April 2020

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. They told us it had reached an age at which a certain type of rot might be both thoroughgoing and hard to measure. Deepest shade on a sunny lot terraced into the hillside, it was a glorious tree with a wide bole, and we'd sling a hammock to it in the summers, to drowse with a sleepy toddler, or retire with a book and a beer in the grateful cool. I helped our friend Walter fell and buck it up on a dark fall day, and when it was gone the space where it had been felt strange as the socket of a tooth.

Years later, the magnolia, grown up spindly beneath that maple, darting out at odd angles to catch the available light, has become a lovely, fulsome tree, taller than the house. This morning the buds are tight-coiled, the size of bantam eggs, and pink as trout. The red-osier dogwood has grown twice again as tall, and the quince blossoms and daffodils are out. I burned some of the old maple the other night, as we sat - six feet apart - around the fire scar behind the barn, with a neighbor, and a glass of wine, wondering at the way the years consume themselves to nothing.

With reality making a late bid for precedence in American life - having been for so long something we mainly exported, in the form of war, industrial pollution, ecological havoc - it’s become a more humane time in certain ways. The most vulnerable are in grave danger, and the best among us walk into the fire to help them. The rest of us are made to sit still and consider our connection to each other, ineluctable, and suddenly very real.

It was the unreality that oppressed me, every time I flew across the country in order to drive across it in a van. The warmth and soundness of regular people, the pathological insanity of all of us together, sleepwalking toward doom. Every time I left home I wondered idly what life would look like if I just quit. No more jet fuel. No more self-promo, social media, compact disc landfill; no more voluntary serfdom to massive corporations - Delta, Budget, Hilton, Exxon, Apple, Starbucks, Facebook - for the simple beauty and privilege of playing music. Then the moving walkway stopped, and for the last month I’ve been forced to live more or less exactly that way; buying little, working some, fishing much, playing music, enjoying my family, making no plans. I lost some money I guess, but we're healthy, we're together, and lucky as hell to be where we are in the unspooling world. Our hearts go out to the cities, everyone in extremity, anyone in harm's way.

Humanity has been walking around on stilts, painting them garish colors with one hand, sawing partway through them with the other. If this pause, and whatever follows it, makes a point of inflection, topples our two delicious flavors of corporate government, creates the space for new alignments to occur, maybe there's a magnolia in there somewhere. I don't mean to sound high-minded, or in any way rapturous. Like you, perhaps, I lay awake nights worrying that this whole deal only sharpens the longest knives. It's the poorest ones who will be hurt most, always, and a working knowledge of the charnel house of human history doesn’t offer hope over caution. But despair is the only mortal sin, and there's some good to come of this, if we can find it.

BILLY CONWAY - The response to Billy Conway's album release and medical fundraiser has been overwhelming. So moving, in fact, that it's hard to talk about, and as a Midwesterner I'd prefer that we didn't. But my gratitude is boundless, and there's no way to reach out personally to everyone who stepped in to look after him this way, so please accept our humble thanks. I'm grateful, and Billy can barely walk upright under the weight of all that love.

VAN DYKE PARKS - A dear friend, a hero to me, and one of the best and most original American minds, Van Dyke Parks worked on the Horse Latitudes album with us in Los Angeles in 2010, and we've exchanged letters since that session, performing together when we can. He was recently interviewed in the LA Times, and his answers are characteristically eloquent, wise, open-hearted, and hilarious: worthy reading in the year of the plague.

RY CAVANAUGH - This year my friend and tour companion Ry Cavanaugh made a delightful and poignant album of the songs that his father - a honky-tonk singer and bandleader in the New York scene - wrote and performed in the late 1970's. On reaching the age at which his father died, Ry sat down with our ace friend Duke Levine to record Time For This, on two acoustic guitars. The impeccable Jennifer Kimball sang the harmony, and this quietly perfect album - a staple for me all this past winter - is now available via the regular streaming channels, and at Ry's website.

LISA OLSTEIN - Poet Lisa Olstein and I collaborated for two collections of visceral rock 'n' roll songs, which I recorded and toured with the band Cold Satellite some years ago, while generously subsidizing the American economy in bourbon. To her acclaimed books of poetry, Lisa recently added her first non-fiction, Pain Studies, an exploration of the metaphysics of pain, and the limitations of language and perception in apprehending it. Don't let the subject throw you, the book is an honest pleasure to read: searching, rangey, and erudite.

DIETRICH STRAUSE - One of the more thoughtful craftsman on the scene, my friend Dietrich Strause writes delicately-hinged and harmonically sophisticated songs that showcase his classical training, dry wit, and a certain low-key charm. House-sitting for us once, Dietrich wrote his name and height on the door jamb where we chart the growth of our daughter and her friends, one of whom subsequently came over and asked, "Who is Diet Rich?" This is your chance to find out. He got back to basics on his last outing, with a reel-to-reel tape machine, a voice, and a guitar. You can hear Last Man Standing on the Sun at all the usual places, and you should.

DAVID HUCKFELT - An old tour accomplice formerly/occasionally of the Minneapolis-based duo The Pines, has made, in recent years, two fantastic solo records and one small child (the last was a collaboration), recently arrived. He's raising funds to cover the second of those albums, the forthcoming Room Enough Time Enough, and you should go give him some money, as the Kickstarter endeth, and that right soon.

JOHN PRINE - When I was 17 I heard John Prine, learned to play the guitar, and started drinking coffee, all the same week. I started drinking coffee so I could stay up all night learning to play Prine songs on my Dad's guitar. I never met him, never opened for him, and I didn't know him any more than you did. But his music was like going to church, and I'm so grateful. He changed my life, with his crow-creaky voice and strange songs, and I recorded some of those songs on an album, in a prior decade. You can hear it on TIDAL, SPOTIFY, APPLE MUSIC, PANDORA, GOOGLE PLAY, DEEZER (whatever the hell that is), and AMAZON.

JUSTICE - Once you've enjoyed listening to that album for free or something damned near it, perhaps consider signing this petition calling for economic justice for musicians, whose livelihood is based in large part on the exploitation of their intellectual property. YouTube is the largest radio station in the world, and they don't pay a red cent. Third-party users can illegally upload copyrighted material, and companies like Facebook and Google can extract ad revenue based on that stolen content. This is not a by-product of technology, this is a political and philosophical decision to privilege corporations over individuals. It should never have happened and now, with live performance shut down, it's more important than ever that you let your legislators know you support fairness in the marketplace.

MARK ERELLI - Years ago my friend Mark Erelli and I recorded a collection of murder ballads and toured together around the country and overseas, as the chance arose. He's an old friend, an outrageous musician, a writer of candor and conviction. Making a record is like being a farmer, in that you have a great deal of up front expense, and generally don't recoup until the crop comes in. His new album Blindsided was released into the current Pandemic Dustbowl, and his touring for it has been cancelled, but that doesn't mean you can't hear it, buy it, and tell your Mom about it, to help him make up the shortfall.

Next letter I'll try to concentrate on things that don't require you to pay anyone, maybe give some cooking tips, or dish on the neighbors. Meanwhile, if you managed to read all this, you should get some kind of reward. Here's an outtake from that album of Prine songs mentioned above, for free.