A Local Folkus » Music

John Mayer Concert Review: My Guest Post on The Central Florida Top5

John — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:46:48 +0000

After the last Orlando Tweet-up I started following the excellent locally focused work of Central Florida Top 5. Through their tweets and timely content Kam and I have been able to catch some truly unique events around town. Their editor, Bess, has done a great job keeping the wheels spinning over there pumping out great content. To “share the love” I posted a review of our recent trip down to Tampa for the John Mayer concert. Pop on over to Top 5’s blog page to catch the full story. Cheers.

I’m a Scot and proud of it! Central Florida Scottish Highland Games

John — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:40:03 +0000

I am a proud member of the MacGregor clan and an avid attendee of Central Florida’s Scottish Highland Games (CFSHG) festival each year. If you have never been to a highland games you are missing quite a spectacle. Great food, Excellent brew, superb music, top notch athletic competition, high stepping highland dancing and medieval weaponry demonstrations – I ask you – Who could ask for more?

We’re heading out to the festival this weekend to partake in our annual Scottish pilgrimage. If you were following our Twitter feed this summer you would have noticed that we were up in Antigonish, Nova Scotia for the longest running North American Scottish Highland games. It is only fair to say that as “authentic” as that Antigonish festival is the Central Florida Scottish Highland Games is far more enjoyable. It is hard to peg exactly why but we love that CFSHG serves meat pies, has instruments and clan gear for sale, brings in world class Celtic rock bands like Enter the Haggis to rock the center stage and with Dunedin Brewing in house pouring the best ales it is just hard to compete with no matter how un-authentic a “highland games” may seem amidst the flatland of Florida.

Click here for details and hope to see you there. I’ll be in my McGregor kilt with a baby girl strapped to my chest.

Hymn For Her – Nomadic musical duo at the Audubon Park Community Market

John — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:30:57 +0000

As many of you know Kamrin and I have another blog called Finding America TV where we document our love of hitting the open road. We have traveled through 39 US states and 5 states of Canada with our trusty travel trailer Kodi and filmed the whole thing. So when we heard the nomadic Airstream trekking musical duo Hymn 4 Her being interviewed by Julie Norris on Front Porch Radio we knew we had to see them live.

This duo, well trio if you include their full-time roadie their 3 year old daughter Diver, stopped through Orlando last week to play two gigs. Here is some video I shot of their show at the Audubon Park Community Market hosted at Stardust. Since the K’s were out of town I was flying solo but it turned out that Diver ended up being my table mate for the show. Armed with a coloring book, 32 color box of crayons and wearing a set of noise canceling headphones she proved to be well equipped and content to let her folks do their thing.

Hymn for Her also played at Dandelion for urban sketcher Thomas Thorspecken’s art opening. That is his sketch of their performance above. They will be back Jan 17th at the Copper Rocket’s 2nd Anniversary of their Southern Fried Sunday jams. You can catch them in February at Orlando Brewing as well, so hop over to their website for details and to check out the music video they put together as a tribute to their Airstream’s previous owners – pretty cool.