Emu Festival

Born 3 decades ago in the unpeopled glacial heart of an Illinois winter, vicariously, owing to the love between an Indiana husband and wife, Michael Thomas Smith materialized and manifested immediately at 6 foot 4 inches tall and 235 pounds confessing 1981′s Top 40, Franz Liszt, and Joseph Haydn. A Sony TPS-L2 Walkman cassette player first introduced Michael to a Beach Boys mix tape on which his brother personally hand-picked the cuts, unknown by the greenhorn green thumb, were lawn-mowing favorites of his elder hermano. Somewhere along this bearing came Michael’s first personal lawn-mowing allowance cassette purchase, Rush: Fly By Night, purely because the album cover boasted an azure owl. Good instinct. Great inclination. An intrinsic, idiosyncratic anomaly began to coerce the boy to create, from the thinnest of air, his own good vibrations. His siblings’ record collections began to fill the melting pot. UB40, Big Mountain, Jodeci, Wham, Fine Young Cannibals, P.M. Dawn, Genesis, Faith No More, The Cure, Motley Crue, Warrant, Primus, Michael Jackson, A Tribe Called Quest, Soundgarden, 311, Freddy Jones Band, Guns n’ Roses, Huey Lewis and the News, Boyz II Men, Metallica, and The Beatles. A clarinet opened the door to something left to be unseen by even a powerhouse of imagination. There will always be an ache to be remedied or a despondency to be steamrolled. Crusading an engagement with peace of mind and gnarly guitars is where you could be under compulsion to find him. That, or somewhere between now, all things considered, and then.