Monday, March 3, 2008

Oakland sends off BJ O'Malley

By Katie Libecco

YOUNGSTOWN – Though the Oakland Center of the Arts director Brooke Slanina introduced BJ O'Malley's set Thursday night, her last at The Stage, O’Malley said, "I don't think I'm going to do anything for the last time.

O’Malley left Saturday to move to Nashville.

The singer/songwriter said over the course of the past six months, she’s given away everything except a carload of belongings. She has an apartment and roommate setup in Nashville, but no bed, no job.

"I'm not going to Nashville because I want to be a country star," O’Malley said. "There's this whole other music scene."

As she leaves, Chris Leonardi will continue to work on her latest album with Josh Roman's Mindrocket Studio.

Meanwhile, O’Malley said her first plan to perform in Nashville is Monday night's open mic night at Bluebird Cafe.

"I don't have huge plans," she said, adding that she doesn't even know what "making it" is.

The guitarist referred to the upcoming move as a "vacation."

"I just need the whole adventure thing Matt Palka was talking about," she told the audience.

Onstage, she talked about the attention she's received over the plans to move.

"I'm not special at all. I'm like the most regular, ordinary person to ever walk the planet," she told the crowd as she opened up, talking about writing songs.

"I would love to inspire everyone to play some instrument," she says.

At one point in the set, O’Malley performed an unfinished song she said she started writing in the past few days.

"This seems like the place to do that at," she said of The Stage, Oakland's all-performance open mic series.

Then O’Malley took off her guitar as her 18-year-old son, Gideon, came to the stage. He put the guitar on, and played one of his mom's songs. "We kind of collaborated on it," he said.

O’Malley watched from the front row, video recording the performance on a digital camera.

Gideon O’Malley then played "Black Sky," which he explained was one of the first songs he had ever written.

O'Malley says she and lead singer Mike Gaitanis of now-defunct DimStarShining have been sending each other messages online. Gaitanis left for Nashville in January.