SPEAK for a Year is over. Why am I here?

WTF SPEAK? SPEAK for a Year is over. We had a deal guys. After December, we were supposed to go our separate ways and let this project end.

Of course that didn't happen. A week ago, I got a Facebook invite for a show SPEAK was playing at Progress Coffee. Even though it was a free show, I wasn't going to go. I wanted to purposely avoid the show to show people (and I really mean my skeptic friends) that I wasn't a SPEAK fangirl and could cut myself from this band. SPEAK for a Year was just a project and that's it.

But the moment I read on that Facebook invite that they were going to "perform string quartet arrangements of Speak songs," I hung my head in shame. I know I'm gonna be at that show. I'm going to go because once upon a time during my Southwest Texas days, I used to hang out at the Coffee Pot on Tuesday nights to watch my friends play impromptu jazz. I would attend my music major friends' recitals and concerts. I carried sheet music in my backpack with a flute case in hand since I was in the 6th grade. I sang in the choir for most of my life.

I am a former band nerd. Of course, I was going to be at that show.

The show was great. The coffee shop was packed but luckily, I arrived early so I got a good seat to enjoy this low key set.

I can read music and I can play music, but I've always been jealous of those that can rearrange music to their instrument with no trouble at all. I've tried it before and it was too time consuming for me. Of course, my music major friends saw what I was doing and was like "Oh, why don't you just write it in that key?" Jerks.

Anyway, the man behind the arrangements Maurice Chammah did a great job turning SPEAK's cotton candy pop rock into subtle orchestral compositions. So all those people that immediate hate on SPEAK because it's a "boy band" and "pop music" can finally get their chance to enjoy the tunes without jeopardizing their credibility. Hello hipster fanbase.

SPEAK performing at Progress Coffee from Sarah Vasquez on Vimeo.

Watching the show made me realized how much I miss performing. I was inspired to go home and start playing my flute again. But let's be real here, people. It's been over five years since I last put that flute to my mouth and the last time I did, I sounded like a 6th grader all over again. My tone was fuzzy. My fingers played sloppy. All those years of leaving my flute in the closet has caught up with me.

I no longer sound like this girl...

The flute player in that song is me when I was a 19-year-old SWT college student.

Back to the original topic, it felt pretty wierd being at a SPEAK show after the year was up. I know I wasn't obligated to see this show. I know no one was expecting me to write a review on it (although, here I am anyway), but a part of me just couldn't resist.

A friend of mine Chris Snyder, who recently finished his year project of recording a song a day, (and here we thought seeing SPEAK for a year was insane), posted a blog post about how he missed it. I have to say I can agree. When you pursue something like this, it eventually becomes a routine.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, and I’ll be honest with you — I miss it. Over the course of 2010, this project became not just a routine, but a structure. Routines are habits; they can mean something, or not. For the most part, routines don’t really mean anything. In fact, it’s quite common to complain about our routinized lives. But my routine — songwriting, recording, posting — was different. It was something I poured myself into. It was a journal, of sorts, of my physical and mental state. I wrote songs in odd places: on an Amtrak train, on a plane to Denver, in a cab in Queens, in a hotel in Toronto, on a beach on Long Island, at my childhood home in Los Angeles. (I’m probably forgetting a place or two.) I wrote songs when I was tired, buzzed, and caffeinated. I wrote some of them with a clear idea of what I wanted, and I wrote others with no premeditation at all.

But now, for what has felt like a very long stretch of 21 days, I haven’t written a damn thing.

This was, in part, deliberate. I needed a break. I needed some sleep. I needed to see friends and watch movies and catch up on Mad Men. I needed to spend some quality time with my wife-in-training, for pete’s sake. I also needed to get some space from the project, to reflect on what I’d done, to figure out what comes next.

But now, three weeks into 2011, the absence of the daily song is starting to gnaw at me. No no, I’m not going to start in again with some all-consuming musical experiment. But I think the quiescent period is over. It’s time to get back to work. After all, I have EPs to release and shows to play…

By the way, you can download two of his EPs with some of the songs from his project here.

As for SPEAK continuing in this type of string adventure, I really do hope they release an album or play more shows like this. I think they have something here people other than teenager girls would really enjoy.