The great thing about the vast majority of musicians is that they are at the same time gracious and generous people, and hungry for attention. That means, if you point a microphone at them and turn on a little red light, by-in-large, they start singing.

So it was when Curt and I started Acoustic Conversations a few years back. The first show was a convoluted mix of stunning flamenco riffs lovingly gifted to us by our good friend John Carlson and poorly mic’d wannabe talk radio. Still, that conversation sparked something cool, and posted a stitch in time that leads to today, the last show of our second season, and our newest addition to the family, James Jeffrey-West.

James is a stunningly warm person. I say that as a point of contrast, I think. He’s a contrast to jokers who try to own a room with ego and pomp; he’s a contrast to yahoos who enter a room with jokester hippery; he’s a contrast to crooners who slide into a room with sticky smug insincerity. When James came into the AC lounge, well, we wanted to give him a hug.

In his bio, James says he plays “good, honest acoustic” music. Insofar as we couldn’t see the allusion when we kicked off the interview, we were wrapped up in it by the end. His songs are gracefully simple packages, easy on the ear and difficult to shake. His song-writing is at once worldly and approachable; he weaves his broad life experience into tales that are most often too short to be completely satisfying.

We talked a lot in this show. So much, in fact, that we didn’t actually get to all the music that we’d intended. It’s a shame, too, because for my money, the best tracks of the evening were those recorded after the show had ended. Take a special listen to Sacramento International, a haunting lullaby to congested air travel; and Half a World Away, an anthem to bifurcated love in ticklish harmonics. You’ll find the show, as well as all six of the tracks we recorded with James available free in iTunes. Please subscribe to support the show.

I deeply hope you enjoy the music of James Jeffrey-West. He’s a new favorite of ours and we’re thrilled to bring him to the show. As ever, comments welcome, but mostly, just go buy his CD. It’s in iTunes, CDBaby, and just about everywhere else music is served.

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I’m in San Jose right now. Did you see that coming? What with my clever title and all? To be fair, the tune I have in my head is actually from “Rent” — and let me say this about that: This show breaks me right the hell down. I’m not kidding.

There’s a new release of the show, I believe celebrating the final Broadway performance. It’s a taping of the current Broadway cast, on stage, doing their thing. You can rent it in iTunes now, and I just can’t recommend it highly enough. The current cast is absolutely stunning, and the show continues to inspire today.

As I was saying, San Jose. Yeah, this lame travel schedule has thrown my posting schedule a scooch, but there IS news here, so better late than never.

Acoustic Conversations with Matt Vrba live in the feed

The first time I caught Matt Vrba was some two years ago, singing in a parking lot next to an RV that was pumping out baked beans and burgers. It was a company picnic. A company picnic.

[Chinese monks are walking through the airport right now. In my head they are Shaolin and could kill me by looking at me. In reality, they cannot find their way out of the airport. Attempting to do a good deed by showing them out.]

So, two years ago, Matt Vrba was ingratiating himself by playing solo for the ungrateful unwashed at a company picnic. Now, two years later, he’s relocated to Nashville and we get to catch him on a tour of the Pac Northwest, witnessing him ingratiating himself on our show.

A lot can change in two years.

And yet, the music that originally stuck with me is here and better than ever. This guy has a fantastic story to tell, and he completely kicks it with the live tracks we’re giving away right now. So go, now, open iTunes and update your feed for the show. Watch those tracks trickle onto your computer. Drop them on your iPods and Sansas and … whatevers … and kick it with Matt Vrba.

Want more of Matt? Visit his site at MattVrba.com.

What’s more important than that? Buying music!

If you like Matt, or the other artists we’ve profiled, remember this: A GREAT way to support the show is to click right over on the “Store” link in the top-right corner of the site and buy their music! That’s right, live and in color, straight to you courtesy of Amazon.com, you can buy music, AND fund the show, AND support the artists all at the same time! So help us out, us creative types battling a flagging economy, and buy some great tunes. You won’t regret it. Neither will we.

As ever, thanks for your support, and stay tuned for more great musicians coming this month!

Last night, we hung out with Tyler Stenson. He’s a musician, a guitarist and troubadour, and he joined Curt Siffert and myself for the innaugural episode of the 2009 season of Acoustic Conversations. The AC show itself hasn’t been posted yet, but stay tuned… it’ll be up online soon. Read on for a little Stenson present.

