 I'm Jessica Carson. Welcome to the special edition of the Sound Post Sessions. I am in downtown Long Lawn in the creative district at Joanna Rose Getting Studio called Oprah Arts. We will talk to her a little bit later in the show about some of her art and what's been going on in the creative district. If you donate to today's show, every $10 you donate puts you into a drawing to win this. It's a $100 gift card that you can spend here at Oprah Arts in Old Town Marketplace in Longmont. Our musicians today are Taylor Sims of many bands. He originally I knew him from Spring Creek Blue Grass Band. Then it was Bonnie and the Clydes and now it's Everybody Loves an Outlaw. They have gained quite a bit of notoriety in the last few months. We will also have Monica Marie on the program today. We're excited to have her back on the show because she played the very first Sound Post Sessions when we were still doing live and in-person shows back in the day. She will be coming out with a solo album later this year so be sure to keep an eye out for that. She's also in Honey Tree which is a duo with Eric Wiggs. So thank you for tuning in. Thank you to the creative district for making this show happen. They very generously created grants for artists and musicians to keep working in this strange time. So the creative district grants funded today's show so thank you to them. We also have two downtown Longmont gift cards and I want to tell you about our Patreon. If you check out the Sound Post Sessions on Patreon.com we have been putting up content from online shows as well as shows that we did live so you'll get archive material and new material and the next two people to sign up for Patreon will get downtown Longmont gift cards. So thank you for joining us and enjoy the show. Her heart on fire just like the hills of Calif. High as the mountains tall from Liza was her name. She'd stay up late and listen to me all night radio dancing with the shadows on paper walls bathed because there's nothing like Liza was her name. Night is calm the snow is fall I guess better see and I can hear that whistle blowing so much for tuning in here to the Sound Post Sessions. I'm so happy to be a part of this great friends and and such a wonderful musical community here in Longmont and I'd like to before I forget I'd like to thank our sponsors for this particular episode and these virtual Sound Post Sessions. I'd like to thank the downtown Longmont Creative District for sponsoring this this episode and and lots of other things that are going on here at the Sound Post Sessions so thank you for that. All right well I don't really have a set list as you know I'm a professional up here and so I don't know what I'm going to do next oh I think I think I know what I'm going to do next. I grew up down in Texas in the Panhandle of Texas and spent my formative years there and it still means a lot to me I mean don't get me wrong I love Longmont I'll never leave but sometimes I get nostalgic start feeling like home missing my folks and missing my family and missing the countryside down there and I wrote this song when I was in one of those momentary laps and reason I guess. I hope you're you're clapping out there I'm imagining it I'm hearing it in my head I'm trying to hear it you know I'm gonna get I'm gonna get crazy here I'm gonna try a brand new song I actually just finished this today I'm gonna push myself a little bit out of my comfort zone because usually I don't do this usually I excruciate over songs but I'm not gonna do that you guys are gonna get the the first the first taste here of this new song so it doesn't have a title yet I'm not sure what it's what it's gonna be but I'll try it for you right now I really hope you like it thank you all so much for tuning into my portion of the show I really appreciate being asked and thank you so much to everybody here in Longmont and wherever you are listening to this or watching this I appreciate it I hope it brings you joy and light and I wish you all the best in these crazy times that we're in and we'll get through them as long as we stick together and as long as our guitars are in tune we'll get through it all right here we go that's it for me I'm Taylor Sims this has been such a treat to spend these brief moments here with you I hope you enjoyed these songs and somebody else is coming up next that's far better than me so stay tuned for that I'm Jessica Carson and I'm here in Old Town Marketplace in downtown Longmont with an excellent watercolor and who knows what other mediums that I just don't know about yet a wonderful artist here in her studio and it's Obra Arts yes tell us about your studio here so I've been here in this building for three years moved up into my own space this year and Obra Arts Obra is Spanish for a piece of work it could be a work of music a work of art and the goal of my studio is to not only advocate for and produce and teach visual art but also integrate Spanish into what I do because I'm bilingual and study in Spain and it's a big part all my works are titled in Spanish so it's a big part of what I do and with the studio I have dreams to teach bilingual classes in English and Spanish so Spanish speakers who are learning English can practice their English and vice versa so that's kind of the the goal behind the whole thing that's great tell us about some of these pieces back here before we got started these caught my eye and I love the theme that you told me about so tell us your thought behind these this is a series that I started last year um it's probably going to be a series of about 20 or 25 pieces all together and the theme is our connection to each other and to our natural world um and physical connection and with the advent of technology and how much we are um spending time together virtually um arc I feel like a lot of our connection our actual real physical connections are lost and are being lost we're spending more time indoors we don't take our shoes off and walk on the ground um anymore and physically we are actually not as connected uh to our world as we used to be and so that's the sprung out of that and then with the advent of COVID um that has become even more um of a poignant subject I think for me because um we're all shut up in our houses and only are are having any connection through technology and through virtual methods so this these are these pieces are the beginning of a series uh about that do you have you made any art during COVID has that inspired anything new from you um a lot of artists kind of started making you know paintings of people with masks on and things like that I kind of went the opposite direction um and started making a piece of work uh that was complete fantasy I had had this little story it's kind of a legend or a myth almost an origin story in my head for a long time and because my kids were home from school and I had to work at home a lot because I was helping teach them um getting help helping them get through their digital classes um