Author: Jody Whitesides

  • 3 Damn Good Reasons To Love 2017

    3 Damn Good Reasons To Love 2017

    Ready To Love 2017

    Mere hours into the new year and I’m ready to love 2017 already. See, I got to spend time with my main squeeze at a really amazing party somewhere deep in wine country (a.k.a. Napa Valley, CA). Cool friends, cool place, great times. That’s an amazing way to get the new year started off right.

    Happy New Year to you!

    Ultimate New Music

    My first thing I’m ready to love 2017 for is new music. My ultimate new music. That doesn’t mean I’m not looking forward to new music from other artists, but I do have a lineup of some amazing tunes. Tunes that cover a gamut of lyrical ideas – plus they are all sonically different as well as being stylistically different too.

    love 2017

    In a time of when so many songs and artists all start sounding the same, I’m still sticking to the catch 22 land of proven difference.

    Deliver More Themes

    My second reason to love 2017 is another juicy opening theme. It was easy to miss last year when I snagged the opening theme to Nightwatch on A&E. A clever show that follows the engaging stories of police, fire and EMT heroes working the night shift in New Orleans. The show has been a rousing success.

    I’m looking forward to having the opening theme on yet another show. I get all tingly thinking about having two shows running concurrently with music I created as their opening salvos.

    Not sure how many Alan Thicke had, but I’d definitely love to measure to the number he had. I envision hitting 10 in my future.

    Increase Live Performances

    The third damn good reason to love 2017 is for the work I plan on putting into performing more live shows. There’s something in the works that should lead to the initial explosion for a particular song released a few months back.

    love 2017

    I’m excited to be talking to some managers and agents about taking the show on the road and bringing it to you!

    jody-whitesides

    Plus it means getting the share the music with you. Which is what I want my 2017 to be all about.

  • You Don’t Choose Trendy Music, It Chooses You

    You Don’t Choose Trendy Music, It Chooses You

    Trendy music is always a topic on year-end lists.

    Goodbye To A Lousy 2016

    Looking back on a year that for a lot of us was probably not our greatest glory is a hard thing to do. I think the one thing that got a lot of people down had to be the deaths of a lot of entertainment icons. Musicians, actors, and creative types that many, if not all, of us are familiar with. Its sad to see icons pass away.

    Sizzling Trendy Music

    While I didn’t really grow up thinking about pop music, I have come to embrace it pretty hard in the last year. But it doesn’t mean I wasn’t aware of many of the popular musicians who passed away this past year. The main reason for the embrace isn’t to be chasing trendy music, but rather to spread out and create more interesting music. Rock feels like a dead subject – especially when most rock isn’t being overly adventurous in sonic terms. Pop music on the other hand is ingesting so many different vibes that it becomes really hard to ignore.

    Fantastic Spotify

    Spotify encapsulates the beauty of finding out what is trendy music. Streaming music and especially Spotify makes it incredibly easy to listen to more music than you can shake a stick at. For me it means taking time to listen to what is topping the charts. This in turn gives me the ability to tear apart the instrumentation and the concepts that led to the creation of the song. That in turns improves my writing, my arrangements, and my production skills.

    trendy music

    An Inspired Past

    While I don’t spend a ton of time dwelling on the past, I did spend time appreciating the music of many who passed away this year. Part of what has stood out is the timelessness of the music created by artists like Prince, George Michael, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Leonard Cohen, and producer Sir George Martin. That’s an incredible list of people who redefined the music industry in decades long before I started playing an instrument.

    Impact With The Now

    Newer music like Daya, Shawn Mendes, The Weeknd, Alessia Cara, Bieber (yes, I’m putting him in this list), and DNCE shows how I can incorporate a variety of styles and make them something new. Looking forward into 2017 I’ve got a line of singles I’m excited to get released. Every song is different from each other. There’s even some that are a serious departure from my normal concept of releasing music. Think someone like DJ Snake or Calvin Harris, more trendy music and I’m looking to keep people on their toes.

    Demolish Your New Year’s Eve

    So on this final day of 2016 I want to wish you a fond farewell to a poor year of entertainment deaths and welcome you to an exciting year of new music. Wherever you end up partying tonight, I hope you’ll have a seriously mind-blowing time. I also want to see you survive any experience you use to ring in the new year.

