Which way is up?

Do you ever feel like life is moving a million miles per hour and you cant keep up, you don't even know which way is up anymore? YUP! I am in the midst of it.

I know that this blog was meant for my time in Nashville but since i am planning on moving back there soon I thought I would keep this blog so i can blog throughout my process of getting back there! I moved back from Nashville at the end of April and life hasn't slowed down since. I took a class at Cedarville in 9 days (maybe the worst decision i've ever made!) It was a research pre seminar class. Yes, a lot of work done in 9 days BUT when it was finished....man was that a good feeling! After Cedarville I played a few shows all around Ohio and then headed for Outer Banks on vacation with the family for a week. It was so nice to be away from life for an entire week. I barely looked at my email and answered phone calls. But after the week was over, life hit hard. Okay a secret about Meredith......she tends to take on too many things at once, surprise! So for the summer she has 6 jobs..........cleaning houses, life guarding, Stealing Hollywood, worship leader, swim teacher, and house sitter. Now don't get me wrong, I LOVE everything that I do and wouldn't trade it for the world. But you know that feeling that life is falling down on you, yes yes i know what you mean! Over the past couple weeks i have almost found myself becoming a little depressed just because there is always so much that i need to get done and never enough to get it done so i just shut down and don't do any of it. I've been struggling so much to find passion. Ever since being back from Nashville, it just seems like I left my heart in Nashville. I cannot wait to eventually move back to Nashville and start life there but lets be honest there is a lot of stuff i have to get through before moving back. My absolute hopes would be that I would be able to move back down to Nashville sometime next summer. haha well I mean that's my dream.

Well, i just thought i'd post something since being back from Nashville. I don't know about all my fellow CMC classmates but as for me, I am still trying to figure out what exactly happened this past semester. Finally somethings are starting to makes sense! I also wrote my first post CMC song yesterday. I am so glad that I took a month break from writing. After Nashville, I was feeling a little burnt out from writing so i took a break and came back a month later and wrote another worship song. I'll be posting it to my facebook artist page soon!

Leaving.....

I'm done. I'm officially a Senior in college, crazy! We just had our last supper together last night as a CMC family. It was an extremely emotional night. We all told stories about the whole entire semester, complimented each other, prayed for each other, and gave LOTS of hugs. I don't think that i has fully hit me that I will never be in the same place with these 32 people again. I keep having this feeling that we're on a break but, that next week I'll see them all again......that's not the case :-( Warren (the director of the program) wrote us all a letter and basically told us how he felt about us and then last night he went around and gave all of us a hug and basically gave us a "send-off". At the beginning of the semester Warren seemed SOO intimidating, i barely even talked to him. During the middle of the semester, i didn't like him (haha) and I even went into his office one day and told him that i basically wanted to quit that I didn't like performing I just didn't want to be there. And he listened (like he always does) and told me just to hang in there. That if i wanted to do something different that he would work with me in any way possible, that this program was here to service me and my needs. By the end of the semester (yesterday) Warren signed all of our letters "Your friend, Warren." When i read that, I started to tear up because once he calls himself your friend it's such a great feeling. He is a guy that i have the utmost respect for. He told me, "Please come back and visit, don't lose contact with us." I have no plans of doing that!!

It's crazy how much I will absolutely miss everyone! They have truly become my family, they understand me and my (artistic) mind :-) Not that some people at home don't understand BUT here there are 32 people who for the most part all think alike and have the same likes and passions. There will never be a place that I can go again where when you wake up there will always be someone playing music, at lunch you'll hear people writing songs, at 3am you'll see people in the recording studio, etc......there just will never be another time like this. I am SOO thankful for this experience, it truly has changed my life. Now i KNOW 100% where I want to be heading in life, the goals that I want to accomplish, and my faith has been challenged and it has made me a stronger person because of it.

