 Backroads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. My name is Corey Medina, Navajo from Shebrook, New Mexico. I'm a blues musician and I've been in the Bemidji area for about four years now. Growing up, I didn't have musicians in my family, but they loved music. And my uncles were my biggest father figures, my uncle and my grandfather, and they loved blues and they loved old-time country and just stuff that you could feel. And it was cool that I could feel that as a young kid, and I just grew up listening to what my mom and my uncles listened to, and that was just a lot of soulful stuff. When you're performing and you come up with a setlist, do you like to have kind of a basic plan then? If you're willing to change up a few songs just by how the crowd is reacting, how do you approach the setlist side of things? I'm horrible at setlists. You ask anybody I've played with. I think in this past year I've made two setlists. But I'm so thankful that everybody I've played with, they're just so in tune and just so down and ready. They're ready for whatever I throw at them. I mean a lot of times procrastination on my part and just not being prepared. But a lot of the time too is like, I'll make a setlist and I'll be like, yeah that's cool to have a setlist but this doesn't mean anything if it doesn't really match the crowd, because we do ballads and then we do hard rock stuff and then we do stuff in between classic rock covers. It just depends on the crowd, the venue. Halfway through this set if I feel like the crowd is dancing away and the next thing on a set is the ballads, all right let's keep it up. Or if it's kind of a chill crowd and they're down for whatever, then it's all right let's do the more experimental slow stuff. So it's cool. So yes, I'm horrible with setlists. I hardly make a setlist so usually we just feel it out when we get there. I think that's one of the interesting things about performing live music is you're telling a story but that story can be different every night. And it really, man for me, I'm very thankful for the musicians I play with. If you watch me tonight there'll be times I'll just, I'll give Eric a signal, my drummer, and he'll know what I'm doing. He's like, oh we're gonna do that again, all right cool. But I love the guys I play with. I can just throw anything at them to like, all right cool, yeah we're feeling that too. And if they're not they'll still follow my leads. But yeah so really with that it's really the guys you're playing with. So if I was playing with guys who need structure it'd be a little hard for it to be organic. And I try to do that every show. I try to make it different every time as much as I can. Songwriting. When I first started picking up the guitar I was like man I want to be able to play the blues, I want to be able to feel that. And then I was like man I'd love to be able to sing like that. And I always tried and I just could not do it until one day I was a freshman in college. And I've been playing guitar up about five years up to that point. And I finally just stopped singing under my breath and I finally just sung out as hard as I could and I actually like hit the notes I wanted and I was like whoa like, and that's when I realized vocally that to really feel it and express it I have to give it everything you know and sometimes it's weird like the faces I make or I have to get a little growl in it and I'm glad a lot of people don't really like shy away from it too much. And so really just so when I write I really have to know that not just vocally but even lyrically that it's real to me. A lot of my songwriting has to be very personal both good or bad and I think that's what makes a lot of the best songs. Backroads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. With money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008.