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Walker, Chris, and Tony were already on stage when I walked into the venue last night. I stood alone on stage throughout last week’s tour. It was just me, my voice, and my guitar. Solo acoustic works for moving hearts, but not so much in moving bodies. I like to movie bodies too. So it…

My first time at the Eastern Iowa Airport was September 28, 1971. My family was moving from Iowa City to Washington, D.C. It was my first time on an airplane. I was three weeks old. Thirty-four years later, I’m here again, waiting on American Airlines flight #4239 to Chicago, then connecting to #360 to Laguardia.…

I just had a fairly major revelation on I-35 between Des Moines and Ames, Iowa. My new record, “Heartland,” sounds fucking excellent. That might sound a bit arrogant. But I’m as surprised as anyone to hear myself say so (or see myself write so). It was either absolute serendipity or complete randomness that made this…

On Ben Kieffer’s legendary radio performance series, Live From The Java House, Jason described performing for 17,000 screaming fans at the Wells Fargo Arena thusly. “You know how you feel when you standing on the edge of a tall building or a cliff?” he said. “You’re head is spinning, your stomach feels kind of swimmy,…

Josh Davis just saved my life. Well, my voice, anyway. A week on the road in the bitter, bone-dry cold of the Midwest has been brutal on my voice. Radio interviews and a rock show a day add up to one sore throat. So I’m in Des Moines right now. I’m backstage at this amazing…

I’m sitting in the front lounge of Meat Loaf’s tour bus. We are idling in a parking lot on the edge of the Cedar River in Cedar Falls, Iowa. It’s well after noon on a weekday. Still, my brain is not even close to functional. Meat Loaf’s former tour bus — a forty-two foot, slate…