Living Upstage

Hi web world. This first post will serve as a short bio and an explanation as to why it is that I am spending time during my day to write on this. My thoughts and stories will follow soon after. Here we go…

My name is Michael, and I am a 22 year-old student at Texas A&M.

I currently make a major portion of my income by playing the drums. This could mean anything from touring and recording with my band to playing percussion in someone’s living room with a singer/songwriter friend of mind. Sounds pretty nice, huh? Well it is great, but just so you know, when I say income, that’s just big boy talk for “extra cash.”

As a drummer, I am always positioned “upstage” whenever I am playing live music. (Hey! That’s the name of the blog!) The term “upstage” actually means the back center part of the stage that is furthest from the audience. Why it is called this, I don’t know. Blame the actors…

Anyways, because drummers are always shoved to the back wall, I tend to miss out on a lot of things. For one I don’t ever get to throw my foot on top of a monitor and start pelvic thrusting at the crowd. Say what you want, but that’s becoming harder and harder for me to deal with. Another thing I don’t ever get the chance to do is talk. Sure we could set up a mic for me when I am at my kit, but then people would wonder why I’m not singing during the songs, and there just so happens to be a very important reason I don’t sing during the songs.

The interesting thing about me is that even when I’m just participating in my everyday schedule, I tend to act like I am still sitting upstage without a mic. I’ve become very comfortable with being quiet and unnoticed in the background, and for me, that’s just not who I want to be. So this blog will be a way for me to speak my mind a little bit and tell some stories about the life of a musician that hopefully will not disappoint. I am also a writer, so this is also a venue to polish my skills.