Last Sunday I headed out to hear some live music at the Red Rock Concert Series at Crown Books in Woodland Hills.  Ron Sarfaty, hosts a show there once a month that features terrific singer/songwriters and players.  (I’ll include a link at the end of this blog.)  On the way there I stopped at a music store to pick up a couple things.  It turns out this was not a regular music store.  It was a rehearsal/performance space with a Mainstage as you walk in the front door and rehearsal rooms up and down the…

When I was a boy on the farm in Illinois I could stand on the back porch of our house and hear my dad's tractor out in the fields. This was back before we had huge farm machinery where the farmer sits inside an airtight cab. No, dad would putt through the fields, out in the open air on his International Harvester 560. Even from the house I could hear my dad singing hymns over the drone of the tractor. I know it sounds like a made up, bucolic scene from a movie but it really happened. (Maybe I'll write it…

A few weeks ago I did something on Facebook I rarely do, I asked almost all of my FB friends to “like” our page. I was blown away by the number of people that liked us. But, it's not all about the numbers, even though with Facebook we all can get caught up in the stats; how many people “liked” my status or how many people viewed my post? FB keeps asking me if I want to pay to boost my post so I can get higher numbers. But for me the most satisfying thing was the fact that several of my FB friends that…

I will echo what Laura and Kelly have said about being in this band, it's great. We all have done a lot of work in the "biz" but most of it is not under our creative control. We have to jump through the hoops of studio executives, producers, record label folks, and ad agency types which can sometimes take the fun out of the process.

But with The Sweet Potatoes we are the creative force. Laura and Kelly write all of the original material and tell some wonderful stories through their songs. I get to…