We played the “Fly Me To The Moon Saloon,” a low-ceilinged, mine shaft of a venue tucked under the fluffy white skirts of Telluride’s main street. It’s known to book the best bands the state has to offer and It’s the first spot I ever cut my teeth (I played there solo opening for Acoustic Junction at Jazz Fest 1994 while my dad played the main stage). “The Moon,” as it’s known by the locals, is where I wrote “Red Room” and it is the “saloon” my Tomboy Bride “..walks in the backdoor” of in verse one. 

Telluride was home to me all last year and became the backdrop for many of my songs.  I named my album after reading a book by the same name by Harriet Fish Backus, a pioneering woman who came to Telluride at the turn of the century with her husband to forge a new life.  Tomboy is a ghost town now.  Its boarded windows and sunken roofs haunt Telluride from 3,000 feet above its ski bum head.  But once, it was home to hard-working gold miners who imported wives from places like New York and Califonia to tend their houses while they went off to extract ore from the mountains.  These new brides would be left for months at a time to fend for themselves 11,500 feet above sea level, under 7 feet of snow. 

I identified with these women when I moved to Telluride and Harriet (Hattie) in particular.  I fancied myself a modern-day version of her if I’m immodest, leaving home, venturing alone into the snow-covered mountains, wild-eyed at the mercy of the unknown.  I wrote the song “Tomboy Bride about Hattie, about us.  About all pioneering spirited ladies who dare to cut their own paths across the wilderness with fearless hearts.   

Here’s some backstory about Tomboy Bride’s chorus:

“With her long hair, waterfall down” references Bridal Vail Falls, a hike with a waterfall above town that looks up, like a lover, at the town of Tomboy.

“And her wild ways, wind through the town” is about the whipping wind that busts through Telluride’s wide streets straight through the continental divide. Getting hit with a gust is like a toast made to pioneering-spirited women.

“And her pipe smoke, clouds in the sky” is about clouds that sit on the town in the mornings and remind me of a smoking badass babe who doesn’t care who she offends.

“Please marry me, be my Tomboy Bride.”  These will be my husband’s lyrics when he comes to ask for my hand.

I’d been looking forward to the show for weeks. My local friends were coming and I knew the room like the bottom of a beer can but… No one told us we were playing during “Arizona Days.”  Once a year, the mountain runs a week-long “ski free” special for Arizonans,’  who are bussed into town, wearing Aztec multicolored blanket coats and leather Akubra hats.  With more style than grace, they dive straight down steeps which churn them up and spit them out at the bottom.  Local hospitals and bars are equally full of our southern brethren during “Arizona Days” and despite casts and splints, these people want to dance.  We, my friends, are not a dance band.

The wind was hollering when we arrived in town.  I was last out of the van and managed to lock my corduroy jacket in the back while trying unsuccessfully to unstick my static-clinging skirt from my unshaven leg hair.  Guitar in hand and teeth clenched I bent my head into the wind and headed toward the saloon. 

Backstage in the green room, I scrawled the lyrics to the song I’d written there, “Red Room,”  on the wall. When we took the stage at 10:15, we were greeted by a crowd who, unable to use us to dance too, treated us like we were invisible.  They smoked and smoked and smoked and got drunk and yelled over us.  Nobody listened and nobody cared we were up there. Often no one noticed a song had ended. 

At set break, I had to run into all the boys I kissed last year (which was a few more than I’d accounted for)  In Telluride, the saying goes “You never lose your boyfriend, you just lose your turn.”  As we took the stage for a second humiliating act, the manager, Rodney pulled me aside.

“I was just told you have 45 minutes left.  That’s wrong, right?!?!”

“No, I mean, yes, we do only have 45 minutes left,”  I told him

“No.  You have to have more.  Didn’t Kipp tell you?  You’re doing 3 sets – 45 minutes a piece.”  The idea of staring out at a sea of smoke and Aztec print and old flames and beer goggled eyes for an extra set made me want to tie my guitar strings in a knot.  Instead, I said, “I guess I could ask the boys to do a 30-minute jam.” My eyebrows lifted like crane wings over my incredulous expression. Rodney simply replied,

“Yeah, do that.  It’ll help cover your guarantee.” Ouch.

