Back in July I stumbled onto an application for a huge emerging music festival in Philadelphia at my favorite venue, World Cafe Live. Somehow I got selected to compete as one of 30 bands. On Wednesday, August 20th I played with 5 other bands. I had my friends Grace, Ryan, Jamie and Mitchell (aka “The Dreamwreckers”) come up and play in my band which ruled. We played a 45 minute set it and felt really good. The winner for the evening was decided by audience vote and I ended up winning which was a fun surprise! I had a lot of friends from the city and Delaware make the trip to the show so thank you kindly to you all for helping me win that night!

Since I was a finalist I played in the final show on Sunday with the other 5 winners. We were the last band to go on around 11:15pm. My band barely made the show in time due to traffic on I-95 so that was very nerve wracking but they pulled through! I felt we played better this night and I closed the evening with “Something So Beautiful” and went unplugged at the end. The bar was completely silent, even the bartenders had stopped moving. It was a really special moment.

So long story short, we stick around and wait for them to announce the top 3 finishers. I was floored when I heard my name called for 2nd place out of 30 bands! There were so many talented acts in the competition and I really had no expectations of making the finals, much less placing 2nd! It was a big honor and hopefully will lead to other opportunities. As 2nd place finisher, I won 30 hours of studio time at Range Recording Studio, 50 duplicated CDs, 250 posters, and a Shure SM58 microphone. Not bad! I will definitely be making use of that studio time sometime in early 2009 to track drums & bass for my next record. Stay tuned.

Thanks again for the support and all of you who came out to the shows!

Here are some photos, you can see the rest here.

For the past few years I’ve been really interested in being the “guest musician” at a Young Life camp somewhere for a session over the summer. This spring I asked around to some friends of mine that work from Young Life, and through a series of events my friend Jimmy was able to secure me a slot to play at a Young Life camp called Southwind for middle school kids. I was ecstatic about having such an awesome opportunity and an avenue to sell my new CD as well.

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