Schola Cantorum

I don't think I've written here about choral singing and how much I love it, how much a part of my life it's been since I was a child. I always sang in church choirs as a child and youth, and I sang in the touring and chapel choirs in college. We (Shelle and I) even sang briefly with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus under Robert Shaw, way back before we were married. Since then, we've sung with the occasional community group, but mostly with church choir.

The Schola Cantorum of the medieval church was the trained cathedral choir, a group of choral scholars. Now it's a (frankly pretentious) name often used for a professional or semi-professional choir at a liturgical church. Our church is not a cathedral. We're a small in-town Episcopal church with a 40-50 voice choir that divides among two services. Sometimes I'm the only bass singer at the early service. But our choir is quite good, regardless of which service you attend and how many singers show up. A few weeks ago, our newly-formed evensong choir -- our "Schola Cantorum" -- met to record some songs we had learned over the course of just three rehearsals, including the recording session itself. The evensong choir is a smaller version of the main choir, and though we're the ones singing on this recording, we're certainly no better than the larger choir. But I wanted to post a sample of what a 20 voice volunteer choir can sound like on a spur-of-the-moment recording. Perhaps this will illustrate why choral singing is so important to me.

Click to download/stream This Shining Night

Pushing

I'm a bit overwhelmed this week. We have a show Friday night (that's tomorrow), and since we don't play more than once a month or so, we really need to prepare. This show involves additional musicians who will play sets before we go on, and whom I've asked to join us for a couple of songs and then all join in for a show closer, so that means even more planning and more rehearsal than usual.

None of this would be such a big deal: I've got the set list mapped out and have run through everything, and Shelle and I will do another quick run-through tonight while our oldest son is at his ballet class. This will probably be a typical family rehearsal, standing in the kitchen with supper on the stove and our little girl sitting on the counter while we do our best to muddle quickly through the set list by skipping intros and instrumentals. It'll be enough. The big complicating factor this week has been my own bone-headed over-commitment in the interest of pushing myself to do something new.

I am not a classical guitarist. Not by a long shot. But it's something I'd like to learn and something I've dabbled with. So when I was asked some time back to play a guitar part as accompaniment on a Walter Pelz piece for the choir Shelle and I sing with, I said "sure." I didn't realize it would fall the Sunday after this Friday night concert, and of course I waited until this week to start learning the music.

Learning a classical piece -- even a relatively easy one -- is for me a very painful process of working through the notes and fingerings one measure at a time. That's because I don't really read music for guitar: I have to think too much about where a particular note falls on the fingerboard. Imagine trying to play piano if you only knew where to find the E and A below middle C and a D, G, B, and E above it. You could find the other notes on the keyboard, it'd take you some time to read through anything. That's approximately where I started this week trying to read the piece I need to play Sunday. We rehearsed with the full choir and flute last night, and it wasn't a total disaster. I've got it down well enough to chug along alright, and the second time through I had almost mastered my nerves enough to stop randomly plucking the wrong strings. But it's been a lot of work during a week when I haven't had a lot of extra time.

So it's been a long week already, trying to squeeze these painstaking rehearsals in when I could while keeping up with a crazy work schedule and the usual stops on the kid shuttle and so forth. In the end, though, I have to admit it's kinda cool. I'm enjoying the challenge of doing something that just a week ago felt like it was beyond my reach. So I guess I'll keep pushing for a few more days, then take a little break. Then I'm going to start working through the Berklee Method for Guitar that my friend loaned me. And maybe one of these days I'll take some lessons.

Can't Always Get What You Want

When I was a kid, I saw a Paul Simon concert on TV where he ended by saying, "Have a sweet and peaceful evening, everyone!" He was so sincere that you could almost ignore the cavorting unicorns and rainbows that seemed to radiate through the sentiment. Sometimes, when I read back through the kind of write-ups I often do after shows, I think about that sign-off. I'm always on about how magical and perfect everything was.

Well it ain't all sweet and peaceful. My last show -- two weeks ago now -- was the sort I'd just as soon put behind me. Luckily, the folks who came out were very forgiving -- they even tipped well! But I didn't give 'em much to work with. I was late getting started because I had little league baseball practice first, and I was pretty tired for the same reason. But that's not really a good excuse. I owe it to folks to be energetic and prepared when they take the time to come hear me play. Certainly, it was not an unmitigated disaster, but my energy really dragged and I had a couple of rather big, obvious gaffes. At one point, I felt suddenly led to play Townes Van Zandt's "Pancho and Lefty," but I let my mind wander until I could hardly remember the lyrics or the chords. Another time I played a very soulful version of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2U," only to get my fingers on the wrong string on the very last chord, ending in horrible, glaring dissonance. Everyone just laughed at that, 'cause what else could you do? I also talked too much, including telling an actual joke that bombed.

