Here’s how it works: set your alarm for three but wake at two, details running through your mind like ticker tape. Kiss your half-sleeping wife, say a small prayer at the door to your daughter’s room, mute the buckle of your belt with your palm as you creep down the stairs carrying your jeans, counting to avoid the creaky steps.

Make a cup of black coffee and listen to the barred owls call up the hill through the open kitchen window. Step outside and clock the waning moonrise lighting the low cloud like a weak bulb behind a bedsheet. Take a piss looking up at the sky, the dim shapes of trees. Hear the few late insects buzzing in the pre-dawn.

Cast an eye over your things, load the car, pat down your pockets, drive a quiet hour south, revolving the coming days and obligations in your mind, absently noting the play of light above towns and cities, white lines approaching in endless succession as if the car were pulling them under. Park the car and process the cattle chute of the airport, sit down in the window seat and rise in the general hum through banks of cloud filigreed in delicate coral pinks and oranges. Consider the work of your life.

Jim Harrison said that leaving is a kind of dying, and I find I have a great deal of practice. It makes a strange awareness of the provisional nature of existence knowing and seeing things clearly only in approach and retreat, a Doppler Effect of human perception.

When the pandemic shut everything down I thought, Ah! Now I’ll have long thoughts, read long books without pause, make sense of the world without interruption! It wasn’t so. Sitting still I found it hard to see the things around me, or gauge my own habits of mind as I grew used to them. I found myself drinking either too much or nothing at all, taking long walks in rough weather, carrying a rifle through the woods when there was nothing to hunt, doing anything to spark a change in the patterns that had sustained me for years but always in bursts of six weeks or less.

This morning I’ll fly to Bozeman to meet the band, and we’ll spend a couple weeks trying to do something real in a human world which, to quote Rexroth, “ …is built entirely of fake, / And in which, if you find a truth / Instead of a lie, it is due / To somebody's oversight.” Why? It’s a good question, and I imagine if it ever stays answered I’ll be in some trouble. This morning it’s because it’s the only thing I know how to do, and I believe in it, most of the time.

THE UNIVERSAL FIRE – The new album is out in the world and doing its work, whatever that is. If you've heard it and you like it, and you'd like us to keep making records and going on tour, maybe tell your friends about it, or send them a copy. I hate to tell anyone to buy stuff. American life is predicated on the idea that you’re not really participating unless there's an opportunity to buy something. Which reminds me, have you seen our new tee shirts?

MT/WY/CO – This week THE UNIVERSAL FIRE tour resumes in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado (see the TOUR page for details), with full band shows in Bozeman, Missoula, Cody, Greeley, Boulder, Hotchkiss, Denver, and Colorado Springs. If anyone has invented a better way to simultaneously make and spend thousands of dollars, I haven't hear about it.

On Saturday (9/28) I'll join James McMurtry, Rick Bass, and Bill McKibben (whose book The End of Nature was a partial inspiration for my Horse Latitudes album) and a host of other great musicians, writers, native leaders, and activists for an evening of music at The Wilma Theater in Missoula. The evening is centered on the Black Ram Guitar, a Breedlove guitar made from downed timber from the Black Ram forest, and the symbol of a campaign to save that ecosystem from a devastating timber sale.

The following night (9/29) we'll play our Missoula album release show for THE UNIVERSAL FIRE at Monk's bar with the full band. Then we'll head down through Wyoming (see below) and into Colorado. I've never been to Colorado with the full band and the shows look great. They'll be even better if other people are also there.

NEW DATES ADDED – We've added a couple late-breaking shows to the release tour, the first is next week Tuesday (10/1) at the Blanca Tatanka, AKA Blonky Tonk, in Cody, WY, on our way down to Colorado, and the second in November (11/11) at the Dream Cafe in Penticton, BC, which I hope they named after the Greg Brown song. If you know folks in these towns, send them out. I've never been to either.

THANKS – I want to thank everyone who kindly sent some cash our way when we cancelled our NYC show, and the heroic people of T. Ruggs Tavern in Burlington, VT, where on ten hours notice we walked in, set up, reconfigured the PA, and played to a bar full of people dancing and hollering. It was just grand. Take the glory any day over the fame baby.

That's it from here folks. I'm flying to Bozeman and meeting the band this morning, and we've got a van waiting and our work cut out for us, which is how we like it. We'll keep you posted.

September 2024