This post isn’t about the music. The music is great. Go listen to it. Buy it. Enjoy. I’ll even help out as a shill here for a bit. See how nice I am? Instead, this post is about success. It’s about what it means to be successful, what it means to know you’ve made it.

Making it casts a broad net, and it’s a theme that continues to come up in the AcConvo shows as we talk to more artists — what is the general expectation of acceptance and success, and how will you know you’ve achieved it?

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rock star like everyone else,” Stenson told us. “I’ve grown up a bit since then.”

And this is the bit that struck me. You’d think that a musician, fresh from quitting his day job to pursue music full time, struggling to find a model around his own music business, would be looking for the fastest way to stardom, to sponsors, to chicks and groupies and all the trappings of celebrity. As it turns out, there’s a more human approach.

Stenson says he’s shooting for relevance. “My goal is not to make you bob your head and snap your fingers. It’s to put a lump in your throat. I try to stay true to my character, my brand,” he says. There are people who email him, who reach out to him that tell him his songs have changed their lives in some way, people he’s never met. “I’ve had to ask myself, ‘Tyler, how big do you want to get? Because you know if some people think you’re a rock star, you are.’ … I don’t want to play 300 songs a year. I used to have dreams of stardom, but now, as long as it’s a livelihood and as long as I’m changing some peoples’ lives — I don’t need my face on TV to feel like I’ve made it.”

There’s honor in modest goals. You’ll hear in the show that Stenson in no way totally dismisses the throngs of screaming fan thing. But what’s clear about him is that you can tell he’s thought hard about what it mean to be successful, what it means to be happy. Sitting there talking to him, it’s hard not to ask yourself the same tough questions.

Dr. Nicholson

I had lunch with a dear friend an mentor, John Patton, yesterday afternoon, before the interview with Stenson. We get together to talk about careers, business, books, and such every six months or so and this time, he asked this question: “How big do you want to get?”

That’s a tough question. See, the challenge in a question like that is that it presumes you’ve thought about what you want to be doing from day to day some time out there, sometime when you’re confronted by future you.

I told him my work right now is pointing me toward education. Not in the classroom sense necessarily, but in the more archetypical fashion. Then he told me about Dr. Nicholoson.

Apparently, Nicholson was one of Patton’s professors in college. In one of the first class sessions, he told the class the following: “Each of you will profoundly affect the lives of 11 people in your lifetime.” He explained to the class that they would affect these people not just in the yeah-I-have-a-best-friend fashion, but in a way that something you do or say, or some invisible influence or intervention you serve that will dramatically change the course of life for 11 people before you die.

Patton’s response: “I realized, 11′s not enough for me.”

For the last 30 years, Patton’s served as CEO of a company that teaches others how to manage projects. For the first 15 years, his work was mostly domestic. Scale changes everything, and now his company serves companies around the globe, and has lisenced his methodology to others on almost every continent. This is his contribution to the arithmatic of expanding his 11 people to hundreds… thousands.

The 11 People

I don’t know my 11 people. I have an idea who a few of them might be, a few of the chance encounters or run-ins with others that I feel may have changed their lives. I think it’s important to think about, but I doubt I’ll ever know for sure. It’s far more important to keep trying, to keep moving in a direction of helping and supporting others, to serve as someone with the power to help profoundly.

Here’s what I do know: I know the people who have profoundly changed my life, the souls for whom I am one of their 11 people. Kira, Sophie, Nick. Lloyd and Debbie. Brendan Murphy. Orion Ross. Chris Lowell. Don Heider. Dogan Barns and Trent Adams. The list goes on, and on, and on, and for each of them, just as I’m sitting here, I can pinpoint a moment in my life that changed as a result of a moment in theirs. For better or for worse, I’m a different person as a result of them.

Success and Relevance

What Stenson said about being relevant, and what Patton said about invisible influence, these are things we should stop reflect on. Because the ripple effect of our actions is always broader than the net we cast with them. Our businesses, the stories we tell, the relationships we cultivate, the brands we follow and collect, the politicians we respect — and those we don’t, the network of interactions and the reactions we will never see, these are the trappings of success.

If you haven’t thought about your 11 people, about the people for whom you’ve changed the course of their lives, do so. Just stop, sit quietly, and take a minute. Do you know who they are? Do they?

Meanwhile, back with Tyler Stenson

At the end of the session, I asked Tyler to play his favorite cover tune. As it happens, it’s also one of my absolute favs: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”. It’s a bit of a low rent recording, but I dumped in the raw audio from the performance mics. Hope you enjoy.