AUGUST 2023

It's been a hot, rainy summer and what I'd really like to do all day is paint, but modern life is a series of banal instructions delivered directly to the ear with all the subtlety of a car alarm, and certain things must be accomplished. For instance, it's been pointed out to me that my career as an entertainer works best if people know that I'm playing.

SUN HOUSE – In August I'll return to Montana briefly to share the stage at the Wilma theater in Missoula (8/11) in celebration of the publication of SUN HOUSE, the long awaited novel from my dear old friend and fishing pal David James Duncan. My longtime bandmate Eric Heywood and I will provide musical illustration and counterpoint as Duncan reads selections from the novel and tells the story of its conception and execution to Montana Public Radio's Lauren Korn and Justin Angle. People have asked if it will be streamed, and I have no idea. I'm just a guitar player.

NOWHERE ELSE – I don't play a lot in the summer because when it comes to playing music on stage I avoid sunlight like a vampire, but there are always a few things that are too good to pass up. Labor Day weekend Eric Heywood and I will play the Nowhere Else Festival in Martinsville, Ohio. Curated every year by our friends in the band Over the Rhine, Nowhere Else brings together art and music for three days in rural Ohio and this year features a diverse roster including Willie Tea Taylor, David Wax Museum, Scott Mulvahilland Ben Sollee, as well as performances by Over the Rhine both nights backed, by our old friends Jay Bellerose and Jennifer Condos, the very Jennifer Condos who played bass on my Horse Latitudes album, the lovely badass herself. Will she sit in? She may. Let's try to play our cards right.

In September there will be a few shows in the Northeast. Then we'll play Alberta, Montana, and Washington state in October, Colorado and New Mexico in November, probably a couple shows in the upper Midwest in December. It's a series of declarative sentences that don't do anything like justice to the work itself or to the miles, airplanes and rental cars that scaffold it, and of course in August none of it seems real.

Back in January we cut twenty-two new songs at Wavelab studio in Tucson, and whatever makes it on to the next record will be mixed and mastered this month, aiming for a winter release. More on that later, when there's something more to tell you, and once we've hired an expensive publicist to help convince people to steal it from us.

Keep an eye on it, whatever it is.