Sundown Brings Laurel Canyon To The Lower East Side
Seems kind of perfect that a band that calls itself Sundown would return triumphantly from its cross-country “Rockwood To The Roxy” tour just a few minutes after, well, sundown on the longest, sunniest day of the year, right?
Sure, a thunderstorm raged outside just before the acoustic trio began its standing-room-only Rockwood Music Hall performance Thursday night (the summer solstice), but not even a grimy New York City downpour could dampen the band’s spirits.
The band — comprised of singer/songwriters Casey Shea, Hutchinson and Andy Stocks — took the stage stoically, gathering themselves in a tight semi-circle around a single microphone. The trio opened with a spine tingling, three-part, a capella intro to “In The Morning,” then began its hour-long, velvet-gloved assault on all that is slick, cynical, or artificial.
What distinguishes Sundown (and much of the musical community sprung up around Rockwood Music Hall founder Ken Rockwood’s intimate Lower East Side venue) is its anachronism in the pop culture strata. Sundown’s songs, while not derivative, are reminiscent of a hazy, lazy, bygone era before Pro Tools, drum loops, remixes or mash-ups. Grounded by acoustic guitars and lush harmonies and adorned with only the occasional harmonica or shaker, the band’s music sounds like something one would hear wafting from a front porch somewhere in Laurel Canyon circa 1974. They’re the Lost Boys of Crosby, Still & Nash.
Moreover, like Joni Mitchell’s “California” and Led Zepellin’s “Goin’ To California,” songs like “West Coast Callin’” and “Maybe Denver” demonstrate the band’s guileless mythologizing of the American West. Instead of being cloying or quaint, though, the band’s earnestness makes it refreshing and endearing.
It was apparent that the guys had spent the last six weeks traveling, performing and recording together (chronicled in the band’s blog) as they traded casual smiles, winks and nods throughout the set. And it was apparent that the audience was starved for the band’s brand of substantive authenticity as it emphatically called out for an encore. The band delivered with “Youth Is Wasted On The Young,” returning the room to hushed reverence.
The club was suspiciously populated by thirtysomething A&R types, leading one to believe that these intimate Rockwood performances might not last much longer. For the boys of Sundown, one can only hope as much.
Editor’s note: The above review was published to MTV News’ new live concert blog, You R Here.
Stars And Hearts And Broken Things (Part I)
I was absolutely clueless after college.
Other than recording “Always Almost There” with Steve Feldman (see below), and spending as much time as possible with my then-girlfriend, I didn’t know where to go or what to do.
I temped for exactly two days that summer. The first job was cleaning up an out-of-wack filing system at the venerable Carrier Corporation (A United Technologies Company) which I did poorly in one afternoon. I’m sure I left the files worse than I found them. The second gig was unpacking a few hundred PCs for some nameless, faceless Office Space. I lopped off a chunk of my thump with a boxcutter, and left before noon.
Great use of a dual degree in journalism and creative writing, huh?
Come fall, then, I was adrift. My lease was up, and my bank account was empty. I half-heartedly interviewed for media jobs in Philadelphia, but couldn’t stomach the notion of moving back to my hometown.
Cue the big brother.
Christofer had moved to Saratoga Springs in the spring of my senior year, and had became something of a fixture at Smokey Junglefrog shows. He had a spare bedroom in a big, old, drafty apartment, and encouraged me to move in with him. Rent was $176, the company great, and Saratoga seemed as close to Telluride or Portland as I was gonna get. So I packed my Takamine, my Cannondale and my futon matteress, and drove east.
Within a few weeks (and following a harrowing five-day stint assembling medical parts), I was working a few jobs. My primary gig (forty-hours a week at six bucks) was at a coffee shop called Uncommon Grounds. This was the ’90s, of course, so coffee shops were new, and novel. There was a whiff of Bohemia to it all. Secondarily, I was writing features for The Saratogian (at the time, A Gannet Family Newspaper).
Both gigs offered me access into the small town. I met all sorts of cool people, like Eric Gilman. Eric had just graduated from nearby Skidmore Colle (where Creative Though Matters), and was spending an innordiate amount of time reading philosophy at the shop. He lived just across the street from Chris and I, smoked pot, liked The Dead, and played guitar. Done and done.
