So the summer starts off with a few outdoor sing strums and I thought I'd share some photos and videos to get us excited about what is to come! Don't forget to get out there and support all those live music events! Thanks as always to the lovely people who ask me to come add music to their event!
The photo above is from the Heron Hospice Society annual walk at Patterson park! I filled in for Brian and Chris from All the Kings Men who's band member thankfully had a scheduled surgery moved forward and they jumped on the opportunity to get it done and found me last minute.
This was at May Days in Ladner. I sang Anne Murray Songs which was a real treat and I was surprisingly nervous. Most likely because I had only ever sang Anne for seniors before who are admittedly generally sleeping. ;)
And finally, the below video was at Crescent Beach Marina,
which new ownership took over and they wanted to throw a welcome party!
What a beautiful place~
Tonight I will be playing the Hilton downtown Vancouver in Hendricks and next week back at Lulu windery June 6th for Happy Hour!
Finally if you like the awesome Pickleball Dragonfly top (secret pickleball pattern) I'm wearing in the first photo go check out my Pickleball ARTwear blog HERE to see where I got it!
Look I play music in front of people nearly every weekend of the year but for the most part it's an ignore-athon. I am wall paper, brought in by very, very nice establishments to color the room with gentle sound. People aren't buying tickets to see me they are coming to the venue so the venue relies on me to give the right level of music where their guests can still chat to one another yet still daydream off to a tune if they need to.
I LOVE being wallpaper. I can sit for 3 solid hours and play music and never bother anyone with it, and that is my special sauce.
So when the Barnside gig was on my to-do list I was nervous and excited right from the start because I knew this would be different than being background music, I had played at enough of these festivals on the big stages to know that on this day, even in a small tent I wasn't there as wallpaper, I couldn't disappear because if anyone showed up, they were there to see me so I had to step up, I wasn't able to just slide in and make up a song list like I normally would. I only had half an hour of play time and I didn't want to waste a second of it. I played a few covers, a pickleball tune and some of an original!
It was as exciting as I'd hoped it would be and so was the rest of the weekend which I documented over on my facebook!
Well done to the entire cast and crew of the Barnside Harvest Festival. Do go there to get the full goods!
Thanks to all the wonderful pals who showed up and partied with us!
It's been a pretty stellar summer and I've lucked out with only one bad weather cancellation all season!
This is one of the last summertime picnic gigs at the winery and the tunnel is so lovely, I asked the customers to send me clips which they thankfully did!
I walked up
in my shorts, looking good
for the
pickleball courts.
I said: "Hey,
can I play?" Just one look
and they turned
me away.
They said:
"All you do is slam it.
Go find another group".
So I called my friend Lee:
Tell me what should I do?
She said: "Don’t use all of your power,
loose the grip of your hand,
practice your drills for hours,
so you got skills on demand.
Don’t just go out there banging
you need some kind of plan
but you will play pickleball
better than they can!
Play it better I can play it better babe! "
5 Straight Down the Line (Sung to Sweet Caroline Neil Diamond)
It’s the end of the day
I’d like play one more game now
Really I should be moving on
Im working my shots
My drive you won't see it coming
Ive been pickleballing since the dawn
Fast...it's coming fast. I reach out, and drive the ball right back to youuuuu!
Straight down the line.... ba ba ba! Can't believe it hit so good..... so good so good so good.
It felt so divine........ ba ba ba! to see it land right where it should and now I......
I wait for the serve
I try to be calm not rattled
Bending my knees and playing strong
We get to the net
I brace myself for the battle
Everyone’s watiing for
the ball
Fast...it's coming fast. I reach out, and drive the ball right back to youuuuu!
Straight down the line.... ba ba ba! Can't believe it hit so good..... so good so good so good.
It felt so divine........ ba ba ba! to see it land right where it should and now I......
I look at the court, adjust how I hold my paddle and wait for a ball that looks divine.
I split step my feet, and look a bit over my shoulder patiently waiting for a sign.
Fast...it's coming fast. I reach out, and drive the ball right back to youuuuu!
Straight down the line.... ba ba ba! Can't believe it hit so good..... so good so good so good.
It felt so divine........ ba ba ba! to see it land right where it should and now I......
