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  Words from the Editor’s Desk

                                                            The Fix

            FEMMUSIC hits ten years in a couple of weeks and I was recently reminded of why I still do this. It is a question that lingers with me. In ten years I’ve become older, and colder. I’m more cynical than I was ten years ago.
            This past week I was at Tori Amos’ Denver show. Amos is an artist who pre-dates FEMMUSIC. She is one of that handful of artists who fit that bill. The majority of them I’ve never spoken to. Those few I’ve found are generally what I imagined or wanted them to be. They are as tired and cynical as I am. They would like to live the quiet life but something in their genetics keeps them on the road and in the studio. It is the same broken gene that keeps me hunched over a keyboard attempting to put into words that an artist is going to change the world, or that another one really needs to stay at their day job.
            Writing and changing the world are two impossible things. Many times I look at my own writing and wonder if 100 monkeys locked in a room with computers might have said it better. Entertainment critics have the impossible task of convincing you to see or hear something by our words alone. Language is not suited to describing divinity. I’ve seen and heard divinity in small clubs on off nights when it was me and the crickets.
            The reason I keep hunched over a computer losing my posture, and losing my hearing more and more every year is want to hear more divinity. I want to see the next artist who will revolutionize the world. If I’m lucky I might even have a few minutes to tell you to see them. Often times I don’t.
            I’ve slowed down in the past few years. I don’t get out as much as I want. I don’t get to hear a CD I want to. If I thought I could do a column called SEE THIS, BUY THIS I would. It would only be a list of artists I think are divine and worth your time and money. It would be a list, not reviews. The reason I could never do it is you want to know WHY as much as I do.
            Before I continue I have to give you a smidgen of that list. Three artists I would lock myself in a room with and listen to their divinity, and die happy. First, Elin Palmer in Denver. Second, SheKeepsBees out of NY. I can’t tell you how many times that CD has lived in my player and not a word has hit FEMMUSIC. Third is the indescribable urban jazz of Astronauts of Antiquity. These artists have changed my world. They need to change yours.
            In a few hours I’ll leave my cramped apartment to see a movie, and, hopefully, go to another day of a music fest and see a few singer-songwriters I keep missing. If I’m lucky one will be divinity and will change my world for those few precious minutes of a song. It is the only WHY I have.

                                                            Sincerely,
Alex Teitz