Eric and I began performing and recording together sometime in the spring of 1994. That’s his second guitar you hear sporadically on “Bloom” (I distinctly remember himwarming his hands over candles in Carl Landa’s rediculously chilly recording studio). With “Bloom,” though, we were only getting started.
Rockin’ On The Horse-Sized Pills
Steve Feldman and I met in Syracuse, New York, right around the time when my band, Smokey Junglefrog, was nominated for an inaugural Syracuse Area Music Award. We lost.
But Steve won Producer of the Year. Smokey and Steve recorded to albums together, “Au Gratin” and “She’s My Niece” (don’t look for ‘em, they’re long out of print).
I graduated Syracuse in the summer of 1993 and immediately began recording my solo debut with him, a limited edition cassette (this is well before CD replication was remotely affordable) called “Always Almost There.”
Five of those songs (“Crossing To Safety,” “Wax & Feathers,” “Rebecca,” “Flood,” and “Keelhauling”) kick of my two-cd, twenty-five song “Besides” compilation which is conveniently available now on iTunes.
Steve’s Penguin Studio was a converted garage behind his brother’s house out on the pastoral, grayish edges of The Salt City. His control room was state of the art, more rock ‘n roll than anything I’d ever seen: two inch analogue reel to reel, 32 Channel Mackie mixing console with Atari automation, and all the outboard gear a guy with nothing but a beat up Takamine and stolen Shure mic could want.
Recording my first album with Steve was an adventure. Some days, I’d arrive before he’d even woken up. I’d climb the stairs to his bedroom above the studio to find him tangled in sheets with some underage groupie he’s picked up playing guitar for one of his many side projects. He’d wipe his long hair out of his eyes, squint into the daylight, and groan through a thin smile, “Can we take today off?”
One morning, after I’d managed to coax him downstairs, he asked, “Do you have any pills or anything?” When I responded to the negative, he disappeared upstairs. Moments later, he reappeared with a pair of horse-sized pills and a bottle of Maker’s Mark.
“What are they?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.”
I swallowed ‘em anyway.
It’s difficult to remember now, but I was still young enough to think I had a real shot in the music business. This is, of course, in the age well before the Internet, mp3s, online distribution. Back then, it was all about “getting signed.” It was one in a million. Still, I thought I could. So naive.
Nonetheless, it was an exciting time. SAMMY-winning producer Steve Feldman was a major player in the (in retrospect minor) Syracuse alternative scene. When we needed a French horn (and we did, unbelievably, for “Keelhauling”), Steve picked up the phone and Bedouine AJ Mann showed up. When we needed a female vocalist (as we did for “Rebecca”), Steve picked up the phone and Karen Savoca walked in (with, it should be noted, a strangely percussive beaded gourd under her arm which was later put to good use on “Wax & Feathers”).
I spent an inordiate amount of time at the Syracuse University library that summer, which is odd given that prior to graduation, I’d spent little time there at all. In the waning days of college, though, I sought the endless rows and columns of books like air to an asmatic.
In those days before the Internet, bands send postcards to promote shows. In those days before Photoshop, we cobbled those postcards together at Kinkos with text book art and a glue stick. In that summer of limbo between college and the working world, I felt aimless, lost, and confused.
Little surprise, then, that a randomly discovered 18th Century illustration of The Four Winds — literally, clouds with faces blowing on the Earth — came to visually represent how I felt.
Little surprise, also, that I filled the liner notes with writings unearthed in my summer at the library.
I released “Always Almost There” in October 1993, at Sophie’s Coffee Shop on the corner of South Crouse and East Adams. Allen Czelusniak of The Syracuse New Times described it thusly:
From the quotations pulled from Coleridge, Dickinson, Eliot and Ovid in the liner notes, it’s safe bet that Benjamin Wagner’s “Always Almost There” is a record better suited for serious listening than background music at a keg party. The material here is highly personal, well-crafted and features some of the finest local talent ranging from the tempered guitar work of Steve Feldman to the sweet singing of The Mind’s Eye’s Karen Savoca.
The introspective nature and acoustic foundation of the songs put the album in the Toad the Wet Sprocket or R.E.M. vein, but this is not a sound-alike record, but rather Wagner on display. Over soft-strumming, airy guitars, Wagner sings with strength, clarity and passion.