Even a lousy show has highlights though. I played "Fake Plastic Trees" for the first time in about two years, and it felt great. Oddly enough, barely anyone in the audience knew the song. I had to explain that it was a Radiohead song. I also played a mini-set of lullabies, because when I should have been preparing for the gig the night before I had been instead trying to put my 3-year-old to sleep. And there was a little girl at the show who was really sleepy, and who lay down on a bench while her mom rubbed her back. That went over pretty well, even if it was a pretty big departure.

In the end, the feedback was positive, and that speaks well of a patient and generous audience. But I definitely learned my lesson about trying to wing it at the last minute! No more cruising in late and unprepared for me. From now on, I'm going back to preparing a set list and rehearsing!

REM Follow Up

My pal Lis caught REM in Scotland this weekend at T In the Park. She writes about the festival here with her usual wit and flair. You should go read it.

On a side note, I don't believe Lis was born when "Pretty Persuasion" came out on Reckoning. Just a guess. I wonder if they played that like they did in ATL . . .

behind on everything

I'm sitting here eating cold, leftover chicken nuggetty things of some sort, nursing a killer headache, and trying to figure out where the first half of the Summer went. Actually, I know where it went: it's scattered among little league baseball parks around the state of Georgia. My eldest son's all star team won the Dizzy Dean 10 Year Old Division B State Championship last week, thus concluding a baseball Odyssey that really started in February when we began the regular Spring season. It was an incredible, fun, humbling experience to watch these kids build the trust and stamina and friendship it takes to convert individual skill into a state championship.

But baseball is not what I meant to write about here. There are a few things I've meant to blog about but just flat-out haven't. One was a show I did on June 28th at the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany. If you were there, perhaps you will agree it was just one of those shows where something indescribable happens and the whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts. Mickey Harte talked about this phenomenon in his book Drumming at the Edge of Magic as if the performers and the audience get caught up in some sort of spiritual vortex, participating together in a transcendent experience that neither truly controls.

That's a bit of hyperbole for my little corner of the creative universe, but the night was nice, and there were two absolutely fabulous opening acts: Barbara and Brandon. And my new friend Ron sat in here and there with a slide guitar, and Barbara played Jembe on "101 Degrees," and I just played what I felt like playing, and everything just rolled along. It was the kind of show that makes you want to quit your day job and just throw your fate to the wind. Until you remember that house payment and how you still have to feed and clothe and educate those three kids!

Speaking of great shows, the week before, on 6/21, Shelle and I saw REM at Lakewood Amphitheater. Holy Rock and Roll, Batman! What a show! They played 28 songs for the hometown crowd, and it was just absolute pure energy from start to finish. We had great seats with a good view of center stage, and the show was so good we didn't even mind so much paying $10 for crappy beer. There was a great mix of material from recent albums and old records, including some kickin' cuts like "Driver 8," "Rockville," and "Pretty Persuasion." Highlights included a hugely amped up version of "Harbourcoat," "Fall on Me" with the ex-Smiths (now Modest Mouse) guitarist Johnny Marr, and a beautiful acoustic "Let Me In" with mandolin and three guitars as well as organ (perhaps I loved that as much for hearing Shelle next to me singing harmony as for the performance). Really, though, it was a show of highlights.

On the recording front: I got bupkis. Nada. We haven't done any because we've been too busy with baseball. I have, though, been working on some new songs and making some scratch demos using a neat little digital recorder I borrowed from my neighbor, Dennis. In that same vein, I'm excited to be collaborating a bit with a MySpace friend Heather Fowler. Heather is a very talented writer -- novelist, poet, short fiction author -- who made the "mistake" of expressing an interest in my songs and in songwriting. A couple of emails later, we were swapping melodies and lyrics on our way to a co-written song.

And finally, one more note: My good friend Bud Buckley has had a couple of songs at the top of the Internet charts in the UK. Man, that just blows me away! You can go vote for him here at the Loneboy store. Let's get him back in the #1 slot!

Nice Night at the Monkey

Look at me, writing a post about a show! I played solo last night at Java Monkey -- my musical home away from home -- and in spite of various harbingers of doom, it turned out to be a good night.

