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Greetings from The Electric City. I’m writing you tonight from Room 202 of the Lackawanna Station Hotel where, through the thin walls of my room, piped in Muzak like drones away like The Lawrence Welk Show. The entire town has that feel, really: as if time forgot it sometime around 1957. Truth is, it was…

Brace yourself; the following story may blow your mind. Just this past Sunday, Nada front man Jason Walsmith and I were sitting around his Beaverdale, Iowa, living room recovering from the previous night’s show and preparing for the next. We’re watching TV when he said, “Lemme’ show you this documentary.” He surfed around his Tivo…

Thirty (or so) years ago, my parent’s took Chris and me to a traveling production of “Annie” at Chicago’s Shubert Theater. Two moments from that matinee stick with me to this day. The first is the sheer terror I felt shrinking into my seat as Mrs. Hannigan screamed at the orphans, “You’re gonna clean this…

I’m not sure this’ll make a ton of sense, but the weekend kinda’ f*cked my shit up a little bit. As always, when we weren’t actually singing, Jason and I spent our time talking about songs, songwriting, and the music business. We’re an odd pair in such conversations. Though he dabbles in politics and has…

Forget that the music industry doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing with itself. Between MySpace, iTunes, ProTools, Twitter, YouTube and the rest, bands don’t need major labels anyway. They’re doin’ it for themselves. In some strange way, 2008 may as well be 1908, or 1808. America’s highways are packed with minstrels and troubadours: folk-rock,…

The last time I stood in front of a thousand people with a guitar in my hands and sang, I’d rehearsed. I’ll be honest: I regretted the ambition of my scheduled 36-hour, New York to Des Moines trip the instant my clock radio sounded at 3:45 Saturday morning. A cold drizzle was falling on Tenth…