 Backroads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. Carlson and the group that we played with for Lakeland was called the Occasionals and it's kind of a subgroup of a band that I started about six years ago called the Seasonals and it was a wedding band idea and we've got a kind of loud dance shows that we do with the Seasonals and we wanted to do more broken down original music, acoustic and different kinds of music and we started the Occasionals with kind of a rotating group of musicians that from around the area they get together. And I'm Christy Miller. I've been around for quite a while in this area in Bemidji and been in quite a few bands. The main one that I was in is called Known Only Locally and we did one of the original backroads for Lakeland Public Television and so it was real fun and an honor to redo it with Eric. And how would you describe the music scene going on in Northern Minnesota right now? It's very cohesive. Everyone's friends and everybody knows each other. It's real supportive. I played for a bit in the Twin Cities and there was more kind of groups of people and they didn't really blend as much and it's a much more collaborative scene here. Well, Eric does quite a few of the songs that Jim, my husband, wrote and he was a pretty prolific writer and he passed away a few years back now but Eric's doing those songs and he does them so well and he interprets them exactly I think the way Jim would want them to be interpreted and I'm thinking you probably heard those songs in your utero because his mom would come to our dances out at Ten Strike and so you probably, you know, through osmosis and other things really are familiar with the twins. I come from a family that's really into folk music and folk music is meant to be shared and passed down and there's very much a sense of place with folk music. People from, like say, County Cork in Ireland. There's a certain sound of music that's there and people from around the area know that and can tell the difference and I think that we're lucky in Bemidji to have that and Jim was one of the musicians that kind of was part of that Bemidji sound that we're kind of carrying on. Perform in front of a live audience and does that affect what songs you decide to play? Performing live is infectious because you have that audience and you can play off of them and they play off of you and so there's that connection that goes on and of course you can have an audience that's a dud. I've played in a lot of bars where the audience was not that great but I've also played in many, many places where it's wonderful and the back roads was good because we had that interaction with the audience. As for doing songs, what we did, we used to just like pick songs out of the air and play them for our sets. Now, Eric has much more regimented it on that and that's a good thing because he will do setless and hand them out to us and that's really great I think. Helpful. Part of the reason that I have to do that is because we have so many different people coming in and we don't practice with the same group every time and so one cool thing about live is that Corey Medina who did the solo on Nature as Woman, that's the first time I'd ever heard him do a solo on that song and I think it's the first time he's ever done one. It was live for you guys and it was amazing and so that's a really cool aspect of playing live is that you're creating on the spot and more so the players like Christy and Corey and Aaron Schnakenburg who's a fantastic sax and bass player and Mark Bauer, they all can do that, kind of make up things as they go and for me I've kind of got my chord structure and I just let people fly and it's really exciting because you're creating there on the spot. And I think it's important to never ever play a lead the same way twice. I gotta say he nails that. He nails that exactly like Jim would want it. Christy gave me Jim's entire discography on a little thumb drive but there's so much amazing treasure in that little thumb drive and I had known about a third of it and then I got to explore all the rest and there are so many songs that strike a chord. It's like a string is tuned to a certain note. Some of his songs just hit me like somewhere where it just resonates and one of those ones is All For Not, the last one that we did, every time I play it I get chills. It's just I'm there with them with the wet sleeping bag from Drenching Rain and all this vivid imagery that he produced in his songs. He was a writer like that. He was an image writer and he wrote a lot from personal experience but he also was able to project experiences and write them into song and it really did amaze me when I think back now and how he wrote and Eric's rendition of All For Not. I cry when he plays it. It's just so, it's a beautiful song to begin with and then the way he interprets it and saying that it is very moving.