Day 6: February 4th, 2010
Jess Yoakum  

At the end of 2008, in the midst of an intense economic recession, Jess Yoakum made the risky decision to leave her day job and follow her musical passion. She set out from her hometown of Boston, MA on a 2-month long national house concert and coffeehouse tour. Yoakum's style, described as "Patty Griffin joined forces with the Sundays is indeed best suited to intimate venues and listening rooms. Yoakum's vocals transcend genre while pulling the listener in with uncommon tones and flavors. Lyrically refreshing, she hooks the listener with thoughts and ideas not often found in today's mainstream music."   Jess's next album "This Quiet Mile" is due out at the end of March. www.jessyoakum.com

Jess shot me the mp3 file for her song “unprepared’ a couple days ago contradicting her song title but, what’s one to do?
     We hadn’t talked about a specific theme but I loved the subject of her song. I have lots of experience with being unprepared and more over dreams where I’m unprepared. Mostly my dreams place me in a classroom without my homework, or with some test that I haven’t studied for at all. What hadI been doing for the past few months when I should have been studying? I couldn’t tell you. Anyway, I worked with ‘unprepared’ as a start for my song. And somehow unprepared morphed into unmade. What I really wanted to do as I started to get into the song was make everyday things like making bread (o.k., like once a year things) tell the story of what was going on between the two people in the song. It’s not perfect but I like a lot of what’s there. Hemmingway says I should kill those bits, but that’s a different blog entry.

Timmy Riordan

Timmy has been called ‘the hidden gem” of the Somerville/Cambridge music scene. In February 2009 he wrote and posted 28 songs on his website. This year he’s doing it again.  He has also decided there should be 8 day in a week (in honor of the Beatles of course) and has invited 32 of his songwriting friends to support him through the month by each writing a song themselves. Over the last summer he recorded 8 of those songs on a CD entitled “Peter Let Me In.” Each CD includes an original cover, hand-drawn just for you in Sharpie by Timmy. Proceeds from this hand-crafted album are all going directed to the making of “New York’s Ignoring Me” his next studio album to be released in summer of 2010.