6 Pickleballin (sung to Surfin Safari by the Beach Boys)
Let's grab a paddle now
everybody's learning how
come on pickleballin with me
come on pickleballin with me.
Early in the morning
we'll be starting out
everybody's coming along.
We're loading up the rack
get your paddles in
find the court
where you belong.
dink and drop and dive and volley, dink and drop and drive and volley
Come on baby wait and see
you're going to love
pickleballin with me.
dink and drop and dive and volley, dink and drop and drive and volley
Come on baby wait and see you're going to love pickleballin with me.
Let's grab a paddle now
everybody's learning how
come on pickleballin with me
come on pickleballin with me.
7 Pickleball AGAIN (sung to Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffett)
I twisted my ankle it turned into a cankle so I couldn’t go to the pickleball courts
I tell you I'm itchin to get to the kitchen cause working this kitchen it isn’t a chore
I just can’t wait to go and pickleball again
Anyone can be good if they give it their all
Just one play and you'll know why we love the game
cause its more than just pickleball.
Now don’t be downhearted, once our game has started we could be friends but right now we’re at war
So lets get the scores right, and watch for the gunfights Keep playing again till there’s laughter galore
I just can’t wait to go and pickleball again
Anyone can be good if they give it their all
Just one play and you'll know why we love the game
cause its more than just pickleball.
Pickleball’s growing, friends are now flowing , you see this game is much more than a sport With dinking and driving seems the whole world is thriving Its common to hear can we all play one more?
Serve it up Serve it up Serve it up
I just can’t wait to go and pickleball again
Anyone can be good if they give it their all
Just one play and you'll know why we love the game
cause its more than just pickleball.
8 To all the points I've lost before: (to Willie Nelson All the Girls I've loved before)
To all the points I’ve lost before
I’d love to add you to my score
From volleys I took wrong
to drives that went too long
don t want to see those anymore
To serves that really weren’t my best
To dinks I didn’t quite caress
and drops that hit the tape
or shots I couldn’t make
I’d like to see you never more !
sometime when the winds are blowin
NO matter how hard I might try
I can’t connect the ball to paddle
I flat out miss and it flies by....
To all the balls that hit the net
It‘s you I wish I would forget
I tell you every day
I’d take back every play
where patience wasn’t part of it
9 Lets Go Play Pickleball! (to the tune of Let's call the whole thing off)
You want to drop it, I like to smash it
You choose to dink it,, I tend to bash it
Drop it, smash it,
dink it, bash it
lets go play pickleball!
You take the side line
I’ve got the middle
Try not pop up, Just soften a little
One day this whole game wont be such a riddle
let’s go play pickleball!
10 Pickleballer
to the melody of Chiquitita by Abba
Pickleballer tell me what’s wrong
You can play more games tomorrow
If you like
I’ve a new ball you can borrow.
Can’t you see the sun is now gone
And it seems you’ve broken your paddle
I don’t think
you should throw it after battles
Pickleballer what can I say
When the rallies don’t go your way it’s time a for learning
(Everyone they saw you throw it no one wants to see you sad)
You’ll be playing once again and again and again
Whether or not
you are hurting
parody lyrics written by Rachael Chatoor inspired by the original songs noted ~ not for commercial use, for fun and sing alongs only, intended to bring tunes to the after game kitchen party.
I'm still a musician and so like everyone else who has to work I must still go sing and strum to pay for my pickleball addiction. So I wanted to circle back to music here on my diary blog now that I have moved my pickleball artwear blog world to it's own home at Pickleball ARTwear.com Pickleball ARTwear.com
I'll keep some of these old pickleball posts up- for historical sake and there are even more that I unpublished but are still in the Google cache. And do scroll past them if you are looking for music history.
I've been on an art binge lately so new music hasn't been flowing as much. With a backlog of things on my creative to do list music gets a back seat sadly.
The good thing about my job is that it forces me to keep my chops going whether I practiced a lot or not, three hours of work means 2 hours and 45 minutes of playing. ( yes I've started taking 15 minute breaks at venues, and anywhere I have to play for more than 3 hours I use their allotted break schedule).
I have some new venues to play this year and have been promising to put a schedule up so today I'm doing it.
