The Chances I Had

In my previous blog I talked about meeting Gary. He had a public access TV show called Obsessed With Gary. He would interview people and have musicians play on the show. He invited me to play on his show in NYC. I played 2 songs. Lisa Loeb actually saw it and called the show and said she loved my music and gave me tickets to see a show of hers. He also had a friend who was an A&R guy for a record company. I also talked about him in another blog a few days ago. His label wanted to sign me, but they wanted me to go on tour with the Lillith Fair. It was an all female tour that Sarah McLachian made. To me, it seemed like it was a bunch of girls who were pissed off that they were not cool enough to play Lallapalooza. I thought about playing it for a few days. But I really didn’t want to be a part of something just because I also have a vagina. I had no interest in playing shows with Jewel and the Indigo Girls. I was also 17 and just got out of reform school. So I said no to the Lillith fair. When I was 14, my mother died in a car accident. When I was 19, my family won a lawsuit from it and I all of a sudden had $135,000. I was working at a Starbucks in Westport, CT. We had a customer, named Ray Bardani, who I became friends with. He was an engineer and he really liked my music. I asked him to make a record with me in the summer of 2000. The whole thing cost me about $20,000. It was called START. When you opened up the CD case, there was a picture of me in a cowboy hat. Somehow my manager at the time got my CD to Faith Hill and Tim McGraw’s label. They wanted to buy a song on it called Love’s Address. But they also wanted me to play Lillith Fair to promote me as an artist. I literally had to hang up on their people a few times after I told them I would not do it. In the music industry, all you have is your first impression. I had no interest in being in the same category as the other chicks that played the fair. The bands that I loved and still do were the Get Up Kids, At The Drive In, Sunny Day Real Estate and the Pixies. I felt I had nothing in common with the Lillith Fair girls. Somehow a little after that, Stetson contacted my manager. They were looking for a rock musician to promote cowboy hats and be a spokesperson for a fragrance they were coming out with. Since I would sometimes wear a cowboy hat anyway I thought it was awesome. All I had to do was always wear one and they would basically be my record company. They would pay for promotion and a tour bus and anything I needed. Another awesome thing was that they were going to put my record in the box of every hat they sold. It was pretty much guaranteed that I would get a gold record within a few months based on that alone. Then 9/11 came. The people I was dealing with died that day. So that deal went up in smoke with them. A few months later, I saw a commercial for the fragrance I was supposed to be promoting. Matthew McConaughey got my job. A few years later I made friends with a guy named John. He ran Sunny Day Real Estate’s web site. They had just broken up and the lead guitarist, Dan Hoener wanted to start a female fronted band. John gave Dan my number and Dan and I would sent our music to each other. I was going to be in a band with him. It was kinda a big deal. It was written about in a few magazines. Then he kinda went crazy and moved to Washington and I never heard from him again. My song Diamond is about him.