Music. According to Kim.

Going in a different direction with this one. If you've never heard of The Piano Guys, you're in for a treat. Well, it's a treat for all of us. There's four of them: producer/videographer Paul Anderson, pianist/songwriter Jon Schmidt, cellist/songwriter Steven Sharp Nelson and music producer/songwriter Al van der Beek. What I love about these guys is that they take modern hits and pair them with classical pieces of music with gorgeous results. It's a great way to bridge two different styles. I've loved everything I've heard from them and would love to catch a show of theirs at some point. I did another video spotlight on them in May that you can find here  and have been wanting to write about them again ever since. Safe to assume that these guys will be featured in many other video spotlights down the road. But seeing as how I've deemed August to be the month of Disney, I clearly had to go with this one. It's "Let It Go" like you've m...

Welcome to the first actual installment of my music therapy series. In case you missed it, I wrote an introduction to this series a couple of days ago that you can find here . The quick introduction is that I use music to help me cope with living with rheumatoid arthritis - with life in general, to be honest - and wanted to share some of the songs that help. Music has been proven to help with pain and depression, among other things. The power of music knows no bounds. This series will be ongoing, with the second installment coming later this week. For these first two installments, I've decided to take you all on an emotional progression of sorts. We're going to start in the dark and work our way towards the light.  Before we get into it, I did want to mention an article I read a while back that suggested that listening to sad music all the time can make you more depressed. It's a valid point and one that I agree with. So why include sad songs? Because sometimes that...

I first came across The Piano Guys a few months ago, thanks to Peter and Evynne Hollens who had filmed a wonderful video for "What Are Words" with them. Since then, I've watched some more of their videos, though I don't believe I've seen them all. When I started this video spotlight series, I figured that I'd be featuring them at some point. I had another of their videos in mind for the first one I'd write about and was set to start writing about it. But then I watched this video and that was that. I don't think you can go wrong with any of these videos, but this one seemed like such a great introduction to the group. What I love about these guys is that they take classical pieces of music and pair them with recent hits in some fashion. I'm such a fan of this concept because I think it builds a nice bridge between different kinds of music and I always enjoy when people do that successfully. For those who may find classical music to be somewhat inac...