I've had a pink ribbon for pickleball in my mind since forever but there was so much else to do first. I've added the artwork clip with my song Standing and you can find that on Itunes or my Reverbnation
You can find the design on all sorts of nifty item on my artist portals like this one HERE, Pickleball Artwear by Rachael Chatoor dot com, facebook, or contact me to custom create some team or tournament wear for you!
Merry Christmas to all my wonderful Pickleball ARTwear supporters!! (here are just some of your awesome photos, you'll find the rest on facebook) I LOVE you!!
So my new clothes have arrived ( a couple of my samples, anyhow ) and I am more in love with them than I hoped I would be. I immediately set to work on trying them on and decided to film the process and intro the clothes with whatever film I captured. See the video below to get a glimpse of my new goodies.
If it seems like I'm delighted with the quality of the items I am, I am so happy the colors in real life look as beautiful as the colors in my imagination and on-screen, plus the make and fit are reliably supeior to the ones I could design on before. These are all I was hoping for and I'm so excited.
This video I must admit I laughed at and watched a few times. It was because it made me laugh that I even kept my ass in there as I was pulling my pants up over it. But it looked so ridiculous to me and I tried so hard to recover and the dragonfly looked so cool I decided to keep it in.
And guess what.
The dragonfly goes on the front.
How
did
If it seems like I'm delighted with the quality of the items I am, I am so happy the colors in real life look as beautiful as the colors in my imagination and on-screen, plus the make and fit are reliably supeior to the ones I could design on before. These are all I was hoping for and I'm so excited.
This video I must admit I laughed at and watched a few times. It was because it made me laugh that I even kept my ass in there as I was pulling my pants up over it. But it looked so ridiculous to me and I tried so hard to recover and the dragonfly looked so cool I decided to keep it in.
And guess what.
The dragonfly goes on the front.
How
did
I
miss
that?
Honestly until a friend of mine asked me which way to wear it? I had NO idea I was wearing it backwards.
What an introduction. I've decided it's perfect and I'm keeping it in. If anything it will give people something to scratch their heads over. Giggle.
Anyhow, I don't expect people to wear all this stuff together by the way. My items are not meant to be worn "party on the top and party on the bottom" always, unless you love literally being ALOT. Then by all means have at er.
Personally I usually wear a top OR a bottom and then I pair them with a matching solid from one of my other favorite brands. The pants I am wearing in this video are Lululemon
The fit is true (I'm a large in most brands. A medium in generous brands and XL in fancy shit) I'm wearing large for everything.
Ok maybe I'm not breaking up with ME but I'm breaking up with something I've worked very hard on for well over a year now. It's my store. I'm breaking up with my old storefront.
All that art I made is gone, blown up and I already have a new store lined up
Last summer while a lovely lady was making a number of purchases in my store, she wrote and asked me to make a T-shirt for a pattern she favored (because I had not designed one yet). So, of course gladly I made her the T-shirt, which she added to her orders. Shortly after her order arrived, I checked with her to see how everything was.
She said she LOVED all the items but sadly she would have to wait till she lost a little bit of weight, before she could wear the capris. Sadly I didn't have a larger size capris or leggings to offer her so, she hadn't made the wrong size choice, I had simply only limited sizes in my store.
This made me feel a kind of way, and it was not a content feeling, knowing that my new friend was unable to wear my weird and wonderful clothes, simply because I didn't have the right products to suit everyone out there.
I thought about it a lot.
As a musician first and artist second, I want to run the "business" side of things, not at alll. Putting together a store and learning all the dreary numbers and tables and htmls and ins and outs and getting computer friendly has not been an easy hike at all, especially when all I want to do is make things look or sound pretty. And I finally had my store running even if it wasn't serving everyone.
But it still bothered me that I couldn't serve everyone, and if the only thing in my way was myself, well I've learned how to do things before. When publishers wouldn't even look at my book idea a couple of years ago, I learned how to self publish. Now I have two books, the second one I also published entirely myself (well my husband supports me in everything I do but that's a whole other love story), because I could. I just had an idea and made the book. So what I am getting at here is that I find forced growth is often a good thing or at least a catalyst. I embrace it (often after a bunch of complaining, but I digress).
And thanks to my aforementioned new friend (who loves butterflies by the way), my thinking turned into inspiration. Inspiration to do what I had never done before and get off my ass and source a manufacturer who could provide ALL the products I needed.