The signs things might not go well started with logistics. I had to miss my son's baseball game for the show, and we had some carefully scripted planning go awry when the auto shop called just before 5:00 to say the van wouldn't be available after all. We'd have to get a rental. When I dropped my PA gear off at Java Monkey, the stage temperature was about 85 degrees with 90% humidity. At least I wouldn't be cold! I went to park, keeping my guitar with me, and it dawned on me that I had not brought a microphone stand. Meanwhile, I drove around Decatur three or four times looking for parking, and finally ended up in the lower deck at the library (don't tell anyone). So I walked the three blocks or so back in the 90 degree heat carrying my guitar, and was pretty tired and grumpy by the time I was ready to start setting up.

But things turned around pretty quickly: some friends from college -- whom I haven't seen since college -- were there with their three kids. That was very cool, to say the least! And the always helpful JM staff set me up with a perfectly serviceable microphone stand, so I was able to get my rig set up and sound-checked without any further glitches. While I set up, more people I know filtered in so that, by the time I started playing, there was a nice audience out there on the patio.

Nothing to be done about the heat though. I just stood up there sweating, and I'm still a little dehydrated from it today. I started off with a John Hurt number, and I kicked it off in the wrong key (which I do about half the time). So I stopped and made some random dumb comments in an effort to cover my gaffe. When I started back -- in the right key -- I hoped no one would be the wiser. After the rocky start, seemed like things pinged along pretty well. I didn't really prepare a specific set list for the show. Instead, I recycled the list from when I played the Monkey last month, and I just kind of winged it as the mood struck. I played a couple of songs I haven't played in a long time, and I changed the order up a bit.

As often happens at Java Monkey, it felt more like a conversation than a "show." The room is small enough for me to go "off mic" a lot between songs and talk to folks, and we discussed the merits of murder ballads and the relative tameness of contemporary popular country music and such-like. I was bummed not to have Shelle with me, but it turned out to be a really fun night. I reckon I played for about an hour and a half. If you were there, thanks for coming!

School's Out For the Summer

Today is the last day of school for my kids. I was just thinking about how long it had been since I'd written anything here -- over a month. Wow. Well, I guess it's fair to say I'm in a bit of a Summer hiatus.

My original plan for the Summer was to take advantage of the slower schedule and really focus tightly on music. We had (have?) high hopes to get the record finished in June and try to play a lot of gigs. But two critical, path altering things have happened. One is, a really crucial server at work crashed, and the carefully devised disaster recovery plan seems to have been created by FEMA under the Bush administration. Which is to say, it might have been good at some things, but actually recovering from disaster wasn't one of them. As a result, everything I've done for a very long time was lost, and I'll be working for months just to get back to zero. Call it a really stressful form of job security.

The other thing is pretty fun: our oldest son asked for permission to try out for the all star baseball team for his birthday. We haven't let him in the past because we wanted to take a break from little league over the Summer. But this year we let him, and he made the team. And now we have baseball pretty much constantly. If we're not practicing or playing or driving to far-flung ballparks for tournaments, we're washing practice pants or uniforms or sliding shorts. Red Georgia dirt does really interesting things when layered with infield grass stains on thick, white polyester game pants.

But we do still find time for music. I'm playing a couple of gigs this month, and we played a really fun show in May at a big party. We were the last of a long line-up of bands to play, and darkness fell right as we took the stage, and a chill was settling in, and the sound system was great, and it was sort of a magical little set. It felt a little bit like the end of Spring.

So here's to Summer! To baseball and no school and crazy schedules. I may get into a music groove and write here a lot; I may hit another dry patch that lasts for weeks. Meanwhile, if you're in Atlanta, stop by JavaMonkey Thursday night and say hi!

Untouched by Suicide

We're playing a benefit for the Atlanta chapter of American Foundation for Suicide Prevention tomorrow night. Details here. Since signing on for that gig way back in December, I've been thinking about the subject of suicide and suicide survivors a lot. I wrote this essay some time back as a response to being asked to say something about why I was participating in the event.

---

Asked to say how I’ve been touched by suicide, I thought: I have not.

Unless you count Tommy when I went off to college. He sat alone in the cab of a friend’s pick-up back home, with his Remington and several boxes of ammo. While the cops closed in on him, he turned the gun around. It was a horrible death, and although I’d given him up with Tonka trucks, I wrote his mother how Tommy had been my hero once.

And before that there was Mr. Free from our church basketball league. Kevin came up to my house when his father, the pastor, had to go into the woods with Mrs. Free to claim her husband. Kevin guessed hanging, but it was a new shotgun from Service Merchandise and no note. Their oldest boy went running through the neighborhood all night shouting for his daddy, was what we heard.

Then there was Sarah, who showed up at Youth Group sometimes. Once I asked her out, and she smiled to say yes, but on second thought she made up some excuse. That was a week before she sat all night in the family station wagon, with the engine running and the garage door closed. Parents found her in the morning. After that they aged considerably, always trailing a sad happy-hour smell.

