Let’s make no bones about it, moving to a new place is difficult. It involves essentially hitting the reset button on your life and starting all over again. A new town, new bars, new restaurants, new streets to navigate, a new tedious set of seemingly never ending bureaucratic challenges to overcome and perhaps most challenging of all, a new set of friends to be found. As always, you can never have it both ways, you can never take your old friends with you and enjoy the delights of a new place whilst keeping the comforts of the old. Your tough old social skin comprised of long held, solid friendships that kept you so warm and comfortable must be shed and you find yourself sensitive, vulnerable and without protection in an unfamiliar place. This feeling can, at times, be overwhelming, so much so that you just want to curl up and hide from it all, but as you become used to it, you find that it forces you to take your life by the neck and give it a good hard shake. There is no choice, it’s do or die, you can stay in forever lamenting your feelings of isolation or you can buck up and get out there and see what happens. Once you adopt that attitude, everything else just falls into place…

Perhaps the greatest gift that Portland has given me is a renewed sense of enthusiasm for live music. The music scene here is intense. Check out the local guides in the Willamette Week or the Portland Mercury and you find that every single night is absolutely awash with wall to wall live music. One of the myths I heard about Portland before coming is that everyone here is in a band and I’m starting to believe that it’s true. It seems that the unfailing antidote to those winter blues for all Portland is to soak up some of the never ending stream of musicians that grace the bars and clubs of this fair city.

I’ll be quite honest, up until this year I had been all but hiding from modern music, too lazy to take the time to discover anything new, just wallowing in the relative contentment offered by the old classics. My playbills comprised of song after song of talented yet overplayed artists such as Zeppelin, Hendrix, Al Green, Bill Withers, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones etc etc. While each and every song and album of this genre are bonified crowd pleasers and classics for good reason, the general mood given off upon listening was one of completely out of touch “Dad Rock”. It had gotten so bad that I had even taken to regular bouts of listening to Dire Straits (scoff you may, but I still maintain that Mark Knopfler is one of the greatest guitarists ever!). I was indeed in dire straits, ha ha ha… Of course, this would all be fine if I could still confidently say that I had my finger on the proverbial pulse, but I couldn’t. So as I tried to re-acquaint myself with the modern world I began to realize just how bad things had got…

By 2011, I had discovered the Black Keys (who started in 2001), Imelda May (2003), Florence + the Machine (2007), and happily Lana Del Rey, who was at least considered relatively new. Consequently, I began to feel as though any conversation I had with some young hipster would have been slightly less embarrassing than the year before (and yes, I realize that even this sentence makes me sound old, thankfully I’m not out to regain my youth, just a small whisper of credibility). I was making progress, slow progress, but progress nonetheless. Then, in August 2013, I arrived here in Portland with high hopes for a serious renaissance in my musical appreciation and knowledge.

I have now been here for over 4 months and I am most certainly NOT disappointed. Portland is fulfilling my dream and revealing herself to me, inch by cultural inch and has left me with the biggest musical boner I’ve had since my last jaunt to Glastonbury in 2005. Thanks to an informative combination of the internet, magazines, newspapers, friends and my own roving eye, I have notched up a pleasing number of musical conquests. For your own listening pleasure, I will give you the run down, in chronological order, so that those of you who will not get to experience Portland first had can at least have a quiet moment alone with her in the confines of your own bedroom:

Chervona – Russian scar band who never cease to get you up and boppin’ McDougall – No link available here, but the most intense one man show I’ve ever seen! Three For Silver – Moody Tom Waits like three piece with a penchant for heavy boozing during the performance, comprising of an acoustic bass, violin, accordion and vocals via an old loud speaker. Awesome… Vagabond Opera – A crazy, theatrical mish mash of Spanish Flamenco, swing and other assorted styles. Not for the faint of heart, but great for letting loose after a few beers. Cults – New York based hypno-rock group, awesome live. Joe Fletcher – Country like rock with a good twist of weird thrown in. Foals – London based rock band who I’m sure many of you will know, I just got to know them last night… 😉

These are the “headliners” for me, I have been to a good number of other gigs here with some equally awesome musicians, but these are the ones that stick in my memory.

So, while it may be tough at times, moving to a new place is a guaranteed way to open your eyes to the world again, giving you an always needed squirt of enthusiasm and appreciation for things that can easily be taken for granted. Just as it is possible to let oneself go physically as we get older and pile on the pounds as a consequence of too much beer and greasy fast food, it is equally possible to let oneself go mentally. Sticking to the well trodden paths of life that make you feel safe and comfortable may seem like the good idea at the time but can ultimately rob you of the one thing that is essential to feeling alive, a sense of wonder in all things. When you push yourself out to the edge where things are a bit more difficult and scary, that sense of wonder starts to wake up once again and all of that cynicism and boredom evaporates before your eyes.

LIVE, BREATH, LOVE, DRINK, DANCE, SMOKE, FUCK, SWEAR, SING, RUN, JUMP, SHOUT, GET ANGRY, MAD, HAPPY, EXCITED

and tell the next person who says their bored to fuck off… 😉