now.

Me on the other hand?  I have furniture, but it’s cheap. My apartment is furnished with a couch that was there already and a love seat his mom handed down to me, which will probably get handed down to a friend when I leave. I’ve got cheap target bookshelves, an old roll top desk my parents bought at K-mart and gave to me for Christmas when I was 11, a dresser from Walmart, and a bed.  What am I worried about?  I’m not attached to that stuff.

I think it’s just that, and it’s not like we haven’t been pretty good about it, combining stuff and telling someone you love that you think that the fact that they bought brown furniture and more brown furniture and more brown furniture and lamps with brown shades and brown curtains to match it all was probably not the most, shall we say, creative decisions he could have made.  Oh sure, it works out fine in the end because you both agree that painting the walls bright green would probably look pretty awesome with all that brown furniture (and um, let’s replace the brown curtains still though, k?) but getting there while thinking about all the other stuff you still have to put in this itty bitty 3rd story condo is a little distressing.

It’s just that I finally get to move in somewhere and stay for awhile and I want it to feel like home.  Not his. Not mine. Ours.  And I’m learning how to do that, on top of planning a freaking wedding.

I’m a little high strung lately.  But I swear I’m fine.

All that to say, I’m actually feeling pretty good tonight.  We cleaned out the mess of a pantry last night, moved some of the stuff in the cabinets around, and I set up my small stash of cookbooks. We made yet another goodwill pile and another trash pile and another recycle pile. We finally finished painting the “dining room” walls (I mean it’s a real dining room, but it’s open to the kitchen and the living room so it’s all visible from everywhere, is what I’m saying) and got that whole area cleaned out and decluttered.  I found some really cute things that belonged to his Granny and put them out on display.

One little corner is done.

And I suppose, you’ve just got to go one little corner at a time, right?

 

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Strong

Posted on March 13, 2013 by Courtney

Yesterday, at work, I was going through my personal email account when a possible song title I had emailed myself awhile back caught my eye.

I opened the email and before I knew it I had hit reply (to myself) and an entire song had poured out of my fingertips and onto my keyboard.  Last night I pulled out my ukulele and wrote the chords – the basic rhythms and melody were already cemented in my head.

I read an article yesterday, too, about Ashley Monroe and Kacey Musgraves and Caitlin Rose, how these are the new women of country music, riding in on the tails of Miranda Lambert’s success, and Loretta Lynn before her.  Women who know how to reach in and find truth and write it down so precisely that you almost feel like they’re pulling the truth out of you when you hear them.

I started thinking about Lori McKenna, who I say over and over I want to be when I grow up, and how she has a way of doing the same thing, with the added factor of being a grown up woman with a grown up life, husband, kids, the works. These other girls are young (relatively, I mean, I’m pretty much the same age as they are), and I love them. I relate.  But Lori McKenna, she’s who I’m on my way to being, outside of music.  I’m getting married in two months and I don’t have that truth to pull from anymore… that single, heartbroken, collapsing in the middle of the house and sinking into the floor despair that makes for such good country songs.  I never had the trailer park background.  I grew up in a small town, but not on a farm, and when I went to college, I was still referred to as a “little city girl” because of the way I grew up and graduated  in a “huge” class of 100.  That speaks to the college I went to as much as where I came from, but my life was rather charmed.  I have no commentary on those years, not meaningful enough to sing about, because I didn’t even know myself yet.

But yesterday, I found a truth in that one-line lyric I’d written down.  I found it in my past, I found it in my present, I found it in the way I’ve fallen in love.  It’s one of the best songs I’ve written, I think, and I barely had to work it at. It truly makes me long for the days when I had a sunshine filled room and a piano to spend hours in, recording melodies and sounds, making songs permanent.

I wrote a song yesterday that with a dobro and a fiddle would fit right in on an Ashley Monroe record, or a Kacey Musgraves project, except for the fact that they didn’t write them.  I still struggle with whether or not I really want to pursue songwriting full time.  I know I’ve got great songs in me, but I’m not sure I have enough of them, or the skin thick enough to deal with the disappointments that come with the territory.  But every now and then I write a song like I wrote yesterday… and.

And I think I have to try.

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Just Breathe

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Courtney

Okay. I admit it.

After all the big talk about how easy and non-stressful our wedding is and is going to be, I let myself get downright stressed out this weekend.

There is a list of things I haven’t done yet and a list of things I haven’t even thought of. A bouquet Courtney! A bouquet! Are you going to carry something down the aisle or just let your arms flop about all wibbly-wobbly like?!

