Spirit West Coast Trip

Background: For those of you who don't know, my brother Sam and I both play in our church band (at The Gathering Place in Folsom). Sam plays the bass guitar and I play the keyboard (that's the 'keys' to all you musician types out there!). ;) Anyway, within the past year or so, some of the people in the church band have formed a group called Scarlet Chord that goes to various places and plays Christian music. Since I moved back to the Sacramento area, I re-joined the church band and also started playing with Scarlet Chord as well.

Spirit West Coast: The first major gig for Scarlet Chord came last month when we were invited to play at the big Spirit West Coast (SWC) festival in Del Mar (near San Diego) on May 22-23. This is a
3-day event that features some of the big names of contemporary Christian music as well as small no-name bands (such as ours!). The Del Mar version is held in May, while another SWC concert is also held in Monterey each year later in the summer. We played Friday and Saturday down at Del Mar. Here are a few of my pictures of the venue, followed by a few photos borrowed from Steve Alviso's Facebook page that show our band playing on stage "Operation Worship."

The Spanish architecture at the San Diego County Fairgrounds in Del Mar is really amazing! Here is our stage (in the lower portion of the image) with a beautiful building for a backdrop.

From the Newsboys concert on Friday evening.

Scarlet Chord checking out another performance from a high vantage point.

I'm guessing that the people in our group who went swimming in the ocean when we went to the beach were wishing that they had read this sign before going in rather than after!!

Scarlet Chord

Austin, Sam, and Mary

Austin and Sam

Kory, Mike, and me

SWC Monterey: Well, the good news is that Scarlet Chord was just invited to play at SWC Monterey this summer! The bad news is that it is July 30-August 1, which includes the weekend of our wedding! That means that not only can I not make it, but neither can Sam, since he is my best man. So Scarlet Chord will be without their regular bass and keyboard players this summer. Perhaps we can move the wedding to Monterey to accommodate the band?! Or, on second thought, maybe the band can wait another year and we will just proceed with the wedding as scheduled. Either way, SWC was a lot of fun, and I hope to get the opportunity to do something like that again sometime!

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