January 2025

I took this picture out the window of a rented car twenty years ago. I was 29, on tour in the desert and making long solo drives across Arizona and New Mexico with a bad back, stopping for tacos in towns I'd never heard of, and writing songs in a notebook balanced on my knee on the straightaways. There were a lot of straightaways. I wrote the songs Mesa, AZ, Real Love, and Any Town Will Do that week on consecutive days. They're all pretty much the same song with changing emphases, each expressing some combination of, "What the hell am I doing out here?" "I love my wife," and, "America is batshit crazy." It's comforting, almost, how little things change.

SOUTHWEST – I'm headed back down to the desert in February for a brief run of shows in Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. It'll be me and Eric Heywood rolling duo, and we'll start at the old Club Congress in Tucson (2/2), before heading out to the Musical Instrument Museumin Phoenix (2/4), on to the Whiskey Creek Zócalo (2/5) in the Arenas Valley, the San Miguel Mission in Santa Fe (2/6) and the Old San Ysidro Church in Corrales, NM (2/7), under the auspices of Southwest Roots Music. Finally, we'll head up into Colorado for just one show, in Salida at the A Church (2/8), which sounds like a cult but probably isn't. Think of buying advance tickets as a sort of CSA model for independent music. Club owners enjoy certainty.

SUNDAYS – In January we're holding down Sunday nights at our local beer bar, Floodwater Brewing Co, with Moses on the upright, and Don on a minimal kit, baffled (the drums are baffled the whole time, the drummer only occasionally). Kris Delmhorst has been sitting in, and last week we had old friends Matt Lorenz of the Suitcase Junket, and Zak Trojano, who isn't afraid to play 'The Gambler' by Kenny Rogers when the chips are down. In an era when Americans are spending more time alone than ever and things are starting to get weird, it's the right move to fill a little bar with people and get them all singing, and some of them dancing. This week (6pm) our friends Colleen Stanton and Hannah French from the local string band the Hilltown Ham Hocks are joining us and, presumably, hamming it up. We'll have a few more guests later in the month.

GALWAY, NY – The session-style shows have been so fun that I wrote to my friend Rick at The Cock 'n' Bull in Galway, NY, and asked if he'd let us come out some night to trade songs in that grand old barn full of love and woodsmoke and superannuated farm implements. The food is beautiful, the people indelibly sweet, the sound perfect, the bartending generous bordering on maniacal. Come hear us (1/23). We love this place.

GHOSTS IN THE GARDEN – Kris Delmhorst has released two singles from her new album Ghosts in the Garden (3/7), and though neither of them is the one I sang on, they're still pretty darn great. She has also hoisted the dates for her spring release tour and made the album available for pre-order and pre-save, which you can do right now. It's an unhurried, harmonically complex, gracefully textured collection of songs, with a slew of high-test singers lending their voices. It's various and daunting, light and heavy, and I can't recommend it enough.

READING – Debra Gwartney, I Am a Stranger Here Myself;  Joe Wilkins, The Entire Sky; Mark Spragg, Where Rivers Change Direction; Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest; Phillip Levine, Unselected Poems. Kenneth Patchen, Selected Poems; Chris Dombrowski, Earth Again. Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian.

LISTENING – Skip James, Hard Time Killing Floor Blues; Paul Cebar, One Little Light On; Big Thief, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You; Dave Brubeck, Take Five; Brahms, Sonatas for Cello and Piano No. 1 Op. 38 and No. 2 Op. 99 (performed by Raphael and Peter Wallfisch on cello and piano); Mose Alison, Mose Alison (2-Fer); Slim Dunlap, The Old New Me; Rita Coolidge, And So is Love; Chuck Berry, The Great Twenty-Eight; Paul Simon, Hearts and Bones.

SPOTIFY – The Spotify corporation is helmed by a psychotic arch–capitalist who's made seven billion dollars by paying artists three-hundredths of a penny for each stream of their life's work, though it's worth noting that this rate only applies to those artists whose songs get more than 1,000 streams on his algorithm-gamed platform; fewer than that, those artists make nothing and the money accrued by their work just goes back into the general fund to be paid to artists affiliated with labels that invest in Spotify. Every December Spotify sends me a high-five e-mail full of complex animations describing in great detail the fantastic success – for them – that we have achieved together by screwing me over. Every year it makes me laugh out loud, and also want to punch someone. If you want to support working musicians, find a way to pay them directly for their music. If you want to stream music – and we'll all do – use a service like TIDAL, that sounds better, with higher resolution files, and at least gestures toward fairer payment.

THANKS – I bring the Spotify thing up only because I want to thank everyone who paid to download The Universal Fire: Solo Acoustic Recordings last month. It balanced the books on the year and let me retire my outstanding debts from the album release. When you wonder to yourself, 'How does the music business work?' the answer is, it doesn't. It's a ghost town, and everyone's killing it on the socials while they hemorrhage cash. We're all just trying to get by, and lucky if we do. Thanks for being in my corner all these years, you're my good luck, and the reason I keep writing songs and making records.

Alright, we'll see you there. Try to act cool when that happens.