Calendar Conflicts

This week was a busy one with concerts shows almost every night. Of course, I could not go to all of them. In fact, on Wednesday night there were three different shows at venues all across town that I wanted to attend.

My friend, Jenny, had told me about a benefit concert for the songwriter and musician, Kevin Sharpe. He has been battling cancer and is having trouble paying for all the treatments, which are incredibly expensive. The tickets to his show were only $20 at the door and there were 38 songwriters and performers featured in the lineup. Plans were for each performer to be able to play or sing two songs. With each song lasting about 3 minutes, that worked out to about 4 hours of music by a variety of top musicians and singers. Wish I could have gone to that one!

As it was, a different friend of mine was having a show at the local comedy club. Since I had committed to his show first, I went to that and had to forgo the benefit concert. Wish I could have done both!

Missing Keith Whitley

Keith Whitley was a country singer who had a knack for picking songs that everyone could relate to. He sang in an easy going style, and sang about love, the frustrations of life and the daily struggles of trying to be a good person.

Sadly, he also had a drinking problem and died from alcohol poisoning. At the time he was married to Lorrie Morgan and I know a lot of people say that she killed him, even though she was not home at the time of his death. I think that she was just such a demanding and difficult person to be around that Keith couldn’t handle it. She is a huge diva and spoiled rotten. So maybe she did.

Every song that Keith recorded was a good one and I miss his music making talents. RIP Keith. I still listen to your music often and we miss you.

Music Downloads

If you’ve shopped for music CDs lately, you might have noticed that they are creeping up in price. I know about 15 years ago the new music CDs were selling for about $16 each in the big stores. If you wanted to listen to the latest songs at home, you had no choice but to buy the CDs and the music business had no incentive to lower the prices.

Now today I can go to Amazon and several other websites and get the one song that I like for just 99 cents. So if there is all this competition now and there are avenues for buying just one song for a buck, why hasn’t the price of CDs come down at all? In fact, just the opposite is true – they are now $18 and $19 dollars for the new releases. That is just crazy. Not only do I object to spending almost $20 on a CD, I object to having to buy 9 or 10 more songs that I don’t even want just to get to hear the one song on that CD that I do like.