March 2021

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. Moses and I changed our flights, and Eric decided to rent a car and drive alone two days' north on the back roads to his place in Montana, from which he sent a series of snapshots of long purple desert shadows and improbable sunsets, digital paintings of late American light.

I went home and fished every clement day, driving out of our little town of empty streets, along empty country lanes, seeing only clouds, no jet trails. I caught the year's first trout on March 14th, the earliest entry I could find in my field journal going back years, a big healthy rainbow in deep water, on a small pink Driftless nymph pattern that the cynical Yankee trout had never seen before. Rexroth wrote in his Bestiary for his Daughters, Trout: The trout is taken when he / Bites an artificial fly / Confronted with fraud keep your / Mouth shut and don't volunteer. He also wrote:

Scarecrow

A hex was put on you at birth.
Society certified your
Existence and claimed you as
A citizen. Don't let it
Scare you. Learn to cope with a world
Which is built entirely of fake,
And in which, if you find a truth
Instead of a lie, it is due
To somebody's oversight.
These stuffed old rags are harmless,
Unless you show them the fear
Which they can never warrant,
Or reveal the contempt which
Of course is all they deserve.
If you do, they'll come to life,
And do their best to kill you.

And each was sound advice for living through the plague year, and the noisy twilight of empire. I slept in the same bed for a hundred nights, and had dinner with my family too, a record for both, and then we kept going. I rose in the dark and piled blankets around me on the porch to watch the sun appear, or made a fire out by the barn and watched the light creep down the western hills while the birds called and sang.

I felt pretty good, sometimes ragged, a little manic. Strangely sad, blindly angry. I'd think I had it pretty much together, and then suddenly have to get in the truck and drive for an hour, trace a circuit of the drainage, trying to breathe, and boxing the compass north into Colrain, west up into Heath, South down to Charlemont, following the big river home again: Deerfield, North, East Branch, West Branch, Mill Brook, Rice Brook, Deerfield. I remembered someone telling me once that Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top had built a replica hotel room into his house, and now I understood why.

I drank too much, or nothing at all, ate too much or fasted. I read poems and novels, history and philosophy, got hooked on a dumb TV show, blistered my hands on shovel work, finally got my pie crust down. I hunted grouse alone, remembered what the phone was actually for, wrote long letters, mourned a dear friend. I took a long hot bath and then sat on the porch in a thin robe in the early winter dark with a drink, watching the stars move.

We played a show a month most months, and we made a living and paid the bills, because you sent along some cash. You, the one reading this. You looked after us, and if as a kid on the road I was wary of anyone who liked what I did, because I didn't particularly like it myself, this year I learned what it meant to be lifted up by people you never met. To trust it. Sitting in my house with a guitar, trying to imagine a few thousand souls on the other side of a device, I felt connected in the most unlikely way. Thanks.

GREG BROWN - When you grow up in certain parts of the rural Midwest, an interest in art may be treated as a type of infirmity, given the same gentle latitude as being born with one leg shorter than the other. It makes people nervous for you. They’re afraid you might try to make a living at it, for instance. When I was learning to write songs in my early twenties – and increasingly in the years after my first record came out, as I tried to negotiate touring and performing – I didn't really have a template for what I was trying to do, or how to move through the world. There was just Greg Brown.

Described as, “A wickedly sharp observer of the human condition” (Rolling Stone), Greg has often been called a songwriter’s songwriter, and his songs have been recorded by Willie Nelson, Carlos Santana, Lucinda Williams, Iris Dement, Gillian Welch, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shawn Colvin, and Ani Difranco, among others. Meanwhile, his concern for living like a human being, on a human scale, in an increasingly inhuman culture, and for relating to the natural world with humility and sensuality, has made him something of cult hero, famous without being famous, known without being known. His deep catalog of slow-yielding and gemstone-durable songs embraces the whole arc of life with a rare integrity, humanity, humor, and pathos.

This Sunday night, March 14th, (7PM EDT/USA) 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. I'll try to get him to play a few songs, and I might play something too. There will be a link to donate, and all proceeds go to my old home bar, the Cafe Carpé(pronounced like the fish) in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, to help them get through a tough year. It's a little room nine miles from the house I grew up in, and it's the place where I first heard live music in a little room, where I learned to play, and where I first saw Greg play. I hope you'll join us.

CONTEMPLIFY - Not long ago I had a long, winding conversation with Paul Swanson for his podcast Contemplify, a program mainly focused on writers and poets, but which must occasionally scrape the barrel for a songwriter, and which he describes as "kindling the examined life." Paul's from Minnesota, though he lives in the desert, and I'm from Wisconsin, though I live in New England, and we pretty much speak the same language. Generally, when I do an interview I set a time limit up front, to save myself trouble in case it's not fun, and to save other humans from having to hear me talk, which is also not fun, eventually. But I like to shoot the shit, and I had nowhere to go as I sat watching a late winter storm blow in, so we talked for a long time.

DEADSTOCK LIVESTREAM - On April 18th (8PM EDT/USA) I'll play through all the old songs collected together on my most recent release Deadstock: Uncollected Song 2005–2020, from the confines of my home. If you want to brush up, or map out the keys and changes beforehand, you can find that album, in the store.

MERCH - I know I promised tee-shirts and songbooks and all kinds of things to buy with my name on them, by late winter. Pleased to tell, I recently hired the fantastic Jordanna Rachinsky, a visual artist whose work I admire (and whose sister Pearl, another talented fine artist, did the cover of Salt As Wolves), and we'll be populating the store with things other than music for the first time in a long time, as soon as we have them to sell. You have no idea how long it takes to cast a bronze bust.

LISTENING - Room Enough Time Enough (David Huckfelt), The Rodney Crowell Collection (Rodney Crowell), Follow You (Pieta Brown), Come Hell or High Water (Malcom Holcombe), Who Are You Now (Madison Cunningham), Light Breaks Through EP (Kris Delmhorst)

READING - Deep Survival: Who Lives Who Dies and Why (Laurence Gonzalez), The Radiant Lives of Animals (Linda Hogan), The Cold Millions (Jess Walter), The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive (Phillipe Sands)

COVERED - An English musician named K.B. Bayley released a version of my song Cheap Suit on his new album, Little Thunderstorms, a lovely collection, and well made. I added it to the Spotify playlist of folks singing versions of songs I wrote. It's always a real compliment when someone takes the time to learn and play one of your songs, and I'm always fascinated to hear them.

That's all for now, and it seems like plenty. It's been a long year, but the days are getting longer now.