I'd sit my eight-year-old son up with the computer and I'd sit down with a little pad of paper and so I started doing just one piece a day of um illustrations of the story so I'd write a line and I'd do a piece every day and I have I'm up to about 67 pieces that I've done for this legend and the story's not completely written yet and some of it's completely abstract and some of it's representational um but all these pieces have to do with the story um and every day I post on Instagram a next the next you know installment of the story and the next illustration so that's what I started doing just kind of I was thinking as an escape as something to open up and follow every day and just that's not about the virus it's not about what's going on right now because I think we all needed a little bit of escape from that so I'm also interested to know about your involvement in the creative district here in downtown Longmont if you've been to downtown Longmont recently you'll know that there are barricades up and there's art on the barricades and so some of the restaurants are using that for extra seating for their diners just a little more room to to have live music and keep having art outside and I want to I want to point our attention over here because you're in the Times call for painting one of the barricades so tell us a little bit about that so um I participate on the creative districts committee which meets once a month and kind of is a brainstorming session and or planning session for what is going to be happening in the creative district and so when the barricades went up I was actually across the street eating a burrito at Benny's with Sabrina Ellert who's a yeah who's an artist in the building too and I said hey wouldn't it be great if they let let us paint them and we had a committee meeting that afternoon and the LDDA Kimberly and Mercedes with the LDDA were so we're going to have artists paint murals on the barricades and I was so excited um so I couldn't wait to get started with that so the next day we had we kind of divvied them up and and decided on placement for them and then we got busy recruiting artists and um we pulled from the firehouse there are several firehouse artists um that are doing murals and there was a stipend provided from the LDDA for that purpose so they were paid for the work um and then uh we also pulled some just from general facebook posts and word of mouth and things like that but there are about 20 murals that are going up and some of them are still in progress some of them are finished um but it's been a really fun um addition to those barriers and then this weekend saturday I know they're doing um the lgda is recruiting uh from the public to do wheat pasting um which is kind of like a paper mache kind of application on the barriers so the ones that aren't muraled on um can be covered by other things and the the community can participate and it's just a really great way to brighten them up and they'll be around till october um at least that's the plan at this point so um they'll be around for a while so you can come down and see some art and be outside and I know a lot of artists at the firehouse and and just local artists here are putting up tents and having uh art events on on saturdays as well from now until at least the end of at least the middle of september it's going to be going on I think so there's a lot going on outside downtown awesome yeah well joyanna rose over arts please come see her come check out her art she's an old town marketplace we're third and main between third and fourth three three two main street great and she's you come into old town marketplace and she's upstairs so come check her out oh yes please tell us about that um so um this is a a gift card that is for a hundred dollars that's going to be redeemable here um that I think uh for donations made during this cast um you get entered to win a hundred dollar gift card and this can be used toward art itself or um toward a painting party or toward a love watercolor lesson or what have you there's a lot to do here so it's redeemable here awesome yes so if you donate to the sound post session you will be entered into the drawing to win that hundred dollar gift card for over arts thank you again for joining us today and letting us come check out your studio it's beautiful I feel like I'm not going to leave today without something going home with me so um stay tuned up up next we have Monica Marie um she is a wonderful wonderful musician she's in a few different projects honey tree monocle band but you get the chance to see her solo so stick around for that and thank you to the creative district for making today's show possible hey looking muff is my song any old day nice to be playing for the sound post sessions an interesting time I have to say I've really enjoyed all the baking with my son who is just over one years old right now and last time I played the sound post sessions I was actually pregnant with him so um kind of feels like I'm coming full circle just a little bit which is really cool um I'm gonna play a love song so I grew up in Colorado Colorado Springs and my husband also grew up in Colorado Springs and we went to the same high school and even though we weren't dating back in the time like back in the day we um we were friends and so this is kind of a very condensed version of our love story this is called loving you we talk a little writing first writing music I wrote a lot of love songs love music from love songs nice to return back I think it's I think it's kind of followed the timeline of my life a little bit I'm gonna play a tune called river song this song I wrote to just say that I I see you and I love you and it's gonna be okay and it's really to address um like deep dark heavy feelings that I think I know I experience and that I've witnessed the people I love experience and um and this is this is a song that I will be releasing um early September so watch out for that this is called river song I just wanted to say thank you to the downtown Longmont creative district for sponsoring this wonderful it's so cool that Longmont has a creative district I'm so excited by that this town has just become you know cool gem of the front range and I always love coming here and making music so thank you sound post sessions thank your creative district all right I'm gonna try one more okay so one of my first memories as a human is sitting on my mom's bed growing up and her playing music to me and me just begging her to keep singing um I would just ask her to sing the same songs to me over and over and over mama sing to me and um I really wanted to write a song about this memory and um my good friend ebb and graze helped me write this tune and um it's all about that memory and so this is called mama sing lived in a brown house a blue trim on a big hill sunny colorado nine two ninety three summer with the smell of stain in the porch I hear sweets calling out to me on the street a song starts two sessions