Bella Umbrella

Check this article from ology.com which lists their 10 Things That Rocked About Music In 2011. I’d agree with everything on the list–damn I love Spotify. And I checked out that Amanda Palmer song, she’s really annoying, but ukulele did become rather popular this year. I got one as last years Christmas present, and then all my friends started playing it. The whole world should really learn ukulele, it’s an amazing amazing amazing thing.

Anyhoo, click the linked image above and read the article! Such a good blog it is.

P.S. I’ve got another music related post coming up that I’ve been working on the past few days, bear with me.

Man, oh, man. What’s up world? Happy Father’s day. I am exhausted, but since we celebrated dad’s day with an early breakfast I’m free for the rest of the day, therefore, here’s a nice little blog.

I have 12 days left before I fly out to California on my one way ticket. I thought I’d be jittery and excited, but instead I’m sort of depressed. This month has been amazing. And it’s only going to get better in these final days spent here in the south. This week I’m finishing up items on my Bull City Bucket List, and I’m heading to Myrtle Beach for the first time on Friday to spend the weekend partying it up on a resort with my four best friends. I wish my friends weren’t so fantastic, if I were just sitting around my house bored this month I’d have no problem leaving. But I’m finally realizing how much each and every one of my friends means to me, and that our time together is reaching an end, and that my childhood as I once knew it is also over. Not to mention, I finally appreciate Durham in all its small-town glory, and I’m headed towards big city hustle-and-bustle in LA.

Anyhoo, here’s this past week in photos/list mode.

Last Saturday – My best friend’s graduation party. Super fun, ended in tears when everyone shared memories of him and I realized my brother from another mother is going to be 2000 miles away from me.

Sunday – Put myself back together after the mini melt-down on Saturday.

Mon.-Thurs. – Shopping, like everyday. Terrence and I had a bunch of bonding time, and I drove out to Crabtree with the ladies on Wednesday. Spent a lot of time on Franklin street too, just getting a glimpse of what life could have been like had I chosen to attend UNC.

Friday – Epic day of bucket list fun. Went to hang out at Duke one last time, had a failed lemonade stand. Ate a fancy dinner with some friends downtown (live music ftw), followed by a cute nighttime outdoor movie marathon in Durham’s Central Park.

Saturday (yesterday) – Successfully hunted down a secret LiLa show with three of my boys. Turns out it was outside at Devines a local sports bar/restaurant downtown.

I don’t think I’ll ever tire of LiLa shows, they’re just an amazing band. Since the boys had never seen them before, or heard their music, it was kind of cool to watch them experience it and to fall in love with it. I couldn’t be more unhappy that I won’t be able to go with them to the July show. Damn you California for being so far away. It was kind of a perfect two days spent downtown, experiencing the best Durham has to offer. Seriously there was so much going on this weekend! I missed out on a Big Hell performance and a few other local music gigs since there was so much happening simultaneously.

Sunday – Here we are! Agh, I think I’ve got to go do some more packing and random stuff preparing for my departure. I’ve been doing things slowly whenever I’m home to maximize my amount of time with friends. I don’t know what I’m going to do, the next two or three months are going to be extremely difficult adjusting to life without the
best friends I’ve ever had.

Hey guys! Finally done with high school, so hopefully I’ll have some more posts coming up.

Until then, I’ve posted my second review on Sunset in the Rearview, Lydia Simmons’ amazing music blog. Check it out!

Me and the homies after Grace Potter and the Nocturnals.

I went to a few good shows this month. :) Check them out, photo style. More on my Flickr as always.

Check out my concert review/guest post on the amazing Sunset in the Rearview blog!

Hey guys, I felt like writing a quick post about my life as it stands today.

In short, life is amazing. Seriously though, I don’t get how lucky I am, I feel so spoiled right now. My aunt booked a sweet Hilton resort in Myrtle beach for my friends and I later this month, we’re going to spend 3 days hanging out and having fun on my last weekend in the south. My other aunt bought tickets for us to see Real Madrid play LA Galaxy in July with my cousin Val. And I just used a portion of the money I saved up this year from working at Parizade to put a down payment on my Coachella pass for next year. I am extremely extremely EXTREMELY excited for all this, it’s surreal.

