Linda Stout

I am writing music all the time, playing with tunings, started up lessons again, looking forward to more jazz, electric guitar and bass from my kindly teacher, Doug Robinson, (Martin Simpson, Patti Witten and about every musician in Ithaca). Doug sang the littlest bit on my CD, at the end of "Missing You Again." In the world of small worlds, Doug's brother was Matt Robbin's (Matt plays piano on my CD, plays with me live; see his young cuteness in the photos area of this site) physics teacher at Exeter. It was good to be back at Doug's this week, even though he had to remove the very orange cat from the room. He called it "dysfunctional." The cat scratched on the door, till we found it later on the middle of the kitchen table. I'm very amused by cats, but so allergic I asked Doug to get me a different chair than the one the cat had been on. Anyway, re. diverse skills, for me it was not just songwriting and guitar playing today. I was fighting with fonts. I was working on editing my press kit. I decided it was better to stretch a font to get what I wanted because what I wanted somehow hadn't come my in the InDesign file or the extra fonts sent from the designer. Now I'm learning they could have been embedded in an EPS. I thought only PDFs would do that. As for diverse skills, I sort of design, use Quark at work, am learning InDesign, used but forgot Pagemaker long ago. However, I cannot do code for web stuff, nor really need to, thanks to HostBaby, my host company. For stuff entirely unrelated to music, which is a joy but has become a business, I think I should start painting as a hobby. I'm so obsessive, I'll be thinking about how to turn that into a business. I don't want that pressure, though, with painting, which maybe I'm talking about and won't do. Well, eventually I will. I was wild about art as a kid, so it will be a good little hobby. Music is definitely not a hobby for me. In ways, it never, ever was. It was maybe more like an unpaid or lowly paid calling. It's a business now, still a calling and a mission. "It's a mad mission...," Patty Griffin wrote in one of her songs. I don't know whether she was talking about music or love. Or both.