I drove a couple thousand miles through the desert and mountains, high plains and passes, places where the tent of the sky bellied down in vast folds of cloud and seemed to weight the mind. It rained once in Utah but I never did see any snow. I covered the ground in long silent stretches, eyes screwed down against the western light and scale, where the mind begins to walk around, and diffuse.

I spoke long letters into my phone, edited them in little cafés over greasy tacos and black coffee, worked on them for days in a row, and deleted them. When I was younger I believed there must be some magic combination of words, some alchemical arrangement which if discovered could locate a clarity wholly fugitive otherwise. I don't believe that anymore. Or rather, I believe that clarity is possible but its survival between human beings is rare, and words are at best a form of translation. Most of what we would say isn't sayable, and what we do say doesn't help all that much. I still like to write letters though. 

I got hold of some psilocybin mushrooms from a friend and sat out on the concrete terrace of an empty house perched in the dry scrub above Salida on a night off, wrapped in a blanket with a glass of mezcal and watching a storm form up over the saddle between the Sangres de Cristo and the Sawatch, a lenticular wall cloud that loomed and expanded and snugged down squat on the peaks. Billy always wanted me to try mushrooms, and I had never got around to it, so I cleared the decks and followed my mind around for a night. I thought about him, and other things. It was a strange high, with the knife-edge, slightly euphoric sadness of fresh grief.

Now it's two in the morning back home in America, and I'll land in Paris in an hour, and later Valencia, if all goes well, which it often does, though the traveler cultivates a certain fatalism. 

EUROPE – This month I'll be on tour the Electric Trio formation, trading up lead guitars and vocals with Ry Cavanaugh of Session Americana, on his songs and mine, with John Convertino of Calexico on drums. I grew up with two older brothers and trio is still one of the most natural ways for me to move through the world, which we will do for a few weeks, mostly in Spain and Italy — with a stop in Marseilles and a few sorties up into Austria and Switzerland — to play Valencia, Santander, Valladolid, San Sebastián, and Girona, Spain; Marseilles, France; Savona, Torino, Piangipane, Chiari, Bolzano, and Castelvetro di Modena, and Como, Italy; Innsbruck, Austria; Solothurn, and Stans, Switzerland. If you have friends in these cities and countries, maybe forward them this email, and tell them we are Canadian.

NORTHEAST — I have four shows in April and one in June, in the portion of the Northeast that I can reach by car within a day. My agent and I have a longstanding fun game where she wants me to play New York City and I say no. I haven't played The City, as people call it out here, since before the pandemic, on a rainy night when Billy and I discovered that the tires on my old Volvo were bald, and I decided to bring only a baritone electric guitar. Neither of these things went well. Anyway, I'll be at City Winery Loft on (4/10), and then down at Harmonie Hall in Philadelphia (4/11). The following weekend I'll be at Bass Hall in Peterborough, NH (4/18) and back at the Zenbarn in Waterbury, VT (4/19). In the first week of June I'll back back at the Word Barn (6/5) in Exeter, NH.

That's what I know about right now. Keep your chin up, and we'll see you out there. Maybe.