The Kt we loved

The Kt we loved
"I just might hurt you if you don't move that camera." — Kt

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Greetings from the Sunny South

Anita and I are in St. Petersburg (Florida, not Russia!). This is our first real holiday in over three years: other than a few quick visits to see family, we’ve been pretty stay-at-home. I’m giving some training here, and so Anita came along for a few days of vacation before and after.

We still aren’t exactly party animals, of course, but we’ve done lots of sightseeing and spent some time on a beach and so forth. We’re having a nice, low-key time.

We were in a restaurant the other day that had a poster of the following (it’s a bit small, but was the best I could find on the web). It’s for a beer called Sweetwater, and says “Est. 420” and “Drink ‘em if you got ‘em”. I found myself reaching for my phone to snap a picture so I could show Katie, which left me so off-balance that I failed to take any picture at all.

Anyway, she would have loved the bizarre mix of pop culture references!


 While driving back and forth to the training site, I’ve found myself listening to Spirit FM 90.5, “Tampa Bay’s Hit Christian Music”. Now, I’d have said I was about as likely to listen to gangsta rap as to “Hit Christian Music”, but I tripped across the station while pressing Seek repeatedly, trying to find something other than country, talk, or Spanish radio. It’s playing a broad range of stuff, from pop to R&B to nu metal.

So of course I wish Katie was here, so we could talk about the music. There’s an earnestness about the bands that’s quite appealing. I don’t mean the lyrics, which I don’t really listen to: I mean the music, which isn’t overproduced, as so much music is—I doubt there’s an Autotune in sight. Definitely a good thing. Some of it reminds me of Relient K, who she used to like; I looked them up to be sure I was right about the spelling of “Relient” and was surprised to learn that they’re also considered Christian rock.

Which in turn reminded me of my recurring daydream that Katie should be an “A&R man”—a talent scout for the music industry, roaming the country, listening to crappy band after crappy band in honky-tonks and high schools and wherever else, looking for the Next Big Thing. Of course, with the Internet and YouTube and the general ill health of the music industry, it’s not clear that A&R people have any future, or perhaps even still exist. But it’s definitely something I could see her enjoying, and with her knowledge of and interest in music, she’d’ve been great at it.