February 2021

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. Each of these will feature interview footage from the night in question, in which one hopes I said something clever. During the broadcast I'll be interacting live on 'the chat,' which will probably make sense when I get there. Hopefully I can do it on my phone, because I text faster than a fourteen year-old girl. Like lightning.

BLOOD BROTHERS - February 26th I'll dedicate the next online concert to playing through the songs on my 2018 album Blood Brothers, and talking about the experience of writing and recording it, as well as anything else that passes through the wilds of my mind. I know I asked for requests for the last thing, and then didn't play them. To make amends, there's an all-request show in the pipeline for later in the winter, where you, gentle viewer, will be able to call the tune in real time, and a lovely assistant monitoring the traffic will relay this information, and we'll all see how many songs I know.

GREG BROWN - Late in the prior century my Iowa girlfriend put a Greg Brown song on a mix cassette delivered to me by mail. The song was Just a Bum, from the 1985 album, In the Dark With You. I liked the song, a wry lyric delivered in a smoky, gravel-bar baritone over a truly weird Midwestern calypso feel, combining hand drums, blues harp, and mandolin. Not long afterward, a friend loaned me 1996's Further In, a darkly spare and wistful reckoning of an album, that starts with one of the heaviest, and best, pieces of writing I'd ever heard (also: a lap guitar solo from Kelly Joe Phelps that will raise the hairs on your neck). I wore that record out, hooked on music that felt like it grew right up out of my home ground, rude and sophisticated, literate and lean, encompassing pretty much everything I cared about, with a cosmic tenderness and attachment to life. I let one album lead to me to the next over decades, in no particular order, as his voice got deeper, more burnished and elemental. Once I was out on the road myself, I opened shows for Greg here and there, and we ran into each other through the years, and exchanged a few letters. I always sent him my records because his body of work – nearly thirty albums, and some of the best songs anyone has written in the last forty years of American music – has meant as much to me in my conception of my interior life, and my work, as anything, by anyone.

On March 14th, I'll interview Greg Brown for the Signature Sounds Backstage Sessions, a series of interviews broadcast this winter, designed to capture the kinds of green room conversations we don't get to have right now: free range talk about life and art, and anything else. Spring before last, when Erik Koskinen and I passed through Iowa City on tour, I called up Greg and Bo, and Greg bought us all tacos at a little strip mall place with fluorescent lights and large televisions playing soccer in every corner. He said he was about done touring, and we had this long, rambling conversation about music, the business, travel, family, life, work. This is your chance to slide into the booth.

SOUL RIVER - My good friend Jimmy Watts, who builds exquisite split-cane bamboo fly rods under the Shuksan Rod Company banner, has teamed up with the artisans at Decade Reels to build a one-of-a-kind, 8' 5wt rig, up for auction now through the end of the month, with all proceeds going to Soul River Inc, a Portland-based non-profit run by Navy veteran Chad Brown, which introduces inner-city kids to fly fishing and wild places, pairing them with veterans as mentors, to develop the next generation of outdoor leaders and guardians. If you have the means, you should probably go place a bid, right now. If you win, you should mail the rod to me.

FRIENDS - My old friend and occasional tour companion Zak Trojano released a beautiful instrumental recently called Spring is in the World, and if you haven't heard it, or his most recent, badass record Wolf Trees, you can find both here. Zak's got the real mojo, but he deploys it laconically, and he's a halfway decent fisherman too, when he's not late. Keep an ear on Zak, and meanwhile, check in on his old bandmate Matt Lorenz, who makes music as the Suitcase Junket, and who recently released a fantastic new album called The End is New. Finally, go listen to the new song, Evergreen, by my old friend Kimon Kirk, bass player for Session Americana, Aimee Mann, Gaby Moreno and others, and whom my daughter at five described as looking "very much like a Disney Prince." The first single from a forthcoming album called Altitude (2/19), 'Evergreen' reminds me of a lost, late Tom Petty track, maybe one of the sad, gentle ones from Wildflowers.

LOVERS - I mean, technically we're also friends, but Kris Delmhorst is releasing a three-song EP called Light Breaks Through, of the songs that didn't make it onto her stellar 2020 release, Long Day in the Milky Way. The eponymous first single from the EP is available, and righteous, here.

ALLIES - Two organizations doing good work, that have been on my mind recently: Honor the Earth, the folks at the center of the fight against the proposed Line 3 tar sands pipeline in northern Minnesota (if you want a basic idea what's stake, the author Louise Erdrich wrote a great article in the Times recently), and All On the Line, an organization fighting for fair district maps at the state and local levels, where gerrymandering is the front line in the battle for a representative democracy, and a less polarized country. I hope you'll look into these, and join me in supporting their work.

DEADSTOCK - The new album Deadstock: Uncollected Recordings 2005 – 2020, which features the unreleased tracks culled from six studio releases and a few sessions, came out in December, and gosh darnit, it's still out now. (LISTEN ORDER DOWNLOAD)

That ought to cover it.