Truth be told, I don’t handle stress very well anymore.  I have several theories as to why that might be, and I’m working on what I can, but it’s just the truth.  I’m so very go with the flow, that once I got the big things out of the way I figured the little things would trickle on down without incident.  They didn’t.

And I freaked out.

Yeah, okay, I’m being dramatic. But my wedding is in just a little over two months and I haven’t even considered flowers.  And until yesterday, I still didn’t have shoes. Or a veil.

I still haven’t made a hair appointment and still can’t decide IF I SHOULD.

My hair. It is short.

We didn’t have a place to put the guest book. Or the cookies or the lemonade.  We still don’t know WHO is going to MAKE the lemonade. LEMONADE. WHO FREAKS OUT ABOUT LEMONADE?

Anyway, I promiseface, I’m actually totally fine.
Just, you know, I’m getting married in May.  That’s not a big deal or anything.

 

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Meat Free

Posted on March 11, 2013 by Courtney

Grant and I have decided to be vegetarian.

Does one ever just decide to BE something and then… be it? I don’t know, but we’ve been proving to ourselves for the past two weeks that we’re actually kind of serious about this.

When we first started talking about cutting meat out of our diet, we were doing so because we’d seen a documentary called “Vegucated,” about a group of New Yorkers who made the commitment to live the vegan lifestyle for a certain number of weeks.  I was already pretty opposed to the factory farm system, and we’d been trying to buy meat labeled as organic, or when it came to chickens and eggs, at very least cage free. “Vegucated” was the first exposure Grant had to any of the crazy food documentaries I’m so addicted to, and before the movie started he said, “This is going to be dumb,” and seven minutes in he was saying, “We can never eat animals again!”  That, coupled with the realization that some of those labels I’d been trusting didn’t mean what I thought they meant, and we decided to try it.

We gave ourselves some exceptions – we could finish the food we already had in the fridge, but we couldn’t buy more for the forseeable future. For “special occasions” (which we never fully defined, and we haven’t had one yet) we could eat meat if we knew exactly which local farm it came from and how the animals were treated there (this mostly meant spending a little more to go to Porter Road Butcher, a place that is not shy about letting you know exactly where they source their products).  We also already have our wedding menu planned out and weren’t particularly interested in changing those plans, so chicken and fish on the big day, it is.  Our caterer sources their products locally, so we’re not too worried about that.

Still, as we started our journey without meat, we found ourselves ignoring the leftover deli turkey (the good stuff!), the unopened package of bacon, and the fish bagged up in the freezer.  The more we didn’t eat it, the more we didn’t want to.  Cutting meat hadn’t only meant cutting meat, it had also meant adding a ton of fresh produce to our diets, and these two factors together meant (at least for me) a ton of mental energy, the likes of which I can’t remember ever having.  I started getting coffee in the morning because I felt like it, not because I felt like I’d die without it. That’s saying something, I’m telling you.

So… why not vegan?  Well, I noticed that a lot of the ingredients used in vegan food are “fake” versions of dairy, which is something, healthwise, I just can’t get behind.  We decided to stop eating animals because we realize just how bad the factory farm system really is, but I’ve been steering clear of overly processed foods for a long time now (which the rare exception of Little Debbie Zebra Cakes. Gross? Yes. But they’re my kryptonite.) and the vegan cheeses and butters are mostly extracts and oils of good things like veggies, but without all the other good stuff that comes with the veggies.  I’m anti-processing, and pro-whole foods, and that part just doesn’t fit into my personal view of a healthy diet.  I also know that asking myself to give up butter and cheese and eggs altogether is just a big old recipe for failure, so that’s where I have personally chosen to draw the line.

The biggest challenge for me, though, is losing most of my arsenal of go-to, easy, delicious recipes.  Chicken noodle soup? Out.  My standard lasagna recipe? I’ll have to modify it.  Grilling up a piece of fish and boiling some rice? Not an option anymore.   I just keep reminding myself, though, that the longer we do this, the more recipes we’ll find that we love. We’ll rebuild the arsenal.

Overall, we’re both very happy with our decision.  It’s probably too early to tell, but I honestly think this is going to stick. And did I mention? We’re both losing weight, noticably, without even trying. This is, again, due to the large amount of produce we’ve added to our diet – we haven’t replaced the meat with potatoes or bread. We’ve replaced it with spaghetti squash and spinach and other foods full of vitamins.  We’re not “Carbitarians.” So yeah, I’m almost never hungry, I never feel sluggish anymore, AND I get to be skinnier?

I’ll take it.

Have you ever made any big diet overhauls? Were they difficult? What’s your favorite meat-free dish?