At the end of an ego-bruising 30-minute jam, Rodney handed me $300 bucks plus $105 we made in CD sales and charged us for the beer.  I need a booking agent.

On the ride home, we stopped at a Safeway.  I bought carrots, hummus, and Pons blackhead strips. The whole band got in on the act.  I love my guys.

Jeremy (guitar) quit the band yesterday.  I called to give him a van departure time for our gig at The Double Diamond in Aspen tomorrow.  I could hear him over the phone beating around the bush, his feet shuffling and kicking at a snow bank in his backyard.  After some hemming and hawing, I insisted he tell me what was going on.

• He told me he was broke (despite a $2,500 sound system he just bought himself).
• He told me he lives in a crack den (the condo I rented on his behalf in central Boulder.  Not a crack den)
• He told me he wanted to move to New York with his brother and “play the scene.”  I don’t think he knew what he meant by “play the scene” but he made it sound cooler than what I was doing for sure.

I was torn between resenting the hell out of him and feeling deeply relieved.  He’s been a headache since he arrived in Boulder and his departure will gratefully put an end to my babysitting and tippy-toeing around him. Still, I must acknowledge, The Sally Taylor Band will be losing a great talent in him when he goes.  My big takeaways from my experiment hiring Jeremy are the following:

1. All that glitters is not gold.  It is better to hire a talented, loyal player than a brilliant self-centered one.
2. Don’t trust a promise made by a guitar player hiding behind mirrored aviator sunglasses and
3. Mr. Jeremy probably just needs some good antidepressants and a little dose of grow the fuck up. 

I told him lightheartedly to just concentrate on making it through December with me and then he could do whatever he wanted.   I let him know what time and place Moby was leaving from in the morning.  More hemming and hawing ensued and I could tell he wanted to say more than his ego could afford. “For the love of God Jeremy, please just tell me what’s on your mind.” Awkwardly he said, “I’m gonna make my way up to the gig tomorrow in my own car.”  

“Why?” I asked.

“I might want to bring some friends,” he said. I suggested he bring them up in Moby, ” That’s why I got a 15-passenger van.” I said

“Well,” he said, “I might want to leave after the show.”

“You want to leave Aspen after the show at 2:30 in the morning to drive 4 hours back to Boulder?!?!”

“I might,” he said. I had no more fight in me and relented, “OK, but this is a big show for us.  Please be on time for Soundcheck at 5 pm.”

I hung up with a sign telling myself “Better things are on the horizon.”  I can’t explain my optimism, but the future feels tingly from here, like a newly brushed set of teeth.   I say this even though all the songs I’ve written in the past month are crap and now I have to find a new guitar player.

I drove to Greeley yesterday morning. I think maybe it’s the cattle murder capital of the world. Black & white pierced and branded cows line every fence along the highway. They watch me speed along, in my little purple car, like unwitting spectators at a marathon. Their eyes are huge and soulful and hopeless. I wish I could open the gates and set them all free. Notice to all cows: “STEER CLEAR OF GREELEY.”

I did a radio interview at KUNC which oddly, turned out to be a classical NPR station.  They had me uncork my guitar and play my little folky tunes between Beethoven and Vivaldi (not bad company to keep if you’re a dead musician but probably not a station reaching the ears of my potential audience).  When they asked me to come in, did they think I was a classical guitar player? I wondered as I packed my guitar into the back seat of my Rav.

A college student with a basketball under her arm caught up to me in the parking lot and, out of breath, asked me to sign her Tomboy Bride CD.  It’s amazing that this music exists without me.  It’s like watching a child I’ve nurtured and raised, go off to college.  I was humbled and honored my music and my autograph meant something to someone besides me.