It seems as if this record is an artistic release for Wagner, something he may not have been able to do in his former band, the SAMMY-nominated (for best new artist) Smokey Junglefrog.
Recorded at Penguin Studios and produced by Wagner and Feldman, the quality of this recording surpasses most on the local scene. From the fat guitar feedback of “Flood,” to the perfectly mixed trumpet fills of AJ Mann on “Keelhauling,” “Always Almost There” is as much a sonic statement as a personal one from Wagner.
In fact, the release — despite the summer-long effort behind it — was comprised of fifty cassette copies. When those fifty cassettes sold out, “Always Almost There” went out of print.
It may surprise you to learn that I don’t spend much time listening to myself. Or it may surprise you to learn that I do, in fact, listen to myself. Listening to “Crossing To Safety” — a title ripped from author Wallace Stegner — I am neither nostalgic nor dispassionate. Something stirs in me, sure. The pictures fade, but the memories last. Still, they shape shift, growing more nebulous, and less tangible every day.
“Fiction,” Stegner writes, “Is the art of making truth out of faked materials.”
In all of its ernestness, guilelessness, and hope, “Always Almost There” sounds like the work of a fictional boy. In retrospect, I could not possibly have believed any of those things to be true, let alone thought that a French horn would sound good in a pop song.
It’s not fiction, though. I know this for sure because it’s there forever set to tape, then made into ones and zeros. Reissued, remastered, and repackaged, it’s the sound of growing up set to guitars — horse-sized pills and all.
My Pretty Nice Little Sunday With Tyler Durden, Frank The Tank, And Sven
Driving to Elizabeth this morning, I was reminded of two classic film scenes.
Abbigail and I moved into our new apartment together nearly three months ago. Still, our dining room table lacks chairs. Our books are stacked on shoddy, foldable shelves. And our twenty inch television rests on a metallic microwave stand from Lechters.
And so Abbi and I found ourselves headed eighteen miles south on the New Jersey Turnpike to the Ikea in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
As I drove out of the Lincoln Tunnel and looked back at Manhattan, I thought of “Fight Club.” In one scene, director David Fincher illustrates the vapid, compulsive desires of a consumer culture in one 360° spin around Edward Norton’s character’s apartment. Product description pop up like thought bubbles. Instead of insight or dialogue, though, there is marketting speak and price points.
“I’d flip through catalogues,” Norton’s Narrator says, “And wonder, ‘What dining set defines me?’”
We stopped at the first rest stop outside of the city to fill the tank with gas; it was the least I can do to thank Christofer and Jennifer for loaning me the truck. Waiting in the full serve line at the Exxon surrounded by every color, stripe, socio-economic and psychographic of person, I was reminded of Bono’s line in the bridge of “Bullet The Blue Sky.”
“Outside it’s America!” he chants like a Pentacostal preacher. “Outside it’s America.”
I think of that lyric virtually every time I step off of the island of Manhattan. Suddenly, I am comfronted by the bulk store loving, NASCAR cheering, Red Bull swillin’, honest-to-goodness, real life American. You know what I mean. People who don’t read Page Six. People who buy books because Oprah says so.
Inside too.
Within just five minutes at the Swedish furniture giant’s behemoth, there in the shadow of Newerk Airport (renamed “Newark Liberty in the wake of September 11), I spot a father and son in matching “Proud To Be An American” t-shirts. Couples lounge on $199 couches. Husbands measure. Wives point. Children whiz by on those roller skate shoes.
Moments later I spot a young Latina woman sporting a red t-shirt with the letters U-S-A bedazzled across her chest.
“Every kitchen needs an aloe plant,” she says to her boyfriend, before disppearing into a room full of afforably-priced light fixtures.
I am easily overwhelmed in big box stores largely, once would think, based on the fact that I have little experience in their oversized aisles. That, I think, might be the point, though: overwhelm the consumer into submission so his only response to a lime green cutting board adorned with hot pink lemon slices is, “Oh,my old cutting board is looking kind of, um, old. I should buy a new cutting board.” And then he spots the matching spatula set.