Also, Lydia from Sunset in the Rearview approached me to help write some concert reviews for her 100Bands series on the site. I am a HUGE fan of Lydia’s, and her music blog is like the only one I read. I’m pumped to write these. However, the reviews are exclusively for Sunset, so I’ll be linking all of the reviews for Mac Miller, Grace Potter and whatever other shows I go to this month.

In other news, I wrote a Bull City Bucket list! It’s basically just a list of things I want to do before I move to LA. Some things are little activities I’ve never done before, but since I’ve totally grabbed the bull by its horns in the past four years, most of the things on the list are memories I want to recreate. I crossed my first even off the list last night, “a Bulls baseball game with Jenni.” I love Bulls games, especially for the awesome fireworks on Friday nights. The weather was perfect too, not too humid or hot. And we got $2 parking! Yes!

Let’s talk about Coachella! So, next year they have decided to hold two, hopefully identical, weekends in April for the festival. I’m not sure how I feel about this yet, it’s kind of strange. But I purchased my pass for the first weekend. It’s farther away from the end of the semester and I won’t have to deal with annoying wannabe stoners raving about it being 4/20. The line up hasn’t been released yet obviously, but I found this cool prediction post, I really hope Fleet Foxes and Beastie Boys play, that would be a dream.

I finally moved my old concert reviews from my high school’s blog to this site! Yay! Check them out, I back-dated them to the day of each actual show. I have two more that I still have to write (Mac Miller, Grace Potter), so look forward to those.

Okay, gonna go play some ukulele now!
Later!

Hey guys, haven’t posted in a while, but since I literally have 5 days of high school left, and my posting on my high school blog is over, it’s time I started paying more attention to this here site.

I’ve got a ton of concert reviews I need to post here, and I have to start writing one for the kick ass Mac Miller show I attended last night.

See you all in a week or so!

Picture to tide you over:

Applying to college is hell. Applying for financial aid is hell wearing a fur parka. That’s why I could not be any happier to be sitting here, on Saturday, April 30th announcing my commitment to University of Southern California with a huge grant from the university along with other federal aid allowing me to attend for a very, very small price.

Since last year, I have been editing my list of colleges to apply to, filling out numerous forms and fee waivers, sitting down for many hours of College Board tests and looking up copious amounts of information about the 12 schools to which I applied. As horribly long and arduous as that experience felt back in December, it all seems to have vanished in a blink of an eye, along with my senior year of high school. It continues to amaze me how fast life goes by.

At various points during the past few months, I received the many acceptance, wait-list (and rejection) notifications. After getting all twelve replies, I was left with eight acceptances, two rejections, and two wait-list notifications. After tossing aside the safeties, and schools I no longer felt like attending, I was left with USC, George Washington, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Great schools that I feel totally blessed to have as options. For me, USC was a no-brainer, I loved the other schools plenty, but as a west coast girl I loved USC for many reasons. However, the cost was a huge factor. Being a resident of North Carolina, I expected UNC to be a lot less pricey. Finally, at 3 a.m. Thursday night, after going to an awesome concert (read the review later), I decided to check the financial aid package for the 100th time that week to see if it had been processed yet. Thank God, it was. The total amount of money my family would have to contribute each year was minuscule, especially considering the great education and huge amount of happiness that would result from my attending SC. The small federal loan I would have to pay for in 2015 seems like the smallest most insignificant number I could ever have dreamed of–totally worth it. Somehow, my dreams are coming true, after many nights believing they were next to impossible. I feel so grateful.

This whole experience seems to confirm my already established belief that things happen for a reason, and no matter what: things work out. Whether we end up at our dream school, or at the perfect one we didn’t expect to attend, I think we all end up where we are meant to be. I’m so excited to be a Trojan next year and go home to my amazing family in California.

Fight on!

Butterflies. Noun. Defined as the cute school-girl symptom of seeing an amazing band and current musical boyfriends, LiLa.