I ate Pringles on the drive home. I got lost twice down dead-end roads. Each was lined with barbed wire threaded like an angry necklace with crows.

I admit it.  I was in an internal hail storm before the show at The Aggie last night. 

I called my mom while I crimped and mascaraed my lashes trying not to cry about all the things I felt were going wrong with the world.  Mama said: “Baby, you’re just payin’ your dues.”  I dropped my eye makeup in the sink and stared up at the bare bulb in the ceiling in hopes of pinching off tears I knew would ruin my makeup job.  “Darlin’, you’re tropical,” she went on, “You’re brighter than most skys one second and the next,” she whistled a falling missile, “a torrential storm with clouds around your head you can’t see your way through.”  She was right, my dark moments feel fatal while my light ones are iridescent prismatic pure bliss sunshine halos coated in sugar (and no, I am not bipolar).

I felt a tickle in the back of my throat. Maybe I was coming down with a cold.  As I stuffed a gig bag (gig dress, gig shoes, hair brush, makeup, and pajamas) I added Advil & Sudafed just to be safe.   Hanging up with my mom I reassured myself I was mostly bent out of shape by a restless night’s sleep. 

My ego is an insomniac.  I often wake up to it pulling at my blankets and when I sweetly try to tell it “This is sleep time baby,” it gets incensed by my insolence and pulls me out of bed by the hair and makes me feed it hot chocolate and Panda licorice while it reminds me of all the things that are wrong with me and what I’ll never achieve.

The drive out to Ft. Collins smelled of manure the whole hour and a half.  Mile after mile, the stench of manure and my stomach felt sour, and my throat felt sore.  I was definitely coming down with something.  It was cold in The Aggie and I paced black cavelike halls backstage post soundcheck. I shivered in my beige corduroy jacket, doing vocal exercises to warm up my swollen throat and meditating on the steam rising from my notes.

I was convinced I’d have no singing voice for the stage but when I stepped into the spotlight, I was saved.  My dad refers to the healing powers of the stage as “Dr. Theater.”  He swears “You can be feeling like utter death, have laryngitis and blood running out of your ear but once you hit that stage… It’s a miracle, you feel 100%.”

We played better than well after all my worrying.  It was a sold-out show.  I wore my fur-lined, knee-high rubber Sorell snow shoes on stage under my miss-matching white mini dress on account of it being so fridged.  But like my voice and my mood, ½ way through the first set I warmed up enough to change out of boots and into my gig shoes.  I did so while comedically singing Mr. Roger’s theme song “It’s Such a Good Feeling, a Very Good Feeling….”

It made the audience laugh and their laughter marinated me into a looser performer (always a good thing).  

It’s the first snow of the season and I’m sitting in Buchannan’s, my go-to university coffee shop. Jazz falls, in concert with snowflakes, from speakers in the ceiling.  The cymbals and high hats seem to chaperone the accumulation, keeping the ground and eager snow drifts an appropriate distance apart.

I arrived home from LA early this morning.  I stepped off the plane at DIA renewed, refreshed, and alive again because this is real.  These mountains, this nature, this musical path I’ve chosen, this is REAL.  No nonsense, no ego, no one to make me “into” someone I’m not.  I’m free to be who I am, as I am, in this moment, and this moment, and this moment, and this, without worrying who’s watching.

It’s not that I didn’t have fun in LA.  Who can complain about playing two renowned venues (Luna Park & The Mint) let alone, getting your ego stroked by record company execs who wine and dine and offer the moon and ½ a dozen stars?  But my greatest accomplishment was returning to Colorado with my integrity intact and a greater sense of clarity and confidence than I deserve about the choice I’ve made to go it alone.

Back at my little apartment, I did a phone interview, the third in the last 24 hours, while I watered my plants, unpacked my bag, and peeled furniture back from where it’d drifted across my warped floorboards since I left.