Because he’s an outstanding texter with a terrific sense of irony, I hit Chris Abad from the edge of the tupperware aisle.
“Ikea is it’s own special hell,” I said.
“Agreed,” he replied. “Have you purchased a rug named Sven?”
I have a sense of humor, but still, I have to acknolweldge that we’re consumers. We’re by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty — these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra…
Martha Stewart.
Martha Stewart’s polishing the brass on the Titanic.
“You buy furniture,” author Chuck Palahniuk writes. “You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled.”
I worry about consumption. I mean, I like stuff. And our apartment was certainly lacking (pun not intended) some key pieces. But where does it stop? Before this week, I didn’t even know what a charger plate was. Or a euro sham (nomenclature that couldn’t be more apt). I mean, I thought I was advanced for knowing what a duvet was.
A few weeks ago, Christofer and I were sitting on Abbi and my terrace drinking beer.
“Just over that building,” I said pointing, “is the antenna of the Empire State Building. If we had the terrace on the tenth floor,” I said gazing skyward, “we could see everything.”
“That’s how they get ya’,” he said.
Aspiration.
“You’re trapped in your lovely nest,” Palahniuk writes. “And the things you used to own, now they own you.”
Driving back to the apartment, the rear gate of the Ford Escape tied down with twine and loaded to the gills with fine, particle board furniture, I thought of another classic film scene. In “Old School,” Will Ferrell’s character, Frank Ricard, slowly discovers just how emasculating married life can be.
“Well, um, actually a pretty nice little Saturday, we’re going to go to Home Depot. Yeah, buy some wallpaper, maybe get some flooring, stuff like that. Maybe Bed, Bath, & Beyond, I don’t know, I don’t know if we’ll have enough time.”
We didn’t.
We still need dining room chairs.
That said, our brand-new Lack bookcase (the one I developed blisters building on account of that odd, shoddy, octagonal Ikea tool) sure does ground the living room in a classic-but-modern sensability.
Well Drinks
There’s a modest little bar on 82d and Amsterdam called The Dead Poet.
Even before I moved to the Upper West Side in 2004 and began to consider it my neighborhood hang, I was a fan of the place. I found it online some years ago searching for a location to celebrate my brother Christofer’s 30th birthday. I liked the name, and that it was described as “nothing fancy.”
New York City is full of bars that just try too hard. They’re either too thematic, to chotchkied, too hip, too exclusive, or too corporate. The Dead Poet is none of the above.
It’s nothing fancy, really, which is what makes it special. It’s just a long, narrow room. The Irish immigrants might have called a “railroad flat.”
There’s barely room for the bar itself, let alone the pool table in the back. The walls are simple red bricks, but adorned shelves of dusty books and framed phrases like “An alcoholic is anyone you don’t like who drinks more than you” and “Beer before liquor never quicker.”
Over the years, The Dead Poet has become our default. When I lived on 80th Street, it was dead center between Chris and my apartment. And now, it’s well worth the 25 block trip. I meet up with the guys there. I grab a post-race burger there. And I introduce people there: my father and his wife first met Abbi over a well-poured pint of Guiness.
Christofer called unexpectadly yesterday afternoon, asking if I wanted to meet for a beer around nine o’clock. I had a meeting on the Upper East, I said, but would be only too happy to walk across the park and share a pint with him and our buddies Jason Thompson and John Rosenblatt. When I called a few hours later, though, the plans had changed. The DP was out. Jason’s apartment — complete with his four-day-old son with wife Audrey Puente — was in.
I was bummed, though I’m still not entirely sure why. I’m not sure whether it’s that plans changed, or plans changed to include wives and babies. I’m not sure whether it’s because I really wanted one of the Dead Poet’s famed greasy burgers, or whether I wanted to be called “sweety” pejoratively by the red-headed bartender. I’m not sure it’s whether I sought the refuge of a loud jukebox, or my own small fraternal order.
Either way, I opted out.
I considered my disappointment as I walked through Central Park. The air was thick with humidity. The trees were heavy with the afternoon’s thunderstosm. The light was beginning to fade over The Reservoir, leaving the sky a deep purple streaked with pink whisps of clouds.
I called Chris as I stepped across West Park Drive.
