Kicking Off 2016 with Allison Felus
Welcome to my newsletter!
Hiya! And happy new year! I thought it might be a little easier and more streamlined to keep you up to date with my blog postings and other goings-on if I got you on a dedicated e-mail list, especially if you otherwise try to avoid the social media thing. Obviously, feel free to remove yourself if you've got too many things coming through your inbox already; I totally understand! But, if you'd like to stick around, I hope to have plenty of good stuff to share over the coming weeks and months.
2015 in review
I sit behind a desk eight hours a day during the week and read stuff online constantly, yet even I have trouble keeping up with all the blog posts and articles and other links I've heard good things about and am interested in delving into. So, I recognize that it's entirely possible that you may have missed out on some of the stuff that I wrote in 2015. In case you have a little bit of downtime here in January and need some goodies to keep your eyeballs occupied during the long, dark, cold nights ahead, here's a round-up of stuff I wrote for my blog Queen of Peaches, and beyond.
January: I got in the habit of going to the (now unfortunately closed) Bad Wolf Coffee shop on Sundays after meditation sittings at the Zen Buddhist Temple
February: My band Pet Theories recorded our debut album in February and I kept a studio diary for days 0, 1, and 2
March: I may have gone through clairvoyant training from 2010 to 2012, but I still don't really know anything about reading tarot cards
April: Mark Knopfler's latest album Tracker was one of my favorite things I heard all year
May: I put together a zine called Satan Is My Father with a bunch of ridiculously excellent contributions from my pals Jake Austen, Brian Cremins, Richard Hodge, Gene Kannenberg Jr., David McCarty, Kate Merena, Liz Shulman, and Tony Trigilio
June: I moved out of my old apartment in Lincoln Square and had a lot of feelings about it
July: I moved into my new apartment in Rogers Park and was too tired and too hot to think or write about much of anything of substance
August: I saw the Amy Winehouse documentary Amy, which catalyzed a lot of feelings of frustration about the exploitation of talent, the way music is discussed among non-musicians, and my own limitations as a singer and piano player
September: I got confessional about being a night owl
October: I decided to just be straight-up honest about the fact that I intensely dislike Halloween
November: My gift to you, Chicagoans —a list of my secret favorite places to pee in the city
December: I saw U2 in concert for the first time back in June and then basically spent the next six months thinking about what an amazing performer Bono is
In March, Brian and I also wrote a pair of essays, meant to be read in tandem, for Maura Magazine about, respectively, The Pernice Brothers' album Eccsame the Photon Band. I believe these pieces are locked behind a paywall, but you should be able to download our issue, #44 "Convalesce," either online here or via the iTunes store in-app.
In September, in honor of my father's birthday, I put together a Bandcamp page with some newly digitized recordings of tapes of his old Terry Felus Trio gigs. I hope to make this a growing archive as I have a chance to unearth more of his old shows. I wrote a little essay about the project on my Tumblr here.
In November, I created another Bandcamp page for old recordings of musicals produced by the Lake Central Theatre Guild. I had the idea to create the page after I heard the news that Jon DuLong had died. Jon was the star of a number of LC's shows in the early '90s, and I knew that I had a taped recording of the show On the Twentieth Century, which he appeared in in early 1992, in a box somewhere. I rushed to transfer the files and post them online as his friends and family were sharing memories on Facebook in the days after his passing. You can read my short in-memoriam essay in my liner notes, which are available to download either on the On the Twentieth Century Bandcamp page or via my Dropbox.
In December, I had an unexpected amount of sadness when I heard that Scott Weiland, formerly of the Stone Temple Pilots, had died. I wrote a bit about my memories of his music on my Tumblr here.
Holy crap, and that's not even to mention all the stuff that my band did this year!! IN SHORT: our self-titled debut album is available to download here or in physical CD form here; our good pal Gene Kannenberg Jr. took a bunch of awesome photos at our Red Line Tap show that you can check out on Flickr over here; Brian and I played a sad bastard version of the old Dion song "Runaround Sue" (with a little assistance from our new friends Annie Passanisi Ruggles and John Huber), which you can view online here; and, you can view THE ENTIRETY of our recent Red Line Tap show on YouTube here, thanks to the magic of the Periscope app.
Anyway, that's a ton of stuff that should keep you busy for now! Thanks for sticking with me! XO.