People even right now are leaving and it's so sad and extremely emotional for all of us. BUT on a brighter note i'm so excited to see where everyone will end up. They have told us all semester that this is the most talented semester that they've ever had. It will be so cool to see where everyone ends up. I know most of the people here have the passion and drive and ability to make it SO far! A lot of them are moving down to Nashville either this summer or the start of fall, they keep telling me....move down here! haha I told them I will try my absolute hardest to move down here as soon as I finish college..... (looks like i'll be needing to find many jobs :-)

to wrap up this post i thought i'd leave with some of the funniest things and things that i'm going to miss about this semester's people:

-Joe Casey always singing my songs, Image in the Mirror and Black and White Masquerade
-people constantly saying, "the girl in the mirror is not me."
-late night talks with the girls in 711
-A.j saying, "OMG (insert name) HOW ARE YOU???" when she answers the phone
-playing INTENSE basketball at the park
-park workouts with Mike
-sleep overs
-late night talks with Karissa and Mike
-practice sessions where Alex is always saying, "I just can't connect to your songs, the girl in the mirror is not me."
-Cupcakes from IVEY cupcakes, Sweet CECE's, Pancake Pantry, shopping, Downtown Nashville, B.B. Kings Jazz Club, the amazing weather here!
-MOUNTAINS!
-Audrey acting like she's possessed and then writing songs about Warren and him not knowing it :-)
-Rocking out to everyone's songs!
-being a skyline singer
-Singing "Thank you Lord" when ever ANYONE says "Thank you"
-performing shows with everyone
-back massage trains
-sunrises and sunsets over the mountains
-shows downtown


Semester 20, i love each and everyone of you. You have become my family and closest friends. It's crazy that we've only been with each other for 4 months but i'm closer with most of you than anyone i know. Thank you!


Well friends and family who follow this, thank YOU so much for supporting me on this endeavor to follow music. It has been a road of emotional ups and downs but it is something that I would not trade for the world. I look forward to coming back and seeing each and everyone of you. Thank you again for all of your prayers and support.

10 days left, what??

10 days left! It's crazy to think that we've been here since January. This place feels like home and these people feel like my family! I'm sad to leave in 10 days and return to OH-IO but, it will be nice to see family and friends. I'm really trying to brace myself for the reality of being back at home. It's going to be hard for people to fully understand what I've been through since January. I know people are going to act like they somehow understand which don't get me wrong is totally sweet of them but, they don't really understand anything about this place. I'm trying to picture what my life will be like when I get back home......have a summer job, hang out with friends, church stuff, stealing hollywood stuff and then start my last year at school. All that sounds great but, my heart isn't there. My heart is in Nashville doing two things that I love, music and Stealing Hollywood.

One of our "music profs" (I never know what to call them haha) Anyways today while we were listening to our 3rd masters he said something like this. "I'm going to miss you all so much. Are you guy's ready to be working on something you love for something like 5-8 years before you'd actually make it anywhere. Do you love what your doing so much that you'll do anything to make it? How much are you dedicated to doing what you love?" Such a good thing to think about. I was talking with one of my really good friends down here about life after the CMC. And I was telling her that I really don't know what i'd do without Stealing Hollywood being my job. But then the question always comes into my mind, what if it failed? What would I do then? I honestly cannot answer that. It's become such a passion in my life that I dont' want to do anything else in life. Thankfully being at the CMC has helped me realize alot about what I want in life and the direction to take.


But right now i'm doing what I love, in the recording studio! Recording the song, "Every Step of the Way." Written by Whitney McCombs! I'm so excited to have a couple masters and everything done for people to actually hear whats been going on all semester!

Recording at an ungodly hour.....

4am and 5am have never been in my vocabulary until I came to the CMC and started recording late nights from 4am-9am. Right now i'm in the studio recording a song that the very talented Whitney McCombs wrote, "Every Step of the Way." Thankfully it's only 12:35 am.....i only am in the studio until 1am tonight and then get to sleep! Ah, how i've never valued sleep so much in my life. Well, I guess I haven't updated this blog since before tour. Tour.....wow now theres an experience. We were on the road 7 days a total of 28 hours on our tour bus with 32 students and 5 staff and 1 baby. Overall it was a great tour we had great crowds and everyone got along for the most part. We've all kind of hit that point in the semester where we all know each others faults and annoyances and well just ignore them now haha. I could have gone into a lot further detail about tour but honestly sooo much happened that its hard to write it all down. But, I do remember that we played at these colleges: Lipscomb University, Greenville, Wheaton, Cedarville, Malone, Asbury, and Nashville. It was the longest tour that they have ever taken a semester on but all for all it went great! Now I only have somewhere around 15 days left. It's seriously crazy how time flys here, it seems just yesterday that I was just moving down here and meeting new people now we're all family. I was talking with someone a few days ago about how weird it will be to come back to real life and try and explain this place to people. This place reminds me of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory haha it's all like a ficticious place. ANyways ficticious or not it's been the best experience of my life! I'm all finished up with my recording session so I'll update a lot more later!

