Thank you, all of you.

To Whom it May Concern,

It's kind of strange when I think about the last few years. I've been away with this and that regarding that or this.

However I can safely report that sometimes life doesn't always seem to work out the way you would expect.

There's a lot to be said for willpower. There's also a lot to be said for malarkey as well. But one of my goals as a person was to be my own boss doing something I love.

Well as of right now I'm an entertainer. For the longest time I wanted to be a composer for orchestral works and various other things. However by happenstance I spent a few years without focus on that goal.

Because of that I felt I learned a lot of things about myself and about the world around me in that time. You see a few years back I was put in charge of a friend who was terminally ill. Over the few months my younger brother and I cared for this man I got my first tattoo, got engaged, broke it off, experimented with being a photographer and many other things in the course of knowing that man who I now call a friend and a surrogate brother. Sadly as we knew his life was cut off too early. But while I got a chance to know him he changed my life and my perspective on many things, God, joy, peace, selflessness, and yes even music.

Over the next year my Dad went through cancer and beat it. Soon after we moved to another town while Dad recovered, unfortunately while in that new (albeit smaller) town he gained a much faster acting cancer and a week after being diagnosed he passed away.

I'm generally a calloused person by nature, it's not necessarily a bad thing as I try to be kind to everyone I meet but that experience ripped the callouses off my heart and exposed a lot of mixed emotions I was unaware I was capable of. I stopped writing music again for a long time because of that.

However once I became engrossed in it again I felt like I had begun a new relationship with a first love.

I fell in love with guitar again and over the course of the next couple of years while taking care of another friend who happened to be very ill, I realized my potential as a guitarist and an entertainer was kind of shocking.

I never felt like I was particularly talented at one thing or the other, and even though my Father made me promise to never quit making music, I was at the time considering a job in health care considering I was growing rather used to being in a home care type of situation and I enjoyed the work.

It took a lot of people who gave a ton of concentrated effort to make me realize how much potential I have on a single instrument.

Thanks to that encouragement I've been working in a band called The Fringe now for a few months with an old friend who is an extremely talented singer and songwriter.

I've gotten to know and become friends with several of the most talented people in the areas where I work, and surprisingly enough I found a community of people where I fit in.

I'm extremely grateful to be a part of this community of extremely talented and creative people, as well as the fact I can play music and put smiles on people's faces as a career.

It's strange I initially wanted to make this post just to mention my band and say a quick thanks to the people that made it a reality.

But the truth is between God, a supportive family, and a great group of friends: I find myself extremely blessed to be a part of a local industry that is not only surviving but thriving regardless of billboard charts, record labels, and other things that aren't necessary.

There's nothing wrong with those things, but when I see so many talented people achieving a dream of making a living doing what you love, just because you love doing it; I'm in awe every day when I see astonishing things like this on a regular basis.

We're not billionaires, we don't drive Phantom's, but we do what we love, because we love it, and it pays the bills. That's my version of the American Dream, and I'm dang impressed by all the people that do it every day.

Of course I want to give credit where it's due, but thank you to all the people that believed in me once upon a time and still support me to this day.

Thank you, All of You,

Joshua Smith
Guitarist, The Fringe