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I’m gonna call it harbinger. Cuz I need a sign, a prophecy, an omen… anything. A couple of hours ago now, Chris, Walker, Tony and I are rehearsing for Tuesday’s big ‘Heartland’ CD release show. We’re at a middle-of-the-road space called Ultrasound on 30th Street. It’s not the best space (thirty bucks an hour), or…

I woke up well before normal this morning, and lie there on my back a while looking up at the cloudless blue sky, worrying. By lunchtime I was sweating. By dinner, I was nauseous. Right now I am, well, too tired to feel much at all. I released my debut CD, “Bloom,” in 1994. I…

It’s not very rock n’ roll, I suppose, to want to be a college professor. But it’s on my short list of things to do, right there next to South By Southwest, the cover of Rolling Stone, the Nantucket Film Festival, and The New York Times Best Seller List. Oh, and Mt. Everest. I took…

At the time, opening for The Samples seemed like a pretty big deal. The year was 1990. I was a 19-year-old junior at Syracuse University. In its first year, my band, Smokey Junglefrog, had already made something of a mark (primarily because we bombed the campus with posters, but whatever). We had released our debut…

This just in from my Smith Family cousin/brother Scott Cunningham, who overcame a slew of injuries to finish his first New York City Marathon in an astonishing 4:10:51. Buck up Wagner! You ran in the top half of all finishers! And only 1 of 3 that recorded music during the training period (ok, that I…

My Aunt Marden wore a lot of orange and brown back in the day. Even in the late seventies, when I was still in single digits, it didn’t seem like much of a color combination. She was one of those not-really-your-aunt aunts. In fact, she was my mom’s roommate at the College of St. Theresa…