It was an interesting year in music, with higher highs and lower lows than I’ve experienced. In some ways, it was my most successful year musically. I had a lot of really fantastic opportunities – among them, opening for Tracy Grammer at Passim on our birthdays, being a finalist in the Susanne Milsaps Songwriting Contest at the Mountain Music Festival in Utah, playing the Newton Lower Falls house concert series (and doing well enough to be invited back). The CD did well too. It actually charted on the folk-DJ list, at #22, and it was named as one of the top 10 albums of 2011 by Bob Sherman at WFUV. It still sells when songs from it are played on the radio (most recently during the WICN appearance two days ago) – I can often tell where a song has played by where the CD orders come in from. I also got into some good habits that have served me well. For at least the first half of the year I submitted to at least one gig opportunity a day, and that resulted in a lot of good performance opportunities. Some have come to find me, as well, including some coming up in 2012; I have some really good shows coming up on the schedule. I also finally got organized, creating google docs for my gig submissions (and their results) and a spreadsheet to track details about the shows I play. And I also broke down and found an occasional voice teacher, with whom I enjoy working. And I’ve written some really good songs this year (several of them in writing workshops with Nerissa Nields, which I ended up involved in entirely because she hunted me down and wouldn’t take no for an answer, which itself was an honor). I’m well on my way to the next CD – I have at least four songs that are as good as anything on my previous CDs, and have no doubt that there will be a third CD. At the same time, I’ve had a bigger crisis of confidence in the second half of the year than I’ve encountered in a long time. I’ve sometimes wondered why I’m doing this – why I’m trying to be a performing singer-songwriter. Some of that came, I think, in part from an extremely busy summer and fall in my non-music life; it felt like I was just barely hanging on, with no spare reserves to devote to music. (It didn’t help that the dog has been really sick all fall in a way that has required that I get up with her multiple times a night; in addition to not having any time, I haven’t had any sleep.) And I got really sick – lost my voice, had to cancel showcases at NERFA (the music conference I go to – the worst time to not be able to sing). I was sick for almost all of November and still have leftover traces of a cough. I actually went without picking up a guitar for weeks. The lack of time, sleep, and health created a vicious circle – I stopped seeking gigs, updating my blog, doing publicity . . . which of course then led to smaller crowds , fewer shows, and less enjoyable ones. I started wondering why anyone would want to come hear me play, which made me less able to try to convince people that they should. It felt like a musical form of depression. I went through something like this before, in graduate school, when I stopped writing songs and performing publicly, for more than a decade. I remember concluding at the time that “the world doesn’t need another mediocre singer-songwriter.” It’s true that the world doesn’t; on the other hand, I hope it’s not true that that’s what I am. It’s ironic that this crisis of confidence appeared in the middle of what was one of my most successful years as a musician. I hope that it really was the exhaustion and the knock-on effects of neglecting the habits that had served me so well in the first half of the year. Vicious circles can become virtuous circles when they run the other direction, and in the new year I hope to get them started heading that way. The signs are good – I do have a set of spectacular gigs lined up in the new year. And, most importantly, I have a light teaching load this spring and learned from the fall that I have to say “no” to more things in my life. So here’s to more confidence and energy so that I can get back to enjoying being a musician in 2012.