 

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Home

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Courtney

I spent the better part of my adolescence and early adulthood (which I suppose I’m still living out) longing for adventure. I wanted to get out on the road and drive. I wanted new places. I wanted new people. I wanted new EVERYTHING.

And now I think I got too much of what I asked for.

I feel mostly at home in Nashville, as a city. I’ve been here long enough that I have my favorite places to eat, and places to ride bikes, and find new clothes, and hear live music.  But outside of that, I’ve been transient inside my 40 mile radius.  I had a good thing in my first Tennessee house, but the commute to work was killing me, so I moved. I had a good thing in my first Nashville house, but the owner wanted to sell it, so I moved. My current apartment is not exactly what I would classify as a good thing, but I moved in knowing I would move again in a year, when I got married. And now that I am getting married in a few months, I have another move on the way in the next few months.

So, I moved to Tennessee in 2009, and by the middle of 2013, four and a half years, if you don’t want to do the math, I’ll have moved four times.

I mentioned this to my mom the other day, how unsettled I was feeling, and how Grant keeps looking at houses, and how I know I don’t want to live in the condo he owns forever, but it’s not so bad for now and good lord I’m tired of moving. She said something about how at least I hadn’t ever moved like they moved back in 2005, a whole house, across two states.  Well, no, I guess I haven’t ever moved like that. I had less responsibility, fewer kinks to work out. But I did move 900 miles with only what I could fit in a little Plymouth, all by myself.  I did sleep on an air mattress in an empty room for nearly five months.  I don’t care what the circumstances are. Moving can be exciting, but it’s also extremely difficult. And the more often it happens, the harder it gets.

And I’ve lived in four places in four years!  It’s no wonder I’ve been feeling more and more lately like I can’t find myself anymore. There’s a little bit of me left behind in so many places.

Add to that all the moving around I did before I moved to Tennessee… From Montana Bismarck, Fargo/Moorhead, Monticello/Minneapolis, back and forth and back and forth, one place for a few months at a time. Friends made, friends moved, friends left. Jobs here, jobs there.  Interstates and country roads. Cows and horses and bonfires and cheap beer and movie theaters and seafood restaurants and actors and musicians and and and.

And.

And my history is scattered.  It’s colorful, and I’m thankful for that. But there’s no one, or even two or three, places that I can go back to to feel home anymore. I know that what that means is I need to get to work creating my own sense of home.  That’s, however, easier said than done.

I’m so excited to move in with Grant and start our lives together. I’m excited that no matter where we may end up, we get to go together.  Even so, moving in with Grant means moving. Good Lord.  Do you think I can convince him to stay in the condo FOREVER? I want  to wear my footsteps into the floor, I want the bathroom walls to smell like my shampoo, and I want to be around when I’m fifty to enjoy the signs that I’ve been there for 25 years.

Like I said, I know we won’t live in his place forever, but I am really, truly excited to finally get to say in one place for awhile.

How do you find the feeling of home when you’re feeling a little too displaced and scattered?

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Nashville is Fun

Posted on February 19, 2013 by Courtney

We went downtown Saturday night with the intention of grabbing something to eat at Panera before heading to the Ryman to have some Fun.

Yeah I just did that.

Panera, though, hates us, and closed at 7:30, which was the very moment we had decided we would get dinner.  Not wanting to backtrack through the wind, we decided to keep heading down toward Broadway, not sure where we’d end up.

Jack’s BarBQue.  I’d never been, but it’s a Nashville staple, and the line was short enough (relatively) so I figured it was about time we try it.

Look, the barbecue is good. But I’m no authority on this particular southern genre, nor do I think I might ever be. What I am an authority on, though, is the magic of Nashville when it’s new, and that’s something I haven’t felt in a long, long time.

We waited in line for about a half an hour before we could order, but lining the walls keeping us company on the way were photos and signatures and newspaper articles.  Some of them were from long before I was born, but some of them were, most amusingly, from when I was a kid dreaming about coming to Nashville and walking up and down Broadway in search of my dream. I gazed and read and smiled at the silly familiarity of it all.

It’s nice to hide some places from yourself for awhile so you always have somewhere new to be.

We finally got our food and went up to find a place to eat, and on the way out, we exited through the alley… right into the side doors of the Ryman.

We weren’t there to see The Grand Ole Opry, or Vince Gill or Alan Jackson , or anything I ever dreamed I might see at the Ryman when I still dreamed of Nashville.  It didn’t matter. We were in Nashville. Sneaking from Broadway to the Ryman — THE RYMAN, god that never gets old — through the alley, and it felt brand sparkling new again.

