January 2021

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. Sunrise through the truck window, the house lit up at night against the hill, other things. We use our gadgets to put a frame around some idea about our lives, but of course the meat of life is outside the picture, immune to our ideas. Like you maybe, I’ve just been living through the days, pretending agency in a world where we mostly have opinions. It reminds me of driving the first truck I ever bought, a white 1984 Mazda B2000 with no muffler: you knew you'd probably get where you were going, but it seemed like any number of other results was also possible.

The long and the short is that life is rich and complex, and there are many things to wake up and think about every day, but most of them aren't going to make it into this letter. My pictures look like your pictures, like everybody's pictures, of the things we didn't see. The only guy I know who doesn't take any pictures at all is Billy. As he would say, Yup. There you go.

SIGNATURE SOUNDS HOME SESSIONS - This Thursday, 1/28 (8PM/EST/USA), I'll play a show broadcast by my old friends at Signature Sounds, part of their ongoing 25th anniversary concerts. I’ll be on a stage, plugged in, under lights that are neither oil lamps nor clamp lights borrowed from the chickens, and I will even be introduced and briefly interviewed by my old friend Jim Olsen. Then I’ll go through and try to play some of the requests that piled up when we announced the show. I saw some good ones in there.

SHELTER IN PLACE - This week the people at Southwest Roots Music and Oklahoma Roots Music broadcast five songs I recently recorded in the privacy of my office, in the privacy of my sweatpants, as part of the Shelter In Place Sessions. You can watch the whole set any time, and catch some great recent sets by Valerie June, Amy Helm, Marc Ribot, and Bill Frissell, while you're at it. The Ribot set is particularly beautiful.

TALES FROM THE TAVERN - February 24, I'll be on Tales From the Tavern TV, as they broadcast footage of a sweet show we played years ago in Santa Ynez, CA (Billy Conway on the suitcase kit, and Eric Heywood on pedal steel and electric guitar) along with some interview footage made the same night. TftT is a great series that we've played for years, the kind of place where you run into various Baldwin brothers, meet Steve Soles, have your picture taken by Henry Diltz, and have dinner with Danny O'Keefe. On the night of the broadcast I'll be interacting with the audience online in some capacity that hasn't been explained to me yet. Doubtless I will be witty and charming, advantageously lit in every sense.

DEADSTOCK - The new album Deadstock: Uncollected Recordings 2005 – 2020, which features the unreleased tracks culled from six studio releases and a few sessions, is available now for now physical purchase and streaming everywhere music is systematically undervalued by a technology corporation (LISTEN ORDER DOWNLOAD). If you already got it, and you're enjoying it, why not tell your friends? Please and thanks.

LISTENING - The albums I listened to most last year were Howlin' Wolf and Mose Alison, but a close third was an album by my wife's old friend and tour companion, Ana Egge, called 'Is It the Kiss,' a lovely thirty minutes of music produced by Alec Spiegelmen, that inhabits multiple genres and references easily, thoughtfully, and with surprising flourishes of instrumentation, particularly woodwinds. I would buy the whole album just to hear her sing the opening track, 'Cocaine Cowboys,' which feels for all the world like a lost Willie Nelson song, but the rest of the album is a deep river. Cooking and eating, we've been listening to Sydney Bechet, Vol. II, a collection of sides recorded just after WWII in New York and Chicago, but not released until 1976: soprano saxophone with a wide, gritty vibrato, and somehow the crooked, battered optimism I associate with America at its best.

READING - I just finished the new Marilynne Robinson novel, Jack, fourth in her Gilead series, all of them good. I read her books because they remind me of my grandparents' house: calm, orderly, and full of a straightforward, but not simple, goodness. I also received a copy of Richard Buckner's Cuttings From the Tangle for Christmas – a dense, lapidary, often surreal collection of poems that captures the dense, lapidary, often surreal experience of traveling around America to play music – also Jorie Graham's collection, From the New World (Poems 1976–2014), which I've barely got into yet, but which looks promising. Hearing we'd lost the great, the utterly heroic and mountainous, Barry Lopez, I've gone back to listen to his landmark work of natural philosophy, Arctic Dreams, pleasant company when I'm up to my elbows in dinner dishes. I've saved a few of his books to read later in life, when I expect to need them.

ETC - A song book, and (gulp) a tee shirt are in the works, and would be done by now if not for the laziness of our CEO, who spends too much time reading, and half-assing his way through home repairs. Rest assured that mercantile ventures are in the offing for late winter, and will be announced at the precise moment they are ready to order, or we go broke.