Boy Wonder

My lovely, tender-hearted, uber talented nephew just received his first college acceptance! Woot! He'll major in guitar composition and performance. Should I bother to mention that his mother was beside herself worrying about his math grades? In the end they saw past all that to the fact that this kid is the real true deal. He cannot not make music. You visit his home and hear guitar strains emanating from the basement and you think it's a piece of music he downloaded and you wonder what it is because it's so beautiful and edgy and haunting and you want to download it too, but then you listen longer and you realize it's not a download, it's a new composition happening in real and wondrous time.

If you knew his mom, my cousin who is like my sister, you'd know she is the last woman on earth who would have expected to have given birth to a rocker jazz metal head musician. Okay, I'm not really clear on the genre. It could be any and all of those and more on any given day. When he plays with his band it does sound a bit like metal, but when he's composing on his own, it's gentler, almost elegiac. His mother couldn't be prouder, no matter what he plays. She's right there at his gigs in the front row tapping her foot these days.

And here's a picture of my nephew from back in the day with my son. I posted this picture of the cousins on Instagram yesterday for Throwback Thursday. None of us could have imagined that I was photographing a future medical first responder and a guitar-playing dreamer who (to my ear) is a cross between Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and Eric Clapton with a little Simon & Garfunkel sweetness thrown in.