My best friend Jay and his band has finally put their first CD together! It's called Standing Room Only and I'm listening to it now.

Jay has been a musician for longer than I've known him, and that's a really long time. When I was younger I gave him a hard time for reasons I cannot for the life of me recall (and that would assuredly make no sense to my 25 year old self the way it did with my 12 year old self). At some belated point I realized the talent that he had.

I've always been the creative sort, but music has really never been my forte. I am good at telling a story in any number of ways. Short stories, novels, blog posts, emails, and even in person. But musical talent requires something differently entirely. It requires a certain innate sense of beat. No matter how much I mimic it, I don't have it. Jay, on the other hand, does. He released a CD some time ago under the Courtesy Flush name as well as single songs here and there. Oh yeah, and he does almost all of the music for NLP!

This CD is great. I've been listening to it solid for the last couple of days. The Drinks are by no means "Jay's" band. There are three other very talented members that put on great live shows in Waco and Houston (Spring, actually). They've mostly subsided on covers because they haven't had something to show off to make a mark as an originals band. Now they do.

Most of my favorite songs were written by him. The best one on the CD was one I wasn't even aware that he wrote until I mentioned the song to him. This CD has been a long time coming and, as I listen to it, I could not be more proud to have Jay as my best friend.