“Have you left yet?”
We agreed to meet at 82d & Broadway, then share a cab to Jason’s.
“Gimme five minutes,” I said.
Crossing Amsterdam, I decided to stop into a corner store for a couple of beers and a bag of chips. Surely, I thought, Jay would be thirsty. I grabbed a six of Harp (from the brewers of Guiness!) and a bag of Smartfood Popcorn (Frito Lay, who knew?), and walked towards the checkout — where I ran smack-dab into my brother.
He was holding his cell phone to his ear, and looking at me quizzically.
“Let’s go next door and have a beer,” he said. “I’ll go to Jay’s later.”
I returned the beer to the freezer, the chips to the shelf, and waved at the clerk who smiled as I passed.
“We’ll be back.”
The bar was crowded, but we found a table in the back and ordered a few pints. And then — as we’ve done so many times before — we eased our way into conversations. We began safely on the subject of work (a subject rife with developments for both of us these days), then moved on to our parents, in-laws, and spouses.
There’s little time for intimacy these days. Life conspires against us. Work demands our time and attention. New families need tending to grow. And everything moves so fast. That’s why, as we split a cab home just a few hours later, I felt happy inside in a small, subtle way.
By the time my head hit the pillow, I’d be wrapped up in anxieties over the new media paradigm shift, the need to be sure my new CDs are on iTunes and rehearse for my upcoming shows, and the fact that our honeymoon remains unpolanned.
But for the moment, waving off each other’s money there on the corner of 67th and Eleventh, we were the only men in the world who know each other like we do, and know well enough to make enough time.
Sunshower
I managed to sneak out of the office just after seven o’clock last night.
46th Street was teeming with tourists awash in smoke from a dozen gyro grills on account of the Taste of Times Square festival. I took to Eighth Avenue, skirted a cab, dodged a bus, and headed west.
I was listening to a U2 b-side, a seven-minute, big-beat remix of Cole Porter’s “Night & Day,” through a pair of oversized Sony studio headphones on account of my iTunes earbuds shorting out over the weekend.
On the West side of 49th Street, just beneath the shadow of Worldwide Plaza (location of my first full-time day job in New York: Lifetime Television for Women), I felt a drop of water smack me on my forehead. And then another. And another.
I looked up. The sky was clear. A few blocks away, just above the patch of grass and concrete where 49th Street touches the Hudson River, the sun was shining a furious, deep orange. Through an archway of green foliage stretching over the street, sheets of rain fell backlit by a glorious sunset.
Soon enough, my sunglasses were dotted with raindrops. My jacket was flecked with moisture. My head was soaking wet. Umbrellas began to sprout like spring flowers. Pedestrians scurried.
I was growing soggier by the minute. It dawned on me that my recently tailored sport coat might be ruined, and that my leather shoes might be sullied. Still, I couldn’t help but smile.
What better illustration of life’s folly — the constant, sometime subtle but always meaningful juxtaposition of high and low, light and dark, happy and sad — could there be than the sunshower?
Sun, and rain. Perfect together.
At the same time.
I Know… But I Like It
I gave Ethan his first guitar when he was just six-months-old. It was a bright red wooden thing; a bit more than a toy, but less than a real acoustic guitar.
A bit overzealous? Perhaps. And that says nothing of the bongos, the piano, or the maracas I gave him — all before his first birthday.
I’m not entirely sure what drove me to try and expose Ethan to playing music so early (or, moreover, still). It’s no different than those annoying uncles who always wanna’ play catch or go to the ice skating rink. Sitting there this evening, watching him fumble for a chord and feign to strum along with his father, the whole jumble of hopes and dreams and expectations for our children seemed writ large on his blank expression.
Abbi was in South Carolina doing recon for the wedding, so mine was something of a bachelor weekend. That I spent the bulk of it inside reading “Walk On: The Spiritual Journey Of U2″ and watching PBS documentaries (plus the occasional episode of “Who’s Wedding Is It Anyway?”) says something about me, I guess.
