HELLO ALL!
Long time, no see. Boy I feel grand. Rested. Even a little happy.
So, once again I find myself in a sort of quasi-exile. The hills, the trees, the birds, the coyotes. I like it here. This is good. This is very good, for life in exile is a life well, in secret.
I figure it's gettin high time I take back this silly "hiatus card" business, put a bet down on the felts and get back to what I do best ~ namely, makin due with what I got right damn here and now.
♥Thanksgiving 2oo9♥
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OLD UPDATE
Secret Life is pulling the indefinite hiatus card and throwing it on the table with a dirty grin.
There may be no "Other Desert Cities" record any time soon. But who knows. I might knock out some recordings like a scribbled love letter on the way to the gallows.
Rest assured I'm in the kitchen sweat'n and cook'n up something wonderful for you. It's not Secret Life but it's worth waiting for.
June 2oo9
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BIO:
My name is
Raymond Wallace. Most people just call me Ray. I perform under the moniker
Secret Life of Sparrows. It's a long name so most just call it
Secret Life. I took the ludicrously long name with the idea that I would have a rotating cast of players but it hasn't, for the most part, worked out that way.
It's just me. Me and my long names. How I came to be stuck with
Secret Life, playing American blues-inflected folky music, we have to go back a dozen or so years to an island, of all places. An island between the Java Sea and Indian Ocean on the
Indonesian archipelago. Now, painfully faithful to brevity, I'll try to keep this telling short, if not sweet. And I assure you, to the best of my recollection, all true.
The local remnant
prince, indebted to my uncle, came to my aid securing for me a traditional oil painting apprenticeship in
Bali. Finding a shortcut away from the treacherous roads through the rice paddies, between my modest village
bungalow and the
studio, I passed a lone house. I'd passed this house maybe a hundred times before but this particular evening, and every evening thereafter, gave me reason to pause. There in the blazing sunset among maturing stalks of rice, obscured behind a blind on the porch, someone was playing an acoustic guitar as I had never heard it played before. This was my introduction to the
Blues, in the flesh so to speak, and it had me.
At that moment I made a pact, 'One day, one day I too would be able to play like that.'
A decade would pass before I ever so much as picked up a guitar or thought about music in any fashion beyond likes and dislikes. I forgot all about naive pacts and enjoyed a quiet modicum of local, personal success in Virginia and El Paso as a painter, printmaker and tattoo artist.
Then one day a
friend gave me a cheap little acoustic guitar. He was moving to New York in search of new music opportunities and he didn’t want it. Ironically with this, I was presented a new musical opportunity of my own.
Growing frustrated as a visual artist, perhaps yearning for the communion my musician friends so easily squandered, I gravitated to that little guitar more and more. I would play in secret, stolen moments until, in the fall of 2oo5; I agreed to become a weekly fixture at a local coffee shop. I cut my teeth there. The songs pouring from me, I played four-hour sets, every Friday for fifty bucks plus tips. I was hooked. I played house parties, bars anything. Then one night in 2oo6, cobbling together a handful of songs on a demo (that I pray is buried in obscurity forever) I quit my dishwashing job and hit the
road with a
friend to do a string of shows back East. I’ve gone out on tour at least once every year since.
A few months later, I was forced into convalescence in the hills outside San Antonio Texas. As the bones in my face slowly mended I took to recording the songs that would eventually become the full-length
Secret Life demo “
...to mock a killing bird.” It was a slow, solitary process. Later
Jim Ward (
At The Drive-In, Sparta, Sleepercar) took the helm producing and released the work through his label
Civil Defense League.
Chomping at the bit I finally got free and out on the
road in the spring of 2oo7 promoting “
killing bird” with
Crooke and Color,
Warren Jackson Hearne and cellist,
Barbara Arriaga. After moving to San Francisco, I headed
out again in the frozen February of 2oo8 with Matt Schmitz and
Jim Ward as he promoted his solo, acoustic album “
Quiet.” During this tour I was fortunate to open for
Bright Eyes, Jim James (
My Morning Jacket) and
M. Ward.
Now, having only just begun, I find myself in the American desert southwest again poised to record my next full-length “
Other Desert Cities.”
Sincerely,
Raymond Wallace
Secret Life of Sparrows
Thanksgiving 2oo8
Online!