And yeah. Fun. was pretty incredible too, in case you were wondering.

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A Recovering Taylor Swift

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Courtney

I am a recovering Taylor Swift.

I don’t mean a recovering Taylor Swift Fan – because I still am that and I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Some of the smartest and most successful people in the industry back me up on this one and your opinion is your opinion and you don’t have to like her, but she’s good. She’s good at what she does and that is just that.

What I mean is that I grew up as a songwriter finding my material in all the boys I loved and didn’t love me back. Or changed their minds about loving me back. Or loved me when I didn’t want them to anymore. Or at all.  I started out, when I was very young, writing about things like the Angels in Heaven and Little Girls Growing Up (and riding bikes. I wrote about girls on bikes a lot [and incidentally just mistyped "wrote" as "rode"]) but the first time I wrote something good it was about a boy. A boy I never even liked that much, but still, a boy.

And when you find something that works for you you tend to stick with it.

I was eating dinner with a boy I liked one night, a boy who didn’t like me back and at that point probably had no idea I liked him (although he figured it out eventually, mostly because I was like, “Hey, I like you.” Chasing loses its charm after awhile).  He bought me dinner though, and he asked a lot of questions about me and I about him, and I remember saying to him, “I’m actually terrified of being happy. Happy people write terrible songs.”

I believed that at the time and I still believe it to an extent.

I read a Taylor Swift quote sometime this week about how she’s not running around chasing boys but when her feelings get hurt or she’s upset about something, she just sits down and writes.  It’s what she’s always done and it’s what makes her feel better.

Me too! Until two years ago when I met Grant.

And that is why I’ve had the same songwriting notebook for years on end, now. I used to fill up a notebook a year, a thick notebook.  When I first moved to Nashville I filled up a notebook with songs in three months.  They weren’t all good. God no.  But I was writing because I wasn’t in a happy stable relationship and that gave me plenty of reason to try.  I didn’t have anything to be scared of. My life was what it had always been.

And now I find myself engaged, planning a wedding, and the most dramatic thing that ever happens is I get annoyed and say something sort of stupid and hang out in the other room for an hour and read a book while we both get over it. Are there songs in happy relationships? I know there are.  I’ve heard them.   But I’ve never written them and essentially, I’m starting over.

I have to learn how to write all over again.

Damn happiness.

I wish Taylor would get this figured out so I could just keep being her.
Yeah.

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When I Grow Up

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Courtney

I make jokes about what I want to be when I grow up all the time.  Do we all still do that now and then? There is just something about dreaming about the big, grand life you’ll have at some point in the far, far off future.  There’s just something about thinking like a kid.

I haven’t changed my “About Me” in a very long time, and it’s due for an edit if not a full-out update (maybe I’ll wait til I’m married?) but one of the things it says and will say for as long as it has to is this, “I want to grow up to be Lori McKenna.”

Lori McKenna.
Lori McKenna.
Lori McKenna. 

When I was a kid – a real kid, all of 8 or 12 or even probably 17 – I wanted to grow up to be Reba McEntire. I wanted to sing and the first time I realized that I might be able to was singing along to her and Linda Davis’s “Does He Love You.” I already had a strange little love for Randy Travis and the obvious obsession with Garth Brooks, and Reba McEntire straight up single-handedly taught me to sing without even knowing she was doing it.

I bet she knows that about a lot of little girls now.

But I was too little or too timid or not enough in line with my peers on musical influences to have a band, and I was tired of singing on top of cassette tapes and CDs, so I started writing my own songs on the piano. Sometime after that I decided I didn’t want to live on a tour bus (probably somewhere in the middle of a band trip across the Northwest, tired, nowhere to sleep, and sharing germs with the rest of the high school). Sometime after that I decided I loved to sing but what I really wanted to do was keep writing.

Sometime after that I discovered Lori McKenna.

She’s this incredible songwriter with a knack for creating the most intense imagery.  There’s no false glamour, no sweeping generalizations about life or love or music. She gets right down to the heart of anything and everything, and she does it with such simplicity and grace.

She’s got a husband. And kids. And she tours, but without the flashing lights and the glitter and the tshirt guns. She feels very real to me. A person, not a celebrity. An artist, not a person in the music business.

And after three years in Nashville, (god no, FOUR years) I am FINALLY going to see her live.

I’m working out what I could even say to her if I get to see her after the show (and knowing the venue, it’s possible). I don’t know.  Nothing could be enough. Or right.

So maybe I should just say thanks. And also maybe

“Wanna write together sometime? When I’m grown up?”

 

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