Still, my hangover from Saturday night’s Alphabet Lounge show was pretty severe. I was moving slowly. In fact, I took a mid-afternoon nap. Ben Fong Torres’ Gram Parson biography, “Hickory Wind,” lulled me to an easy and deep sleep. When I woke up, I had a melody in my head, and some words about a guy who leaves the small town in which he grew up and becomes estranged from his parents — who, along with all the town’s folk — consider him “the man who sold his soul.” So I wrote it, and recorded it in just under an hour (you can download the demo of “Everybody Knows” by right-clicking here).
Point is, the clock was slipping rapidly towards four o’clock — the appointed of Ethan’s Fourth Birthday party — and his present was sitting in the living room in an ugly brown cardboard box. Moreover, I’d been a bad uncle, and failed to buy wrapping paper. Worse, there wasn’t a stitch of Scotch tape in the house.
The last few weeks — what with The MTV Movie Awards and all — have been insane. Last week, for example, was chocked full of twelve hour days. There was no way I was making the guitar shop. Which is where Abbi came to the rescue.
“What kind should I get?” she asked. “I don’t know anything about guitars.”
“I’m sure you can just walk in and browse and within five seconds you’ll be swarmed by guitar shop dudes.”
Me? I walk into Sam Ash or even Guitar Center and I’m persona non grata. I have to wrestle a clerk to the ground to buy some picks. But sure enough, four and a half seconds in the door, Abbi’s got some skull cap wearing, David Evans wanna’ be tuning a 3/4 scale Yamaha and strumming her the opening strains of “All I Want Is You.”
Easy, buddy.
So the guitar is great; just like daddy’s and Uncle Benjamin’s. But come this afternoon, it’s still in it’s ugly brown box. And I know full well that half of the joy of birthdays is tossing wrapping paper into the sky.
Now, I’ve never been one for wrapping paper. Seems kinda’ wasteful. I like to use the comic section. Or better yet, make my own: a little construction paper and some magic markers and you’re in business. And so it was that I found myself pulling apart the most recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine. What could be more apt than the colorful pages — carefully selected for their editorial insight, of course — of the magazine that launched a thousand deluded rock ‘n roll fantasies (at least one of which I can personally speak to: mine). And so it was that I stepped out onto Tenth Avenue with a triangle-shaped box with Amy Winehouse, Jeff Tweedy, and Queens Of The Stone Age peeking out from between school bus, fire engine, and dump truck stickers — all held together with the tape from one of those lint rollers.
I hop a cab, commiserate with the driver (he neither a fan of the Puerto Rican Day parade, nor double-length busses), hop out at 82d Street, climb the stairs, knock on the door and excitedly await young Ethan’s unbridled rock ‘n roll enthusiasm when…
He opens the door and — my hand to God — says right off, “But I don’t need a second guitar.”
Cue the sound of air wheezing out of a balloon. A hung over balloon.
Still, he saves Abbi and my box for last, after the pile of books, the glow-in-the-dark turtle, and remote control car. He saves it ’til just before the ice cream. At this point, it’s dusk. Two days of cake and cookies and “Happy Birthday to you!” have gotten to him. He’s a little punchy, a hair spacey, distracted. But everyone knows Uncle Benjamin can’t wait to see Ethan play his new guitar, so they remind him, “You still have one more present, Ethan!”
When he finally opens the thing, he begins by carefully peeling off each sticker, then takes to ripping each page. He doesn’t seem to notice that it’s a magazine, or that I’ve carefully arranged the Charts section next to Reviews. Instead — aided and abetted by his increasingly mobile tenth-month-old brother who is crawling all over the box — he begins voraciously clawing at my punk rock wrap job. And when he opens the lid, his mother, father, and grandmother say in unison — as if rehearsed — “Ooooh, Ethan! It’s beautiful.”
Ethan stares blankly at the guitar, it’s lacquered blonde pine top reflecting the red glow of the stars above the dining room table. He is speechless, and I’m not sure why. In that instant, I begin to imagine that he feels the pressure of all of us bearing down on him, that he knows Uncle Benjamin already has plans to get him into this thing he calls “the studio” and play in something called “a band.” And I imagine that he wants to play along with daddy when he sings “Home On The Range,” if only he could make his little fingers fit on those big strings. And I imagine, as he pulls the one-of-a-kind Lilybug guitar strap fashioned from recycled audiotape over his head, that maybe it’s all a little bit confusing for him. So I begin to feel kind of badly, like maybe we should have bought him a remote control truck.