Let’s start this post with a flashback. It’s a warm night. Somewhere in downtown Durham, the Casbah is shaking. First row, pressed against the stage, sandwiched between a friend and a stranger, I’m bouncing up and down, both hands in the air, smiling wide, and singing along to the lyrics of LiLa, finally making up for my absence at their Fri., Apr. 1 show.

I am a groupie, an unashamed, known, and confirmed groupie.

Due to lingering paranoia from the debacle at Motorco, my concert buds and I arrived early to Casbah, for the free show on Thu., Apr. 28. After mingling outside with the likes of Katherine, Sarah, and some DSA acquaintances (all loyal fans such as I), and getting my brand new Casbah membership, I wandered inside to sit on one of the benches against the wall nearest the stage.

The first opener, Big Hell, produced by Tom Rau and Gabe Turner, is a hip hop group that yields much harder beats and lyrics compared to headliner, LiLa. They played to a very sparsely populated room for most of their set. Unfortunately, most of the Casbah crowd remained outside or lingered near the bar instead of getting involved in Big Hell’s awesomely bearded performance.

Big Hell performing. Notice LiLa bandmates ELi and J-La on the right.

I loved Big Hell. I don’t know when I’m going to learn to look up openers before showing up to concerts. Once again, I found myself wishing I knew the music I was watching performed before me. When they pulled out the melodica (an instrument I’ve been planning on picking up after the ukulele) I found myself making a serious mental note to download their stuff later.

What made the performance even better was seeing ELi and J-La stand right in front of the stage supporting the band. ELi, also known as Riverside graduate Eli McDuffie, somehow, makes me want to express my enjoyment of music further by mirroring his indescribable and crazy excited energy and dancing.

Chit Nasty performing. Apologies for continued use of horrible iPhone pictures, promise to do better next time.

The second opener, Chit Nasty, has a much more well-established following compared to Big Hell. Again being totally unaware of Chit Nasty’s existence prior to the show, I came into the performance not really knowing what to expect.

To make a long story short, I just didn’t like Chit Nasty’s performance as much as Big Hell. Lyrically and musically, Chit Nasty just isn’t my cup of tea, though they have great stage presence and the girl and guy rappers that they featured on a few tracks were awesome.

On to LiLa. How do I describe my extreme, incredible, deep-rooted, pure love for LiLa? I don’t know if it’s possible. I love local music, and as bands like Hypothesis, Big Hell and LiLa prove, something in the water here in Durham just creates crazy amounts of talented bands and artists at every level.

J-La rocking out on stage.

I just feel incredibly loyal to LiLa, I will follow them anywhere. The six man band is pure genius. Hip Hop, folk, alternative, feel good rock, whatever you want to call them, they are good. I don’t understand how their cult following isn’t ten times the size it is now.

After attending shows and listening to rappers who are fun, but nothing ground breaking, equipped with a hype man and a laptop, going to a show like LiLa’s where they have resurrected the use of live instrumentals and quality, chill-worthy vocals (thank you, J-La) makes me almost hate everything else.

Their energy is something everyone in the crowd seems to feed off of, I found myself drawn in to the performance, barely worrying about how I looked or how hot it was in the front row. Every moment where I happened to sink into a lull of swaying or singing, I was immediately shaken out of it from watching ELi jump around stage, engaging every breathing body in the room.

When he waved at me during a song, I think I could have died. Seriously? It’s one thing for him to talk to me before and after the show. But for the front man to this band I am utterly obsessed with to take a second to acknowledge my presence while he’s up on stage? Unbelievable.

It’s little things like that that make me appreciate local music, and good music in general.

The show was perfect: solid set list (including a taste of a new song from their third album coming soon), exciting and engaging band members, great venue, and a hyped crowd.

LiLa is an inspirational band and live performance who I can’t wait to see again in a few weeks. I’m genuinely sad I’m going out of state next year where I can’t just go to a show every month or two. LiLa is doing something different from other bands out there and they are worth checking out immediately if you’re already late hopping on the wagon.

P.S. LiLa doesn’t have any great artist bios online at the moment. Someone should write that. And by “someone” I mean me. ELi, get at me.