Maggie's Music

I just posted this to my blog on LiveIreland.com.

For the past couple of weeks I've been pretty busy developing a series of 16 Squidoo lenses for Maggie's Music, an independent label started over 20 years ago by hammered dulcimer player Maggie Sansone. The label specializes in what has been termed "chamber folk." While there are many solo recordings on the label, the artists often get together on each others' recordings as well. The music draws on Celtic traditions of Ireland, Scotland and other areas, with a good dash of American influence thrown in since all the performers are from the States. The music I've heard, which includes samples from CD Baby that are up to two minutes per track in some cases, is both lively and beautiful.

Back in November I started a Christmas music lens on Squidoo and came across several CDs from Maggie's Music, which I included. Maggie Sansone, the founder of Maggie's Music, spotted the lens and emailed me asking if Squidoo might be an appropriate place for a small label to put up some information. She offered me some promo copies.

Things developed over the next few weeks with me creating some lens ideas and proposing to do a lens for each of the twelve artists on the Maggie's Music label. It's a busy time of year for a musician who's also managing a record label, but once Maggie approved the idea, I got started making lenses. It turned out to be sixteen of them:

Maggie's Music
Maggie's Music: Karen Ashbrook
Maggie's Music: Robin Bullock
Maggie's Music: Ceoltoiri
Maggie's Music: Ensemble Galilei
Maggie's Music: Hesperus
Maggie's Music: Ken Kolodner
Maggie's Music: Jody Marshall
Maggie's Music: Al Petteway & Amy White
Maggie's Music: City of Washington Pipe Band
Maggie's Music: Bonnie Rideout
Maggie's Music: Sue Richards
Maggie's Music: Maggie Sansone
Maggie's Music: Celtic Collections (this is where you'll find the Celtic Tapestry 2-CD set)
Maggie's Music: Christmas
Maggie's Music: Lenses

The first one presents a sampling of CDs from the artists, and the last one is what Squidoo calls a "lensography," a lens that basically links to the other lenses. The lenses themselves have links to the Maggie's Music website along with information from the website, although there's much more info at the website itself.

Maggie and I worked out a trade - she has sent off a whole bunch of CDs via UPS which ordinarily might've gotten here by last Wednesday or Friday, but of course right after the package left their office in Maryland, the weather here in the Northwest turned bad, with more snow in Portland than I've seen since my last one in New England in 1999-2000. I'm hoping the package will arrive later today (it's around 7:30 a.m. Monday as I write this, and I know the package got to UPS in Portland yesterday). It's a good deal - she gets the lenses made for whatever the cost of producing and shipping the CDs is, and I get CDs that would've otherwise cost me around $16 each. I don't know how many CDs are in a package that UPS says weighs seven pounds, but even allowing for a couple of pounds for packaging and UPS rounding up a bit, five pounds of CDs has to be a fair amount. It'll be like a slightly delayed Christmas, and I'll be listening to lots of music for quite a while. In addition to LiveIreland.com, of course!