I’m sure it will work out just fine. Maybe he’ll take to it, maybe he won’t. In the end, we take from our parents and elders that which fits us, and cast the rest aside. Either way, it’s only rock ‘n roll.
Everybody Knows – MP3
Sometimes songs come easily.
I woke up from an afternoon nap around two o’clock (late night at Alphabet Lounge) with a dog eared copy of Ben Fong Torres’ Gram Parson biography, “Hickory Wind,” at my side, and heard a melody with the line “If you’re goin’ back to L.A., tell my father I said hello” in my head.
An hour later, I had this.
Songs like these come kinda’ quickly as the form sorta presents itself. “Radio,” for example, has verses that begin with “morning,” “afternoon,” and “nightfall.” Easy to write, and easy to remember. This one has “father,” “mother,” and “brother.” Imagine it with a pedal steel, and you begin to get the idea.
If you every wondered whether my stint with the classic country cover band, The Smith Family, had an influence, well, here’s your answer. And if you ever wondered why I keep writing about leaving small towns and selling out, well, everybody knows I’m the man who sold his soul.
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Seems So Long I’ve Been Waiting (Still Don’t Know What For)
A coupla’ months ago, when Chris emailed me and asked if I wanted to play a show, I was all, like, “Sure!”
I figured he and I would hook up with Tony and Ryan and do our thing: his songs, my songs, Buckeye — whatever.
Then we found out that Vaughnathon was double-booked. And I tell Chris that — much as I love Tony — bass without drums is like is like Oreos without the stuff in the middle. Next thing I know, I’m playing solo, opening for Chris, Tony, and a different drummer.
Which is totally fine. But what to do? What to play? How to shake it up?
I could play “Harder To Believe” and “Milk & Honey” ’til the cows come home. Throw in “Summer’s Gone” and “Dear Elizabeth” and we’re half-way there. But where’s the growth in that? Where’s the challenge.
So Sunday night, I’m drafting my “hey come to mu show!” email when it dawns on me: why not get all Casey Kasem on their asses? Why not play my greatest hits? Or, since I don’t really have any hits, per se, why not play my most popular downloads?
Genius!
Well, ends up that three fifths (3/5) of my most popular downloads are, ahem, not my songs. That is, I didn’t write them. Which is actually fine with me. John Denver’s “Leaving On A Jet Plane” and Phil Collins’ “Take Me Home” — for example — have each contributed to who I am as a songwriter and a person. Still, I, like, never play them live. And I rarely play alone to begin with. So what was I thinking?
And here’s the punchline.
I’m playing three more solo show in the next six weeks.
What gives?
I had a good run of creativity there: “Crash Site” to “Almost Home” to “Love” and “Heartland” — plus a handfull of EPs. In the middle of all that I got my hands on ProTools and started cranking out home demos, many of which went on to become full on studio recordings. I toured some (100 shows in the last three years or so; not terrible for a guy with a day job). But then…
But then I entered into this huge transition — mid-thirties, corporate executive, engagement — and I felt it all shifting.
Oy, what’s my point.
My point is, my forthcoming two-cd rarities compilation, “Besides,” notwithstanding, I’m not entirely sure what comes next. I mean, I know I wanna’ keep writing and recording songs, I’m just not sure which ones, with whom, and when. I know I wanna’ keep playing, I’m just not sure Rockwood Music Hall’s gonna’ keep booking some dude slipping towards (gasp!) 40-years-old who draws twenty or thirty people, max.
So. This Saturday night. Alphabet Lounge.
It’ll be just me. I’ve been rehearsing all week. I’ve been trying new things, trying to get my sea legs back. There’ll be no guitar, drum and bass to carry me (which blows, cuz those guys are super strong and make the load much, much lighter). I have no idea how good it’ll be, but it’ll be interesting. I’m messing with all the old ones, and learning some I’ve never played live. “California” (my third most popular iTunes download) is gonna’ be mellow and arpegiated. And wait til you hear what I do with “Dear Elizabeth.”
But what’ll do with my singer/songwriter career? Dunno’. We’ll see. What’s left behind to shoulder grows weghtless.
You get used to it.
