In college I took a course with Paul Boyer, History of American Thought, 1859-Present. Why 1859? That's when Darwin published On the Origin of Species, which I had read in high school to impress a girl…

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 . . .

THE UNIVERSAL FIRE is out today and streaming anywhere music is available, and I hope you’ll stream the hell out of it, buy it, and share it. I hope the songs will be company, and make you wonder, like I wonder, what we’re all doing and what any of it’s for, if not love.

FOR MOST OF A DECADE I spent about a hundred and twenty nights a year on the road with Billy Conway. When we were out duo he played a suitcase drum kit: a snare drum with a Remo conga head, a ride cymbal, a low-boy (sock cymbal) from the 1930’s, and an empty suitcase that carried all these things and served as the bass drum.

Friends, It's my pleasure to finally announce the release of the new album THE UNIVERSAL FIRE, coming out this September (9/6) on Fluff and Gravy Records.

My dear friend and fishing companion, my deeply strange uncle and philosopher-poet correspondent, Greg Brown, has released a songbook, and it's fantastic…

Tomorrow I’ll fly overnight to Ireland, new green to new green, leaving the peach tree out by the barn throwing pink sparks and magnolia flowers littering the ground, cherry and plum blossoms just opening.

I took this picture down in Texas on tour with John Convertino this winter. Last night of the trip, wind blowing hard down the street in Marfa, the two of us standing outside the bar and maybe thirty souls inside, some of them just there to shoot pool.

PIETA BROWN – At the end of February I'll play a couple split bills with my friend Pieta Brown in New England, sharing the band and backing each other, reprising a stripped-down version of the show that we toured in December in the Midwest.

Twenty-four years into the new century and I’ll turn forty-eight next week, having lived half my life in the old one. Half a life with the phone plugged into the wall and Code-a-Phone micro-cassettes piling up taped messages.

I first heard Pieta Brown back in 2002. Her debut record had just come out and she came through town to play the Cafe Carpe while I was out on the road. I missed the show…

The western tour continues in November with shows in New Mexico and Colorado, starting at the Old San Ysidro Church in Corrales, NM (11/10), and heading north to play San Miguel Mission in Santa Fe, NM (11/11) before rolling up into Colorado…

 After a show at the Cock'n Bull in Galway, New York earlier this month, I was sitting around having a late drink with the folks who run the place.

I got up early and built a fire in the scar out by the barn. I read for an hour as the light came up and then decided to rig up and fish. Getting out of the car at the turnout I realized I had an appointment at the dentist but figured, hell, I have an hour . . .

It's been a hot, rainy summer and what I'd really like to do all day is paint, but modern life is a series of banal instructions delivered directly to the ear with all the subtlety of a car alarm, and certain things must be accomplished…

Friday night (6/23) we'll play the last of our four Friday nights at tiny Floodwater Brewing Co, in Shelburne Falls, MA. These residency shows have been special, the good feeling in the good place and no foolishness, or maybe just the right kind.

I came home from the Midwest to the May porch, window corners filled with crabapple blossoms, lawn grown over for no-mow May, which timing dovetailed perfectly with the reign of no-mow wife.

MIDWEST – In the first half of May I'll embark on a Midwest tour that’s essentially a tour of Wisconsin with one show in Marquette, Michigan. Political borders are often captious. Wisconsin is the place where I was born and raised …

In April I'll play four shows with a full quartet in the Northeast, beginning with a return to the Cock'n Bull restaurant in Galway, NY (4/12), a magnificent old barn in the bucolic upstate farm country.

When I say March I mean April. I'm not doing anything much in March except writing this email and minding my own business, various as it tends to be and – so far, at least – endless.

 I dropped out of college as a junior in the fall of 1996, after attending a single class. I had rented an apartment, bought my books, and suddenly I couldn't stay. I was tan and strong from working outside, I was in love…

We went down to Tucson and cut a record. The boys flew or drove from Montana, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Texas, and we met up at a little adobe house – north of downtown and across from the blue neon of Gus's Liquor…

In the first week of November I'll join my old friend Gregory Alan Isakov on the first leg of his fall 2022 European tour…

I sat down at the laminate pressboard desk in a hotel in Lewistown, Montana, last week and made a notebook recon of all the songs that seem to be in play.

The last time I saw Kelly Jo Phelps we met at Captain Jack’s Bar in Sumner, Washington, his formerly bucolic home town, lately devoured by metastatic Tacoma.

I'll be on the ground in Montana much of the summer, with shows in the first part of July which, for reasons that remain obscure, we are not yet able to announce…

We finished up with an afternoon show in Hesston, Kansas on Sunday, when it had finally quit either raining, or snowing, or blowing our hats off when we opened the hotel door in the morning. The redwings were singing as we piled into the truck . . .

Friends, it's March, and it's raining. In the morning I'll cook a triple recipe of Molho de Ovos from the Portugese Homestyle Cooking cookbook, the one where the pages are so broth-stained you have to pry them apart…

Winter in a northern climate tends to stick to the facts, and I'll try to do the same. I've been piling everything on the back burners and the kitchen smells like smoke.

