Twenty-four years into the new century and I’ll turn forty-eight next week, having lived half my life in the old one. Half a life with the phone plugged into the wall and Code-a-Phone micro-cassettes piling up taped messages. If I was gone for a week or two sometimes the tape ran out. A lot of things used to happen that I didn’t know about right away.

Half a life borrowing time on various computers I didn’t own. Boring, boxy appliances. Half a life with the Rand McNally and the Wisconsin gazetteer. Nothing to plug in, nothing to charge. I didn’t read the news. I figured someone would call me if something happened that I needed to know about. One morning I woke up to a friend calling to tell me to turn on the radio, people were flying planes into buildings in New York City.

The new century picked up speed, and nouns became verbs. The graphics improved as the story fell apart. Attention frayed and then it seemed to fracture into kaleidoscopic neuroses. The kids got nervous, and it was hard to blame them. Long slow thoughts gave way to vivid, incomplete impressions like fireworks, spectacle replacing spectacle. You could still identify the gears of a culture but the teeth didn’t meet, everything seemed to spin like a back-eddy at the edge of the river of time. Whoever got famous before just stayed famous, fame having acquired a certain undead quality.

Forty-eight years. The distance between Custer having bone awls driven through his dead ears by the Cheyenne women whose relations he’d killed at Washita Creek, and Coolidge delivering the first radio address to the nation from the White House. A long time, and not so long.

********

Last week I excavated the file cabinet in my office closet. Bundles of gas and electric bills dating back to the '90’s, old tax documents from years when I made less than ten grand, registration and maintenance records for dead cars. I found a pile of old letters tied up with leather bootlaces, and sat crosslegged on the floor dividing them into piles to keep or burn, both piles requiring that I read them again.

Sitting there, I remembered the way that time could lay out like a great field bent to the wind – undulant, sibilant, particular beyond measure – giving the impression of ceaseless, patient energy. I remembered what it felt like to be in my twenties as I read my grandparents slanting hands, read my young friends' wonder about the young lives they were trying to sort out. I wandered around the house, considering to myself whether my sense that everything moves too fast and everyone is too distracted is a function of age, or an accurate read on things. It could be both.

Like Neil Young, one of these days I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter. But I'll have to leave the phone plugged in in the kitchen to get it done. Anyway, no one wants to hear a songwriter wax philosophical. Probably, no one wants to hear a songwriter wax anything. So perhaps, gentle reader, we should get to the brass tacks.

TEXAS – The dead of winter is an appropriate time to go to Texas because my heat threshold – the temperature above which I become mildly angry about everything – is exactly 73F. So I'll play a handful of shows in the first week of February – the 04 Center in Austin, Green Apple Concerts in San Angelo, the Pony Bar in Marfa – with my friend John Convertino, who plays drums on my new and forthcoming album in addition to playing on many of my favorite records by greats like Rainer Ptacek, Richard Buckner, and Calexico. If you know any Texans, tell them we like Shiner Bock and barbecue and we remember, if only just dimly, the Alamo.

NEW ENGLAND – In the first half of March I'll play shows around New England with various friends, backing up Pieta Brown (at the Parlor Room, Northampton MA. 3/3), and also with Martha Scanlan and John Neufeld (including the Cock'n Bull in Galway, NY 3/13, One Longfellow Square in Portland, ME 3/14, Passim, Cambridge 3/17). On the evening of 3/15 I'll play two sets at the Back Porch Festival in Northampton, MA., and get to see some old friends in the process. Details on the TOUR page, as always.

IRELAND – In early May I'll return to Ireland to lay the groundwork for a winter 2025 full band tour there by opening a brief run for England's John Smith, a songwriter whose work I know and admire, though we haven't met in person. We'll fix that with a run of shows that includes Dublin, Limerick, Clonakilty, Cork, and Ballincollig. I might add a few solo things in there, we'll see. More about that later.

My new album THE UNIVERSAL FIRE comes out 9/6 on Fluff & Gravy Records. When there's more to tell rest assured I will tell it in nauseating detail, for months on end. Until then, let's just enjoy the quiet.

WINTER 2024