Home is where the heart is

"Home is where the heart is"

Is it completely absurd for me to say that I feel like Brentwood TN is my home? We went on a retreat this past weekend to the Smoky Mountains as a get-a-way from music and let me tell you it was SOOO relaxing. I literally stayed in the hot tub all the time, haha. This cabin held 36 people, it had a pinball machine and couple other video games (where the guys spent most of their time!), tv's everywhere, balcony on every story, 2 hot tubs, a movie theater room, and a room with pool table.......pretty awesome place, o and did i mention the view was breathtaking? After being in Nashville for going on 3 months and taking a weekend trip to the Smokies it's pretty safe to say that I would LOVE to live in the mountains someday. I always thought that I would want to live on a beach but, living in the mountains is just incredible. Mountains amaze me, they are one thing in nature that truly takes my breath away. I love sitting on our balcony at our apartment in the morning, drinking my coffee and just look at the sun rise over top the mountains, BEAUTIFUL! But anyways when we came back from our retreat we arrived back at our apartments and I had the weirdest feeling, it was like I was home. Home for me has always been Canton, Ohio but maybe God has something planned for me in the future to be somewhere else.

So continuing an update of my journey here.....Stress level has INCREASED a lot! The first few weeks here was getting to know everyone, get to know the equipment, get to know your music. Now, we should already have a pretty good idea of who we are and what music we produce. The past couple weeks we've been in studio time for literally 24 hours a day. Usually everyday there is one of us students in the studio for every hour of the day. Yes, that means that someone is always stuck with the crappy hours 1am-6am. Try doing your master vocal track at those hours....haha not easy! On top of recording and trying to get our master recordings done for the semester we're preparing for our tour. I'm SOOO excited about our tour. We are planning an 8 day trip up north and doing about 7 shows (i believe). There is talk of them doing like a variety show where there will be more artists showcased but, we still do not know for sure. How they have done it in the past is that only one or two artists will headline and then the other artists will play in the band, be stage hands, back ground vocalists, etc. So we have a tour bus and we load up all of our equipment, lights, etc. and we travel and do an actual tour. I'm super excited about this tour and the opportunities that it's going to bring. Our tour manager is A.J. (who lives in my apartment) and she is going to do a great job at planning this whole thing. And she's working on getting me contacts for every school that we go to so that I can set up a meeting with the school to talk to them about Stealing Hollywood and the possibility of doing an event there. So I can't even imagine the possible doors that this could open with Stealing Hollywood. On another note for Stealing Hollywood, we have the opportunity to host an event at North Dakota State University in November sometime. Details of that are still in the works, but i'm so excited about the word getting out about this!!! So anyways stress level here at the CMC is rising. We were told today, "Well gang, sleep is no more." haha great thing to hear right??

So anyways if anyone reads these here are a few ways you could be praying for me and the kids here:
-SLEEP :-)
-details for tour comes together
-recording goes smoothly
-since stress is rising, just pray that we all still stay cool with each other and don't end up at each others throats!

Thanks!

Does the Music ever stop?

Does the music ever stop?

I've been in Nashville for about a month and a half now but it seriously seems like so much longer than that. I think we've all hit that point in the semester where we're just getting sick of music. (I know i am) Now don't get me wrong, i knew that music would be my life coming into this semester BUT i didn't really think it through that well. We ALL eat, sleep, and breathe music 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. When we're not performing, we're practicing, when we're not practicing, we're listening, when we're not listening we still have songs going through our heads. And coming at the perfect time in the semester is our Smoky Mountain Retreat! This coming weekend we're all going to the smoky mountains to a cabin that holds 36 people. We are all so excited for this little break of music. We already have been talking about how there is going to be no music whatsoever :-) I think coming back from the retreat we will all be refreshed and ready to start preparing for our tour coming up in 5 weeks.

