Alex Williamson is just “Looking For Some Time”

Alex Williamson
Alex Williamson
“This is called ‘Looking For Some Time.’ It’s my ode to North Carolina,” he said, followed by an almost embarrassed laugh.

I met Alex Williamson on a cool afternoon in late October 2010. It was just before the start of MoogFest, and the city was swarming with world-class musicians and their crews, all frantically trying to settle in before the madness of that Halloween-fueled festival. He was playing on the corner of Battery Park and Page Avenue in downtown Asheville, a good block from two of the best-established busking hotspots, and I assumed he was from out of town. But he wasn’t. He was a local guy who either hadn’t done enough busking to know where the money spots were.

He told me he was a former UNC-A student, recently returned from a stint in Germany, and that he was busking as a way to “help out” while he looked for a teaching job. This was the only time I ever encountered him on one of my “busk hunts,” and his only appearance on Busk Break to date. I’m not sure if he’s still in town or not, and I wasn’t able to find a current website for him, but some of his older music still survives on his Deb O’Nare MySpace page.

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Steve Shanafelt

Steve Shanafelt used to think he was a writer. Lots of other people thought he was a very good one, and they paid him to write everything from news articles to erotic comic books. Then, a few years ago, he started to realize that writing was just one very tiny piece of the puzzle. He started recording podcasts, producing field recordings of busking musicians, making short video series and learning how to make websites. Along the way, he learned lots of ways not to manage businesses and how to promote those businesses online. Now, people pay him surprisingly large sums of money to show them some of the things he's picked up.