    See you on the flip side with new music to play for you!

    Happy New Year!

  • Cooking Up A Storm For Christmas

    Cooking Up A Storm For Christmas

    Cooking

    Cooking up a storm over the holidays. That is the modus of my Christmas vacation this year, which is extremely fitting based on the kind of year entertainment has had. Unless you’ve been under a rock its patently obvious to me that its been a horrendous year for legends and icons of music and film.

    Hell within 48 hours of Christmas we lost George Michael and Carrie Fisher.

    George a musical icon that created some amazing music and of course Carrie who was part of one of the biggest movie franchises in cinematic history.

    Cooking What

    Beyond the strange string of deaths that lined 2016, I spent a good portion of the year creating. There’s been a new design on the website. There’s been over 60 new songs in production for various co-writes and other things. I’ve been writing new music for release. But my favorite thing this Christmas is the cooking lesson I got as a gift from my sister.

    She’s got some great connections in her little spot of the world and its led to us having a nice lesson in cooking last night with Chef Veronica.

    cooking-crab-cakes

    Chopping & Cutting

    The menu started with crab cakes – so very tasty. It was followed by the group of us chopping up all the ingredients for the main dish Duck L’Orange with ravioli.

    The beauty of all the chopping is that I received a super amazing chef’s knife. So sharp that I barely had to drop the knife on the item I was cutting and it would cut itself. Like a hot knife thru warm butter. Drop.

    Seriously, having the right tool in your hands makes doing something so much more enjoyable. Like in music, having a great instrument can help you sound better, having a better knife and help you cook better. I’m sure of that assessment. Its probably a lot like getting access to a top end compressor while recording.

    One cooking technique I learned was called supreme. Supreme is the art of cutting out citrus so that you don’t have the membrane to deal with while cooking. Yet another reason to have an amazingly sharp knife.

    Sharp Knifes

    Speaking of sharp knifes tends to remind me of a guitar teacher I had who refused to have any glass or knifes in his house. His reasoning had to do with having an incredible fear of severing his hands – which would mean an end to his ability to play guitar. Aside from rock climbing and bowling, I never shared that fear. For me, rock climbing is super rough on the muscles for my guitar playing. Thus I don’t have a problem with glass or knives, but I don’t do rock climbing and I bowl with my right hand (so I don’t waste my left hand for days on end). BTW – I suck terribly at bowling.

    Ravioli

    While I’ve made regular pasta, aka spaghetti, in the past, I’ve never made ravioli before. Its a slightly different ballgame in the pasta field.

    We got the filling, a mushroom and ricotta filling, finished and chilled first. Then we turned to the pasta dough where we spent time running it thru a pasta roller, over and over. Nothing new there. But when it came time to make the ravioli, thats where things took a turn.

    First you lay out the bottom and then get your top half together (hoping that you get them roughly the same size and shape.) Once you have the bottom you dab out the filling in uniform spots on the flattened dough. Once there’s a line of filling, you place the top over it and press down.

    I learned a cooking tip that its wise to use an egg wash to help seal both sides of the ravioli together. Meaning I had to do this prior to putting the top on.

    Then I had some fun with a couple of different ravioli cutters that were laying around. A heart shaped one, a round one, and also with a pasta cutting wheel to make square ones.

    Duck

    This was the first time I had cooked duck as well. Chef Veronica showed us how to score the skin prior to cooking. Duck is not like chicken. Much like a Les Paul is not Moog. It requires an entirely different method to cooking. So we scored the skin with crosshatches. Then set it into a hot pan to start searing and cooking the fat side down.

    Cooking-Duck

    Once the duck was nearing completion…

    Into The Water

    That’s when the pasta took its turn dunking into a hot bath. What’s awesome about fresh made pasta is that it cooks in roughly 3 minutes.

    Ding.

    Out of the water came the pasta. The ravioli got covered with a brown butter sage sauce. The fettuccini was topped with the duck and a tasty orange sauce (made from the supreme’d oranges).

    Eat Up

    What a tasty and fun way to learn to cook something new.

    It gives me an idea of how I could bring the idea of producing music into someone’s home…