OREGON – This week I'll play a few shows in the state of Oregon: The Shedd Institute in Eugene, Thursday night (5/30);  The Red Barn in Hood River (5/31); and Mississippi Studios in Portland (6/2) on a co-bill with Jeffrey Martin. Jeffrey's partner Anna Tivel is also a wonderful songwriter, whose gorgeous new album Living Thing comes out this week (5/31). At one point Jeffrey and I discussed forming a band with our wives and calling it Married People, but decided that we'd only ever play on Folk Cruises. In order to make this idea more palatable than the current floating-toilet model of songwriter seafaring, we would buy a second-hand pontoon boat and motor, and a cooler full of beer, and putter around various northern lakes singing at people from thirty or forty feet away. Keep an eye out for this project.

MICHIGAN – In June we'll convene the full band from the new record for a trial run of three shows in Michigan. We'll start up in Marquette at the Ore Dock Brewing Company (6/7) on a split bill with our lead guitar player Erik Koskinen and his band, then we'll head south to headline the twentieth annual Nor-East'r Music and Art Festival in Mio, Michigan (6/8) before heading east to play another split bill with Koskinen in Paw Paw (6/9) at The Lucky Wolf. If you want to hear the new material as intended and before anyone else, you will have to fly to Michigan, land of my forbearers. I have spoken.

RED ANTS PANTS – This July we'll return to the Red Ants Pants Music Festival in White Sulphur Springs, MT (7/26-28), alongside Los Lobos, Sarah Jarosz, Lukas Nelson and other people who are more famous than us. Red Ants is everything a festival should be, and it's also in Montana.

GREG BROWN – My dear friend and fishing companion, my deeply strange uncle and philosopher-poet correspondent, Greg Brown, has released a songbook, and it's fantastic. Necessarily incomplete and also unnerving – collecting forty songs from thirty-one albums and still somehow leaving out ten or twenty songs I would classify as perfect – the book is called Ring Around the Moon and it includes drawings, photos, and stories, as well as the lyrics and chords to songs so various, and so distinctly Greg's, as to form an undeniable document of an undeniable American soul. Go find it.

We'll see you out there, maybe.