I thought I would be forced to give up my love of playing music in bands when I left the big city out east for a life in the southwest.
At first my girlfriend thought she was headed for the corporate offices in Phoenix, but at the last minute her employer changed his mind and sent us to Albuquerque instead.
The former city has twice the population of the latter, so I worried if I’d be able to make friends in a smaller urban sprawl. However, it has been a lot easier than I initially expected to make friends here in Albuquerque. I found a group online of fellow musicians interested in my favorite genres of music who also happened to reside in Burque. A couple of us started discussing plans to meet up for an informal jam session. This turned out really well when we met up at a professional rehearsal studio in Nob Hill. We then found a more affordable location for jams in the International District. Now we jam twice a month for fun and sometimes play gigs if our friends need a fill in band at the last minute. We all shop at the same cannabis dispensary in La Mesa on Copper Ave after we finish our jam sessions. Most of us buy cannabis flower products, but myself and the drummer are both huge fans of dabbing cannabis concentrates like shatter and live rosin. Albuquerque has quite a few cannabis stores from one neighborhood to the next, but we really like this location in La Mesa compared to some of the other cannabis dispensaries in the city.