Well, anyways moving past the burnt out feeling, this week is crazy BUT going to be awesome. I'm performing this coming thursday for our CMC live show again and doing two originals, Black and White Masquerade and Alabaster Box (which i need to change the name to cause aparently it's a CeCe Winnas song from the 90's, so any suggestions of a new name would be great!) But their sounding amazing in our rehearsal times. It amazes me everyweek the talent of the musicians that I work with. They take my "so-so" songs and make them sound legit! So thats the crazy part of this week is performing BUT on friday my friends from Cedarville are coming down. I'm sooooo excited to see them and show them around Nashville. I miss them all so much! I can't wait to take them downtown and show them Broadway street. A bunch of us from the CMC went downtown last night and went to a few places and ended up at a Karokee place and it was absolutely hilarious to watch these drunk people getting up and making complete fools out of themselves. The conclusion of last night is that we all fell in love with this city. Walking downtown Nashville, there was just this feeling of satisfaction. I love the feel of Nashville, just love everything about it.

So, I know that wasn't much of an update but.....that will just have to do for now :- )

Shmee

Shmee- the catchy slogan that everyone around here is saying. Do we really know what it means?? nope. But, Stephanie Spitnale has brought this phrase to Nashville TN and it's catching on. haha!

Well, another week has gone by and the pressure is rising. When we watched this past "game tape" it was like a wall of pressure hit all of us. We realized that we're about 4 weeks in and their raising the bar. A huge compliment to everyone here was that they said our first two shows were where everyone else the past semesters were at at week 10, so as much of a compliment that is to everyone their also raising the bar! So even though we might have a "good" show or "good performance" it's not good enough. It's so hard personally to be surrounded by so many GREAT artists that want to be part of the music industry with everything in them. God has been showing me many things this semester and a huge thing that He's been showing me is that a full-time career in music industry is DEF. not for me. I'm so glad that i'm learning this now because before i came here i was thinking maybe i could have a career in music and let Stealing Hollywood follow me around. God has different plans and it's so evident in my life right now. I realized this when i was asked to describe my music style and who i am as an artist and person. I can't fully describe who i am without mentioning Stealing Hollywood. (That is when i realized that SH is my full passion in life, I always love talking about it!!) Being away from Stealing Hollywood is absolutely killing me! Now i know that Stealing Hollywood is my life and it follows me where I am but, when i'm back in Ohio and Cedarville I have so many connections and people that i work so closely with on Stealing Hollywood. So being in Nashville where no one knows about Stealing Hollywood it's been so hard! I feel like i've left part of myself behind. BUT, on a much more positive note....God has been opening up huge doors here in Nashville for Stealing Hollywood. The director of marketing for Cedarville has been getting me some pretty big connections here in TN. I have a meeting with Mercy Ministries on Tuesday....if you haven't heard of Mercy Ministries, check them out!! I've been getting in contact with churches and ministries and it's soo cool.

Also, another update about Stealing Hollywood is we "hired" on a SH representative Audrey Weinbrenner! She goes here to the CMC with me and is from Kansas. It was so cool how God brought both of us here to the CMC the same semester. We have very similar stories and we both want to do the same things in life. So now she joined the SH team and is going to take Stealing Hollywood to Kansas! She's going to be starting a SH bible study this summer for junior high girls teaching them about healthy relationships, modesty, authentic beauty, and how to live a healthy lifestyle with a healthy mindset. I'm SO excited to see how God is going to be using her. So now we're both extremely excited and just want to work on SH ALL the time but, that's not possible because we have to still perform and practice for the shows. So, if your reading this please pray for us both that we'll find a healthy balance between music and Stealing Hollywood stuff. I know God has us here for a reason and I know we're going to learn a lot about the music industry and will come out of here with powerful songs! A cool idea that we're working on that i'll fill y'all in on :- 0......we are hoping to create a CD together and combine both of our song set list for a CD that we can sell at churches, schools, events, etc. to help raise money for Stealing Hollywood. Both of our styles of music are very honest and powerful and are directed for girls. So when we go around and promote SH we can sell these CD's to make some money for the ministry.

So, more about this upcoming week. I'm performing 3 songs this coming Thursday and for two of the songs i'm stepping out from behind the piano and just singing (just me and the mic)....haha we'll see how that goes. I've never stepped out from behind my piano, it's like my security blanket. haha. And the friendships here are sooo cool and growing. We all are getting extremely close and the funny thing is we've only known each other for about a month!

I'm hoping to update more and more but, we're literally busy almost every hour of every day so it's difficult. But, i'm absolutely loving it here and anyone reading this should just come down and visit me cause it's a blast!! :-)