June / July / August

I have nothing to say and it will doubtless take a few paragraphs to say it. Alone in Wyoming for some months as young man, I arrived with ambition. The first morning alone on the property, the nearest neighbor miles away, I set a wrought iron table in the yard with my typewriter fronting distant blue mountains, and wrote songs, poems, and letters. I filled pages in a small black book recording the contents of my mind, impressions and opinions. I worked every day until the coffee wore off, and then I drove out to fish. At night I read by the fire, and drank.

By the time I left, I found could scarcely write a sentence. Not from loneliness, or dullness of mind, but because what really interested me was the sky, and the way the wind put the grass down, or hustled cloud shadows across the wide bowl of the valley. The landscape bled me. In comparison to the actuality of the world, my mind had all the compelling majesty of a B-movie projected onto an old bed sheet. It was a good lesson, and I still mostly feel that way.

But there are shows on the books in July and August, and I expect to be working this fall, barring the unforeseen, and I figured I should probably tell someone. As my daughter used to say, frustrated with any attempt at help, I am the one the telling the story. So let this suffice for summer, season of push-ups, lawn mowers, cocktails, mare's tails, bare feet, dry flies, barbecue, thunder.

COCK'N'BULL – July 7th we'll go back to visit our old friends at the Cock 'n' Bull in Galway, New York. This has become one of our favorite joints in the last few years, a rambling old barn, well off the path, drawing from a wide rural area, serving great food and curating a surprisingly eclectic mix of shows. These folks do it right. We'll be outdoors, and you should come get your supper and listen. We'll be rolling in the trio formation, with Moses on bass, Billy on the suitcase.

STONE CHURCH – July 9th we return to the Stone Church in Brattleboro, Vermont. It's a sweet room in a sweet town, a town I knew would be good years before I ever set foot there, having heard Greg Brown's immortal alliterative opening line, Sitting in a bar in Brattleboro / Thinking about one of your songs. Billy and I will play duo on that one. Get your tickets, and make some dinner reservations in town. Let's help the clubs and restaurants get their feet under them.

RED ANTS PANTS – Sunday, July 25th, we'll be making our first full band appearance since 2019, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Red Ants Pants Festival with our dear friends in White Sulphur Springs, Montana. This is one of the great festivals, mainly because it's in rural Montana, run and staffed almost entirely by women, which is something we should consider for all three branches of the U.S. government if this experiment with millionaire white guys doesn't pan out. We're on the Sunday bill with friends Martha Scanlan and Hayes Carll, and also Taj Mahal, who at this point is basically the Mountains and Waters Sutra with a guitar.

GREEN RIVER – August 28th, I'll play a midday solo set, and then a special late evening duo show with Kris Delmhorst in the historic roundhouse at the Franklin County Fairgrounds, in Greenfield, MA., as part of the Green River Festival, run by our old friends at Signature Sounds. Nice to bring it all back home, and keep it in the family.

LINE 3 – Today people in Minnesota are tying themselves to earth movers and giant drills, getting arrested and beat up for trying to halt construction of the Enbridge Line 3 Pipeline that would carry millions of barrels of Alberta tar sands through the delicate wetlands at the headwaters of the Mississippi River, and through ancestral and treaty-protected Anishinaabe rice lands. It's a watershed moment for climate, but you may have heard nothing about it. We know enough to know we can't keep extracting and burning fossil fuels. We know it takes millenia to build a complex ecosystem, and hours to destroy one. You can elect politicians on a platform, but if you don't keep hollering, they don't have the political capital to enact it. Sign the petition against the pipeline, tell your people, tell your reps.

LISTENING – Neil Young: Young Shakespeare / Look Out for My Love (Neil Young Archives Vol. II disc 9), Rodney Crowell: The Rodney Crowell Collection, John Lee Hooker: The Big Soul, Erik Koskinen: Cruising Paradise, Doris Day: You're My Thrill, Julian Lage: Squint. James Joyce: Ulysses (BBC Radio 4 reading), Joni Mitchell: Blue (Worth saying, I listened to Blue every day coming home during the last year of high school, just lay on my bed and listened, drifting in and out of sleep. Initially because the record bothered me. I'd never heard anyone sing flat on purpose, slightly bending a long note out of true like a horn player, for the tension it creates – I was unaware of either jazz or fresh garlic until college – and then later because the world it creates is undeniable, whole. I had never heard a woman writing with such perfect freedom and harrowing self-knowledge, joy, desire. She didn't write like a man; she assumed prerogatives that men take for granted. She didn't write in response to the strictures or pieties of gender, she ignored them, because they were beneath notice. A stand-alone expression of deep humanity).

READING – John Muir: A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, Frank B. Linderman: Plenty Coups, Chief of the Crows, Gretel Ehrlich: Unsolaced, Jim Harrison: Collected Ghazals, Craig Lesley: Winterkill, Tony Earley: Jim the Boy, Kevin Barry: Night Boat to Tangier, Antonio Machado: Times Alone, Kurt Vonnegut: Bluebeard, John Steinbeck: Cannery Row, Annie Dillard: An American Childhood, Marilynne Robinson: The Death of Adam, William Gibson: All Tomorrow's Parties.

That's it for now folks. There may be other shows announced here or there, and perhaps I'll get to that all-request livestream if I can get the tech side sorted again. I expect to be back in Montana on tour in September, and I'll hope to see you there, or somewhere.