Enough with the doom and gloom for a minute; let’s have some fun. A couple years ago my town seemed to have cornered the market on the blackbird population. They were thick as thieves! They were everywhere! And they were funny little muses for me. I wrote two blackbird songs, one because there was a […]
Sometimes our students are our best teachers. A few years ago, I had a guitar and violin student (I love a multi-talented kid) that was one of my favorite people ever. One afternoon, they said to me in a voice filled with wonder, “Music is the wind, and we are the willow tree.” And I
On the night of October 8, 1871, there was a wildfire in Wisconsin that killed 1400 people and destroyed hundreds of thousands of acres of forest. The little town of Peshtigo was completely destroyed, leaving a handful of survivors. One survivor was the Reverend Peter Pernin, who left one of the only eye-witness accounts of
So this song is about the sensual magic of books. The first person I ever knew who openly talked about book-sniffing totally admitted to being a “dirty book sniffer.” For him it was a clandestine pleasure, opening a book and breathing in the smell of paper and ink while no one was looking and then
Animism is something that gets stronger in my world and in my life everyday. Everything is people, rocks, trees, rivers, landscapes, birds, bees … all of it. People. Every one. Everything has an energy, a spirit. If you take the time to get to know things, they show you their personalities. There was a storm
Microplastics are everywhere, and forever chemicals are, apparently, as forever as diamonds. Hooray for us. Well, that’s what you get for not thinkin’ things through, folks. And of course I wrote a song about it. Livin’ in the age of chemical cruelty We got shit that’s never goin’ away Microplastics in our bodies Is this
So of course I wrote a song after last week’s post. Have you met me? And I will refer you to last week’s post if you didn’t happen to read it for the backstory. You can read it while you listen to the song. Or, you can listen to the audio post and then listen
There’s an old Indonesian saying about not letting your red-haired daughter get too close to the mountain, or the Volcano God will take her. Okay, it’s not exactly an every-day household saying, but apparently, it’s there. A long while back, possibly around 2020, I mentioned a fascinating book I read called When They Severed Earth
I love co-writing songs with people I love. And I write a lot of songs about people who are dead now. Put it all together and what do you get? A posthumous co-written song by my friend David Warren and me. Davey died, tragically, and a friend of his was going through a box of
Blackbirds have been constant … harbingers? companions? somethings? for much of my life. It is, of course, extremely possible that there are just a lot of them around these parts and I have had a lot of opportunities to observe and interact with them. And maybe be observed by them, because who knows, they’re definitely
