April 2021
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. We live in a tiny New England village tucked into a river valley, with a single central artery of traffic and commerce connecting one side of the river to the other across an old iron bridge. There’s also a defunct trolley bridge with a footpath, planted over in improbable flowers by women who lost sons in the Great War, and a rail line running the length of town, which, when a freight train comes through, creates for all the world the sense of living in a model railroad set built to 1:1 scale. There are no traffic lights, and no fast food or big box, because there’s nowhere to put it. The village has looked more or less the same for the last sixty or seventy years, neither professionally quaint nor too dire, like some of the old mill towns gone bust.
The policeman directing traffic was there because a while ago Hollywood discovered our town, and since then two or three feature films have been made here, and now they’re shooting a television series. There’s something distinctly American about living through one of the more harrowing winters in recent memory only to have a film company descend on your little town as the crocuses and daffodils bloom, using an array of heavy machinery to decorate the main drag for Christmas, and covering only recently cleared sidewalks in fake snow, in order to make a TV show about a serial killer.
What else? The magnolia buds are falling open, the fishing has turned on. I started following people on Instagram, something I had consciously avoided for years, having a standing policy to neither like nor follow anything on the internet, even my wife, but which made it hard to understand what people actually do there, for instance on Instagram. Also, when you follow no one, some kind of algorithm tries to decipher your interests on the basis of whatever draws your eye when you stumble onto the search page, and over time Instagram decided that my great passions in life are Yoga instructors, sharks, vintage guitars, big fish, and surfing, something I have never tried or thought much about. Surfing, that is. It began to make me feel weird, and I thought I had better start following some people.
I went up to Billy’s farm last week and spent a day stacking a few cords of new cut oak for next winter, talking and working in shirt sleeves for hours on a beautiful, bright day. He’s doing well, living through the endless chemotherapy sessions, working hard on the good days, laying low when he has to. He's keeping his lamp trimmed and burning, and he sends his love to everyone.
Meanwhile, there are actually a few shows to announce this month, the first one online this Sunday night, the others outdoors and local to New England in May. It’s been a long year, and for the first time in my peripatetic adult life I’ve learned to miss things. People, places, certain frames of mind and ways of being, which have been unavailable. I’m awfully ready to play music with my old friends.
LIVE DEADSTOCK - Sunday night (4/18) I’ll play the last of the series of livestream shows dedicated to my solo albums, this one covering my December 2020 release, Deadstock: Uncollected Recordings 2005–2020, which is a collection of studio recordings that didn’t make it onto albums, and alternate versions of songs recorded elsewhere. I'll play through the songs and talk and a little about writing them. I had enough material on hand for two discs and cut it down to one, so I’ll try to throw in some of the songs that didn’t make the cut for the album of songs that didn’t make the cut. If you suffer from what Morphine called Sunday Afternoon Weightlessness, get a beer and tune in, here. Maybe try putting the La-Z-Boy in the garage, and leaving the garage door open. This creates a sort of liminal space, and it's always worked well for Billy.
NEW ENGLAND - In May we'll play a few outdoor and properly socially distanced shows within a hundred miles of home. If you’re able to get out this way without any unnecessary risk to the public, I hope you’ll come and find us. The late breaking ’21 tour season starts with a show at the Barn at Egremont, MA. (5/7), followed by a show the next night in Exeter, NH., at the Word Barn Meadow (5/8). The following weekend we’ll play Black Birch Vineyards (5/16) in Hatfield, MA., in a concert put on by our fiends at Signature Sounds Presents.
SALE - You’ll find that we’ve reduced our prices on various albums in the store, so that the non-standard releases (Live in Portland, Redbird Live, Horse Latitude Demo’s, etc) are now marked down to either $5 or $7.50, the perfect thing to throw in the cart with a songbook and t-shirt, once those go on sale later this month (we'll send a separate email to announce those, just finishing up the details). You could perhaps buy four of each, and hand them out to all your friends who still own CD players. I think we can all agree the main thing is that we need to get them out of my basement.
That’s all for now. Merry Christmas everybody.
