in the middle of the ocean with lyle lovett

So, I just got back from seven days on a cruise with my mom, oh, and you know, Lyle Lovett, Patti Griffin, Emmylou Harris, Shawn Colvin, Brandi Carlile, and Shawn Mullins just kind of showed up. So there we were, in the middle of the ocean, with some pretty legendary musicians. It was also amazing to me how many other people I ended up knowing on the boat - lots of Atlanta musicians and other musicians I met while working at Eddie's Attic, people from home that work for and volunteered with Sixthman, the company that chartered the cruise, and totally randomly, my friend Jenn Hobby from Q100 and her husband Ryan. Ryan plays with Sister Hazel and has played on the Rock Boat cruises that Sixthman also does. It was quite funny because Jenn and I were trying to schedule a meeting and discussed how we couldn't meet that week because we would both be on vacation, and then ended up on the same vacation. Small world. Stranger still, I went to aerobics class last night, and who ended up being in class with me? Jenn. Extremely small world.

The cruise was great, I was really in need of being away from everything for a while. Of course, on a cruise, you are really, really away from everything. Cell phones and internet cost like $7 a minute, so unless you have a lot of disposable income, you're pretty much cut off from the world. Every night we had another amazing concert to see, and every now and then you'd have a sighting of one of the big performers on the boat. We watched Shawn Colvin playing black jack and try to hide under a hat and glasses from her weirdo fans. It didn't work. My mom turned into a huge Shawn Colvin fan on the boat, bought all of her CD's, and then ended up bumping into her in the bathroom and again in the newstand at the Miami airport on the way home.

The concerts were great, the weather was beautiful, the islands we visited were tropical, and really the only thing that wasn't great was the food. Apparently they had just wrapped up the John Mayer "Mayercraft" cruise before we got on the boat, and some interesting photos of John Mayer on his cruise have been circulating on the internet...

That is Mr. Mayer, on the Lido deck of the same cruise ship I was on, just days before we arrived... Lyle Lovett didn't offer this kind of entertainment on his cruise.

And here is the amazing Brandi Carlile singing "Follow" on the boat...