Well howdy,

Sorry it's been so long since I did a real blog entry.  Things have been busy, busy, busy. 

Winter is always an interesting time for me.  I basically come back to town after an exhausting and awesome tour, put on a couple of big shows in San Antone, get back into the swing of things with my bands that I abandon for the big tour, hustle gigs, get my residency rocking, jump back into networking, and push through the holidays where I can crawl into bed for a week and spend a little time with my wife.  

This winter has been pretty productive.  Been pushing the 2015 LoopFest videos on social media and a few of them are making some small splashes.  I love it when my artists get some attention from these efforts.  It's a beautiful thing.  Another awesome development has been my blogging for www.loopinglive.com.    I submit two articles a month that they publish at their discretion.  It's a been a lot of fun trying to work within their parameters.  My editor, Greg, has been great.  He doesn't mince words, is supportive, and has great suggestions and guidance when I need to do rewrites.  More than that, he even added a new feature for the site that he asked me do to that is basically doing short reviews of videos of various loopers.  That's been a ton of fun and harder than expected.  Mostly it's been challenging to find videos to watch that have something useful to learn from and isn't the same thing over and over and over (looper joke!).   But it makes me watch a lot of fun, interesting, and sometimes, awful videos.    The video reviews are just being rolled out, so we'll see how they are received.  If you want to read my articles they are all here: http://www.loopinglive.com/author/noah-peterson/

I did get invite to play the Mexican LoopFests in May...but I just can't swing it at this time.  I was invited to Singapore for this month, but that fell through.  I keep hoping one of these will pan out.  My LoopFests are undergoing some pretty serious changes.  It was looking as if things were going to be postponed for quite some time, until some conversations I was having with some supporters of the fests panned out.  The Southern California LoopFest is going to be at Cal State Univ Long Beach put on by the Bob Cole Conservatory of Music; it's official.   That's pretty awesome.  I'm still working on the others.  More announcements to come later.  I've got the first couple of sponsors on board and looking forward to getting many more.  This should be the year for us!

Part of the joys of this time of year, when I'm home in Texas is the joy of life and music in Texas.  I spend as much time as I can on my yard.  It's been a terrific dandelion battle this year.  Every year I pick a new weed to wage war on.  Of course, that's all pretty silly as my "lawn" is basically nothing but weeds.  But I have some grass starting to take some territory and I'm thrilled about that.  My compost pit is rocking, finally.  My tomatoes and peppers have lasted through the winter, my fruit trees seem to be doing well.  My cacti are flourishing and everything is looking beautiful.  Now that the danger of frost is over, I'm all worried about getting my garden really going before the spring rains come.  There was so much, so long last year I lost all my avocados.  Which was hugely disappointing as it was the first year the tree fruited.  I do love my yard work.  

Another part is my bands.  This time of year is zydeco season as it's Mardis Gras and the crawfish are in season.  Jean-Pierre and the Zydeco Angels are hitting are usual holiday and festival gigs and have a regular Sunday north of Austin for a crawfish boil throughout the season.  I do love playing zydeco.  It's fun to get off the sax and scrub that washboard.  It's a lot of work and the drives are long; but I love zydeco....   My other band, La Chichada, is my band of buddies.  We don't play that often and we rehearse a lot.  But I love the guys and we're a really fun and different band.  In some ways we're really epic and original.  And the guys in the band have been in and around the scene forever.  My crown jewel down here though is West Kings Highway.  The band is essentially a trio - me, Johnny, and Sweet Pete.  We have a pretty good time and are an excellent band.  We have a couple new members, but they aren't really gigging with us a whole lot.  Mostly we use subs, guest artists, family members (Johnny's family are all basically musical royalty in S.A.), and the newbies to keep things varied up and rocking.  We have a Friday night residency at Sancho's from 7 to 9pm and are getting pretty tight.  It's a good band and good guys.  I'm doing a little recording here and there and get a few sub jobs; finally starting to get the phone ringing a little....glad about that. 

I've also got a couple studio projects that I've been pretty busy with. O.M.N.I with Zack and Ben is coming along pretty nicely now.  Zack and Ben have a studio set up in NYC and are getting very efficient.  I've got another project with Nick Shan here in S.A., although we've stalled out for the past few weeks as I've been too busy with other projects.  I signed a new record from my old friends and former bandmates Irie Impressions and that baby is already out at your favorite online retailer.  

And on and on and on.....  while I'm going through all of this mostly I'm trying to make it better for everyone across the board.  Better, faster, smarter, easier, and more profitable.  Doesn't always work...but I can always keep working on it.  And then there's the domestic stuff; house work, fixing things, working on the house (got a crappy little fixer-upper that I've greatly improved upon, but still needs LOTS of work), car repairs, hustling work, playing with the cat, keeping my marriage solid, exercise, and once in awhile, sleep.  

It's not all sunshine and smiles. Had a couple of deals go south; it's the music biz and there's always jackweeds to deal with.  So I've been dealing with that as much as I can so I can be done with it.  The up side is I hardly ever run into this crap anymore.  But it's going to happen, it's the music biz.

I'm also spending a lot of time looking at web stats.  Web traffic is way up, video views are rocking, things seem bright and shiny.  Got some rare family time with the in-laws coming up and I'm greatly looking forward to that.  Get to see some new parts of Texas and get back to Cali.  Should be a great time.

I'll try and be a little more attentive, but I do get caught up in what I'm doing and tend to neglect things. 

So stick around, read some stuff, watch some videos, stream some tunes, but a CD or 6, and come see me at a show!