At 2:00 I took a taxi East, my back to the powdered sugar mountains, to get my band a van!  I’ve been wrestling with the decision of whether to rent or buy a van for these upcoming gigs.  The rub has been less about the purchase price (which is a whopping $24,000) and more about the commitment to life as a musician.  But last week I made my bed.  I put a down payment on a Ford Econoline E250 Cargo extended van and, with the band, named it “Moby” ‘cause It’s a white whale of a beast.  I felt grown up walking into the dealership, signing papers, and driving off the lot as a working musician.  

I had the transformational experience of seeing Jimmy Cliff in concert last night at The Hot Tin Roof and he taught me a thing or five about performance. 

Spiritually naked, he selflessly flung himself about the stage.  I stared up into his spotlight like a moth drawn less to a flame than a blow torch.  Jimmy lost himself in the music like a shaman in a trance. Unselfishly, he let the audience invade him like his body didn’t even belong to him, like it was just a doorway, a portal, a lifeboat, a river on its way to an open mind and for the price of admission, everyone was invited on the journey.

Jimmy darted around the stage like he were trying to evade hunters, and then belted as though he’d been hit. He swallowed the stage whole with the force of a whale and then released it to his band with equal force and gravity. He was angelic and on fire and I fell in love with him.

I pray someday to be so unselfish as to leave my body on stage for my audience and just be a channel; a portal that leads to freedom and open water. But for that, I’ll have to become unselfconscious. 

‘Hard… not impossible,’ I thought to myself.

I found this ring at a flea market recently, It’s a circular depiction of a young Buddha leaning into enlightenment.  It reminds me of what Jimmy was giving his audience. I think I’ll wear it on stage from now on to remind me how to lose myself.

The Foundry is a pool hall, bar, and music venue with tall ceilings and a cigar-smoking, board-game-playing section.  It fills up with a late-night crowd who’re mostly there to hook up or die trying.  I knew it wouldn’t be a glamorous gig but I didn’t think it would be disastrous and in all fairness, it was really only the first 2.5 hours that sucked.

The trouble started when our sound man, Rex, showed up.  He’d clearly been around the block if not around the whole neighborhood.  He was a Vietnam veteran who demanded respect. He had a white-bearded face that was quick to smile and, we’d later find out, just ask quick to scowl and yell curses at us and our unborn children.  During a two-hour sound check (which normally takes 15-20 minutes) Rex couldn’t figure out how to get even a peep from the guitars. He kept looking at the stage with squinted eyes, turning a knob, worrying it right and left, right and left, right and left, looking down, locating a new knob, squinting eyes, worrying it left and right, left and right, and repeat. Repeat. REPEAT. Once he realized he was getting nowhere with the knobs, he started yelling at us, infuriated at his own incompetence. 

Jeremy was most frustrated with the situation on account that every time he was asked to check his mic he’d get an electrical shock to the lips.  This hurts. I can attest. It feels like a hornet sting on the tongue. Plus it’s, mind the pun, shocking. Jeremy cursed, paced the stage, was told the problem had been fixed, and got shocked again and again. It was like watching a Milgram experiment and I didn’t think I should watch my band take much more abuse.

I approached Pony, The Foundry’s owner who was deeply apologetic and frantically called around to other local venues trying to find a decent sound technician for us.  When Steve (our savior) showed up from The Boulder Theater he asked what needed to be done.  Quietly, out of Rex’s earshot, I let Steve know I was afraid we needed to start from scratch. 

We had a decent show once Steve got the sound on track.  We had to compete with an ever-increasing number of ever-increasingly drunk, desperate 20-somethings looking for a hook-up but the cluster of folks who crowded around our chest-high stage were totally into us and I could have sworn I even saw a few people mouthing the words to some of my songs.  Is that even possible?

The F*ed up thing was that every time Steve would step away from the soundboard, even a few feet, fuzzy little Rexy would scurry on over and push all the suck buttons despite Steve and Pony’s explicit instructions to stay away from it.  It was like he couldn’t control himself.  It actually made me laugh and reminded me not to take myself too seriously. 

Thanks Rex.