Mornings the past couple years have gone like this: wake in the dark, wander downstairs to boil water for coffee. In the clement seasons, light a small bundle of sage or a twist of sweetgrass and take it out to the porch…

This week I'll be running around New England solo for the first time in a long time, with shows in MA, NH, and VT, starting at the Center for Culture and History in Orleans, MA. on a show put on by Vinegrass (11/4), and then up to see my old friends at the Word Barn in Exeter, NH (11/5), and finishing up in Vermont with a show at the Zenbarn in Waterbury VT (11/6).

NEW ENGLAND – There are a few New England shows on the books in October and November, exquisitely timed to interfere with both fishing and hunting, and starting with a benefit for our local nonprofit, The Permaculture Place, in Shelburne Falls, MA.

Yesterday I knocked out a little desk work and then went fishing, knowing the remnant of Ida would swing north today and the brief window of dry, cool sun would close.

I have nothing to say and it will doubtless take a few paragraphs to say it. Alone in Wyoming for some months as young man, I arrived with ambition. The first morning alone on the property, the nearest neighbor miles away, I set a wrought iron table in the yard with my typewriter fronting distant blue mountains. . .

DON'T TEES ME - You wanted a T-shirt right? I'm pretty sure you did. Because you wrote me that email about it, and then those second and third emails.

I tried to cross the bridge in town on the way home from fishing, but found the road blocked by a police officer routing traffic away.

A year ago Heywood and Moses and I quit halfway through a tour from California to west Texas, waking up in a rented house in Phoenix and deciding the evening's show up in Flagstaff would be the last.

TALES FROM THE TAVERN - February 24, I'll be on Tales From the Tavern TV, as they broadcast a trio show that Billy and Eric and I played some years ago in Santa Ynez, CA., intercut with footage from another, earlier show, played solo.

I scrolled through the photos on my phone to see if there was anything fitting to accompany a fairly boilerplate letter for a boilerplate month. Pork chops, fresh snow, the new desk I built, a nearly successful tarte Tatin.

This month I’m releasing Deadstock: Uncollected Recordings 2005 – 2020, an album gathering up the songs no one got to hear: unreleased tracks and alternate versions from six studio records and scattered sessions, that form a kind of alternate history.

I went to bed early in the count and in the morning made coffee in the half dark, looking briefly at the news to learn which of my illusions had survived the night. Not many, and I sat reading Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Notebook by the fire…

Recorded at Ryan Freeland's Stampede Origin Studios in Los Angeles in the fall of 2010, and released in spring 2011 on Signature Sounds Records, Horse Latitudes is a blur…

Driving north at dusk on IA-1 in a rented car with the rough mixes of Ghost Repeater on a burned disc, a hamburger, and a new pack of smokes, was about as good as life gets.

This Friday night, 8/28 (8PM, EDT/USA) I'll play all the songs on my second album, Stripping Cane (Signature Sounds, 2004), the second in a series of monthly livestream concerts dedicated to airing out the back catalog.

I wrote a long thing about race, class, violence, and terminal-stage global capitalism last month, if only to clarify my own thinking, and then I set it aside. It seemed like a good time to shut up.

In the early dark a song sparrow we call Norman clocks in, accurate to the minute, a tiny rooster punching a tiny, irresistible time-card. We sleep with the window open…

A few years ago the maple on the north side began to look ragged and, preferring that it not fall down and crush the house, I called someone to come look at it.

When I passed through the entrance to the security line in Dublin last month, the small, uniformed woman checking my documents said to me, in a heavy Polish accent, “You look like Texas movie.” I said, “Thanks.”

A friend asked me the other day why I wasn’t on a Folk Cruise, or maybe an Outlaw Cruise, at this winter moment.

There's some chance I owe you a letter, and let me apologize. I caught up on correspondence shortly before Christmas…

Through the Colville Res in the dark fog and across the Columbia on the ferry before dawn, switchbacking up to the dryland plain above, the light pink and blue, a lone coyote at a dead run picked out white gold by the first sun, and we the only things moving on the planar earth.

We're getting a lot done this week. For instance, we've managed to play two shows In the past six days, but we've been fishing four times.

Well, Billy and I have decided to go ahead and get famous. We’ve tried it the other way and it’s a hell of a lot of work.

I first heard Richard Buckner's album Devotion + Doubt (MCA 1997) in the apartment, precisely the bed, of a woman pursuing an advanced degree in biology…

I don't have much to tell you about June, about gone anyway.

I caught the first in the slack water backing a seam that mirrors the contour of the large igneous rock where, baking summer days, I take my daughter to swim in the clear green of the pool.

It’s another happy April / To every happy fool, or it will be by tomorrow. I’m sitting in a coffee shop fronting the square in Denton, Texas…

There's a poem in Ragged Anthem, the fantastic new book by Chris Dombrowski which comes out this week, that I think about a lot. It’s been a long winter, and I printed the poem out and put it on the refrigerator…

I went out to see Bill and we walked. We walked in the morning after feeding the horses, donkey, goats, chickens, ducks. It seemed like one of the goats might be going to die but then he didn’t, and in fact never required the shot we drove into town to get from the bartender.

January 4-10 I'll tour northern California and southern Oregon alone with a couple of acoustic guitars and a microphone. If ensemble play is a conversation, solo performance is a conversation with yourself, frequently about your shortcomings…

In December we'll finish the year on the road back home in our native Midwest with shows at the Ninth Ward in Buffalo, NY (11/30); Hugh's Room in Toronto, ON (12/1); the Tip Top Deluxe in Grand Rapids, MI (12/2); The Ark in Ann Arbor...