I got up early and built a fire in the scar out by the barn. I read for an hour as the light came up and then decided to rig up and fish. Getting out of the car at the turnout I realized I had an appointment at the dentist but figured, hell, I have an hour, and hustled down-canyon a quarter mile or so at an angle of fifty degrees. When I reached the river, falling quietly through a long, deep bend where I have never encountered another human, I took out my phone to set a timer and realized that the car clock was still on Midwest time, and I didn't have an hour at all. In fact I was late. I looked at the river the way I once looked out the window during math class, turned on my heel and charged back up the hill, drove to the dentist one town over with all the windows down and the sweat drying on my back. The hygienist didn't ask why I was wearing neoprene socks.

When I got out of the chair I located a second cup of coffee, and still feeling obscurely slighted I decided to follow a smaller river on a road that turns to dirt a few miles north of town and stays that way well into Vermont, ten miles up. It's a river I know well but hadn't fished yet this season, and the water was summer-low but healthy after all the rain. I fished for two or three hours and never saw anything larger than a Redbelly Dace, an endangered species of minnow so pretty that a small school of them in clear water can redeem a whole day with a graceful blur.

I thought about the July floods and the volume of water that had scoured the drainage, a visible line ten or fifteen feet up the banks in snarls of driftwood and knotweed stalks tangled in the brush. I thought about the fish biding time in the dark turbulence of a storm-blown river. I thought about the various work I could get done if I went home. Then I drove to another small river one drainage over, to a beat of water between two long skinny reaches, bordered by a farm on one side and wooded hills on the other. It's a place where the bones of the river aren't negotiable, the bed having migrated back and forth across the valley floor in the millenia since the last glacier disappeared and settled for now where a ledge of metamorphic gneiss turns it sternly toward a brief series rocky pools that, in other years, reliably holds three or four large fish. I cut through the woods to enter the water below the last riffle and crossed to fish upstream. Nada.

I drove south, following the river back toward the little town where I live, through the sparse strange settlement of post-industrial New England, thinking about nothing. On a whim, time by now having become the abstraction that it is, I pulled off to fish below a wooden low-head dam that I often visit in the spring, and where I immediately hooked a large Rainbow on a dry fly, playing it through the backing water of a circulating pool as it leapt clear in three arcing jumps, and bringing it to hand without taking it from the water but reaching down and quickly turning it in my hand like a slab of wet light at the edge of a storm, to stare at it a moment before letting it go.

Summer's over, and the trees and flowers look like a 1970 Kodak, the colors dry and desaturated, the light taking on an ochre cast. The dew is heavy and the mornings are dark and cool. I fished the Bear River in Iowa, the Bad Axe and Mud Creek in Wisconsin, The Cascade in Minnesota, Rock Creek in Montana. I swam in Lake Superior. I sat around the fire singing, I slept outside. I don't need to tell you any of this, but last month my friend Alan said I was phoning it in, and I thought I should try harder.

NOWHERE ELSE – 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 Mulvahill and Ben Sollee, as well as performances by Over the Rhine both nights backed by Jay Bellerose and Jennifer Condos, old friends and one of the great rhythm sections in American music. They'll sit in with Eric and I as well. Hot damn.

NORTHEAST – In September I'll do a brief solo tour of the Northeast, playing the Cock'n Bull in Galway, NY (9/13), the 443 Social Club and Lounge in Syracuse (9/14), with a stop back home to play Floodwater Brewing Co. in Shelburne Falls, MA (9/15), then up to Nova Arts in Keene, NH (9/16) and out to The Rockwell in Somerville, MA (9/17). I toured solo for about ten years and grew to dislike it, mainly because I was bored with the company. But over the course of Billy's illness and then during the pandemic, I had to learn how to do it again, and I found I didn't mind it anymore.

ALBERTA / MONTANA / WASHINGTON – In October I'll play a few show in western Canada, up around Calgary where I've never been, with shows at Rig Hand Distillery (10/11), King Eddy (10/12), and The Windmill (10/13-14) before dropping down into eastern Washington for a show at the Sun Mountain Lodge in Winthrop, WA (10/17), then down into Montana for a real cool split-bill trading songs with my friend Martha Scanlan at Monks Bar in Missoula (10/19), and returning to The Attic in Livingston (10/20) and One-Legged Magpie (10/21). I'll be joined by Eric Heywood on the run, on pedal steel and electric guitar. If you know any Canadians, maybe tell them we're coming out for a rip.

SOUTHWEST / COLORADO – In November I'll be running around Colorado and the Southwest, in December perhaps there'll be something in the Midwest. Not sure all the where and when. Those dates apparently aren't all confirmed yet so maybe just don't make any plans in those months if you live there?

MOSES — If you’ve seen me play or bought one of my records in the last fifteen years there’s a good chance you’ve heard Jeremy Moses Curtis. Moses is Captain Gravity, the guy with a bass guitar who holds it all down, arriving promptly on the first beat of the measure, looking sharp and smelling nice. He used to be in Booker T’s band — yes, that Booker T — but I stole him. He’s a dear friend and a great musician, and an ace songwriter. This past year Moses recorded an album of his own songs, produced by Kris Delmhorst, and available all over the world on the Blueblade Records imprint starting 10/6. But TODAY on Bandcamp Friday, you can PRE-ORDER Midlife Chrysler and know that the proceeds will go directly to Moses. It’s a fantastic, bone-deep collection of songs that “…locates the tension between here and gone, love and motion, music and silence, work and calling in a country where the exceptions make all the rules and everything feels like a racket except music, the big mystery, the thing that still brings people together.” Get on it.

The new record is finally mixed and soon I'm going to have to start talking about it so I can raise enough money to print the thing and hire a publicist to convince everyone to steal it from me. These are complex times. For now, let's all just agree that it's the best thing I've ever made and I'll probably retire on the proceeds after winning three or four Grammies and starring in a reality TV show about my fascinating life. I don't want to give away too much, but there will be startling personal revelations and dramatic reversals of fortune. Like when I caught that fish the other day.

SEPTEMBER 2023