Look, I've had people write to me and ask me to get larger sizes or to make shorts, or long sleeve sun shirts, or leggings with pockets etc....... but it's an enormous task to change everything.
This woman is a customer however, she committed to me by purchasing, and I felt like I had failed her.
So I was determined to at the very least, find some leggings in her size that I could customize for her, even just to send her as a unique original pair, just for her. Never in my wildest dreams did I realize her simple request for some Pickleball Butterfly clothes would inspire a radical blow up of my store.
You see I found a supplier with the best leggings I could locate. They looked amazing online, crossover yoga band, pockets and seemingly superior construction to the ones I had in my store at the time. The best part is they went up to size 6X and that's several sizes above what I even needed, so things looked golden, I dug in and designed a pair.
While on the new site designing I noticed some other items with similar broad sizing that were empty canvases, just waiting for me to create on, pieces that people had been asking for. Different cuts, better materials, More significant construction.
I wanted to see this stuff. It is pricier and I wanted to see how it feels in real life, to see if it was worth the extra cost, so I made some longer athletic shorts and an athletic short sleeved top as well and sent off my order.
When they arrived I was so impressed with it all that I found that my wheels where turning. This stuff is too good for me not to offer it. It would be excruciating, but I had to do this.
So I set out looking to teach myself how to RE-do my store. I didn't do it without help. I did as much as I could by myself first, and then when it got scary, I searched and found a web expert who lives close enough by who helped get me running and then due to family emergency could not continue the job.
Which paralyzed me. I was not interested in floating alone again without someone I could trust holding my hand through the web developer stuff, so, I blew it up again.
Yes, after a thousand dollars of education I had a beautiful store that I realized I didn't want to run because the stress of it took all the fun of the art away.
And this new site lets me just be an artist. The Artist Shops.
basics like Tshirts and hoodies as well as all sorts of new items like mugs, towels, jackets, stickers, sweatshirts and more will cost you LESS because that all has been moved onto my ARTIST site where it's not my own store, I am merely an artist who designs using the THREADLESS site where you get the items from directly, and I get a commission. It cuts out the middle man, the shop and sends you to the source. If I put these basics in my store I have to charge more and do all sorts of work to do so. So I didn't. Look for all these new gift items and basics at my ARTIST store HERE.
Canadian residents please note some items will be shipping internationally and duties could apply.
And to my new friend, she has her new leggings now, and loves them, and I am so grateful to her for her open comments because it spurred me and all of us, to a better place. See the old store I blew up. (I still have all these designs and more ready to go digital if someone wants to partner with me)
Here is my free ARTIST shop. :)
This site will invite you to sign up but you can bypass that, you are not obligated to sign up to look or shop! :)
And for your listening enjoyment I leave you with my latest #pickleball parody. "I DINKED the ball and I liked it" based on @Katy Perry's iconic tune I Kissed a Girl which I used to sing with @Hitzone a hundred years ago. :) (also please take some time, Katy has a foundation called Firework Foundation and she serves underprivileged kids with her inspiring camp)
The video above features not only my friend @Lee Whitwell but also a few other outstanding young professional pickleball players who she wrangled in to guest star with her, and it's so been exciting to watch the PPA and MLP and spot these players who are in my video, out there being awesome on the courts. In fact the same day I got the video part from Rachael Rohrabacher my hubby and I watched her win a gold medal with Anna Bright. I've since seen them all playing on stream and become a fan of each of them, so thank you SO much again pickleball stars! (and speaking of Pickleball Stars.... )
Now I know for a fact that many of you don't really watch pickleball on TV (or stream it) because you tell me so, and that's a real shame. If I can inspire you all to do one thing for your pickleball self that will inspire you and ignite some fire in your happy little pickleball heart, let it be to tune in to some pro pickleball and give it a watch. Admittedly it's getting weirdly harder and easier at the same time to watch. There is more pickleball streaming than ever before but no one knows where to watch it, so it is a challenge, but most of the big Pickleball Forums share great clips and so if you scroll through those it's a place to start. They usually post when there are tournaments streaming as well.
If you know this game it's really worth watching it being played at the highest level, especially when you know just how hard it is to be THAT consistent.....you will keep tuning in to be inspired to move your own feet more if nothing else.
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