FOR MOST OF A DECADE I spent about a hundred and twenty nights a year on the road with Billy Conway. When we were out duo he played a suitcase drum kit: a snare drum with a Remo conga head, a ride cymbal, a low-boy (sock cymbal) from the 1930’s, and an empty suitcase that carried all these things and served as the bass drum. He used to laugh when the sound tech would ask him if there was ‘sweet spot’ for mic’ing the suitcase, but he got more sound of out that rig than most drummers could get out of a full kit. I’d bring a couple guitars and an old five-watt amp and between us we could cover all the territory in a real lean, powerful way.

Billy was my best friend. He had done the big dance, found fame with Morphine and before that Treat Her Right, met or played with everyone from Bob Dylan to Bo Diddley, and then walked away from that life. He was gentle and curious, with a horizonless mind. He was literate and funny, philosophical in the sense that he wanted to understand not one thing by itself, but everything together. He was kind to everyone, and patient, and I learned a lot about how to play music, and how to be a person, simply by being in his company. We spent so much time together on the road, talking about this and that, and after years it was hard for me to know where my own ideas ended and his began. It was an endless, meandering river of talk that we camped beside at night and plied again the next day. 

We only had four things on our hospitality rider, four adjectives and four nouns: black coffee, tap water, French wine, and Mexican beer, increasing in quantity as we scaled up to trio or full band. If those things were available we could generally take care of the rest. Billy and I used to take the last Modelos back to the hotel and shoot the shit before we drifted off to sleep, and there were a lot of mornings where the tableau at daylight was two near-empty beer cans, a clock radio, a handful of coins. If it was a painting, the title would have been, ’Still Life with Hangover.’

Then Billy got cancer, and I was on the road alone for the first time in a long time. Long enough that it was hard to remember how to do it, and for some reason my people sent the full band rider out, so that everywhere I went the clubs gave me a bottle of French wine and a twelve-pack of Modelo, and I wasn’t even drinking. The trunk of the rental was swimming with beer and wine, and I was making these long quiet drives alone, seeing the country again, feeling the rhythm of my life – dark early rise and shine, to airport, to rental car counter, to hotel, to green room, to stage, to gas station, to interstate – for the first time without Billy to help me see it. I wrote this song and sent it to him back in Montana like a letter.

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Today 'Solo Modelo,' the second single from THE UNIVERSAL FIRE, is out and streaming anywhere expensive music is treated as free, and a massive corporation pretends this arrangement is an artifact of technology when it’s actually the simple collision of greed and opportunity.

Take it for a ride – it's the feel-good hit of the second half of the summer! – and then go PRE-ORDER the new album on vinyl and compact disc, and come find us on the road this fall around the country.

Pretty please with sugar on top.

THE UNIVERSAL FIRE — NORTH AMERICAN TOUR
Get tickets

9/5 The Word Barn, Exeter, NH *
9/6 Iron Horse Music Hall, Northampton, MA *
9/7 Narrows Center for the Arts, Fall River, MA * 
9/8 Cotuit Center for the Arts, Cotuit, MA 
9/11 Cock ’n Bull, Galway, NY *
9/12 Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, MA * 
9/13 Iridium, NYC, NY *
9/14 The Cut, Gloucester, MA * 
9/20 Millennium Stage, Washington, DC 
9/26 Live from the Divide, Bozeman, MT * 
9/28 Wilma Theatre, Missoula, MT (An Evening with the Black Ram Guitar)
9/29 Monk’s Bar, Missoula, MT * 
10/03 Gold Hill Inn, Boulder, CO *
10/04 Delicious Orchards, Hotchkiss, CO *
10/05 Mercury Cafe, Denver, CO *
11/01 McCabe’s, Santa Monica, CA *
11/03 Sweetwater Music Hall, Mill Valley, CA *
11/06 Mississippi Studios, Portland, OR * 
11/07 Tractor Tavern, Seattle, WA *
11/08 Trout Lake Hall, Trout Lake, WA * 
11/09 Juicebox Public House, Centralia, WA * 
11/10 New Prospect Theatre, Bellingham, WA * 

(December Midwest dates TBA)

*with Erik Koskinen