My friend Greg came home from college with me one weekend, and it turned out our dads had known each other at the same school. Dad was smiling graciously when he greeted us, but there was an edge to his joking, and you could just tell he and Greg’s dad hadn’t really been friends. Your daddy was the advisor on my hall in Winship. A real son-of-a-gun! Wrote me up just for having water in my sink. How is the old rascal?

Greg put on a smile and a bit more accent, just shy of sardonic. Why, I don’t rightly know. My daddy put a pistol in his mouth and shot the back of his head off when I was five.

Breaking an awkward silence, Greg went on. After that, my mom got us a puppy. Sometimes I’d throw it down the stairs, just so I could pick him up and comfort him.

People just hurled into shock and pain in the wake of this violence, and me thinking I’ve dodged that bullet. Well sure, I haven’t been hit hard like that dog thrown down the stairs. But by the simple calculus of the thing, I don’t suppose any of us can claim we’ve been untouched by suicide.

Good Old Days

Have you heard this radio commercial for ice cream? A brand that's supposed to "taste just like the good old days"? The ad consists entirely of a slick country song that starts out, "I remember our old country home. . . ." The song is in line with a lot of what's coming out of Nashville, what I've been hearing on commercial country radio when I listen. There's a great deal of misty nostalgia in these songs, and I gotta tell ya, a hell of a lot of it rings laughably false.

In the ice cream song, the speaker reminisces about "simpler times," and sets the bucolic scene with mama in the kitchen and the kids down by the swimming hole. At the climax of the song my family just laughs out loud: "Mama hollerin' through the screen / 'would you kids like some home made ice cream.'" Now, anyone who knows anything about home made ice cream, or the past, or mamas, should find this image comical in several ways. We've got the kids down in the creek while mama is supposed to be churning ice cream up at the house, presumably in the kitchen, just like she might bake a peach cobbler. And she's going to surprise our apple-cheeked kiddies with that yummy chilly goodness when it's all finished and ready to serve.

For starters, making ice cream is messy. Rock salt is dirty, and when you mix it generously with gobs of ice, you get a messy, corrosive run off. So you churn ice cream in the back yard, preferably on some patch of dirt where theres no grass to kill, or even better, where there are some weeds downhill you been meaning to get rid of anyway. And what's more, in the gauzy past of my youth, ice cream churns were mostly hand-cranked, so I'm sure that in this "simpler time and place" of the song, mama ain't got no fancy electric churn. If you've never taken a turn at hand-cranking an ice-cream churn, let me tell you something: it's bursitis-inducing, back-breaking, mama-pissing-off work. You get as many people over to help as possible and you take turns.

If mama had been busy up at the house making ice cream for the kids, we're talking about cooking up custard, wrestling ice, handling dirty rock salt, turning that ass-whupping crank, and dealing with the messy run off. After all that, she ain't fiddin to sally over to the screen wiping her hands on her apron like Aunt B and sing out a friendly, "you kids want some ice cream?"

On the contrary, mama is stomping out onto the porch, hands red and hair flying, and she's hollering, "If you kids want some of this ice cream I'm a-churnin', you better get your sorry butts up outa that water and come help me! You think I'm doing all this for my health? Tell your daddy to come in from that barn and bring me some more ice or this isn't gonna set up. And somebody's gotta take a turn at this crank! I'm up here sweating like your aunt Edna at a square dance, and y'all just playing in that mud like you don't have a care in the world!

Silly as it is, this song would be right at home alongside some big country hits. Why, I'm surprised there're any farmers left in the fields; to listen to country radio, you'd think they've all pulled up stakes and moved to Nashville. Every time I turn around there's some song about "I'm a farmer like my daddy and his daddy before that / And I love Jesus and the flag, and you can tell it by my hat." I heard this song yesterday that was all about how great it is to be a Southern man because of our traditions of farming and respect for women and family and love of Jesus and all that. And I was thinking, hmm. I'm a Southern man, and all the men in my family are Southern men, and I gotta tell you, I have to look pretty long and hard to find someone like the gentle, faithful character this song describes as the stereotype. Don't get me wrong: I love my family and I'm proud of my heritage, but you gotta take the crunchy with the smooth, folks. It's true that we southerners are not all a bunch of nine-fingered, cross-burning, wife beating hayseeds. It is also true that I have been to a family reunion where a man was wearing a klan t-shirt (not a blood relative), that I have heard shockingly bigoted statements uttered by people I love, that I have seen families torn apart by neglect and ignorance and even violence on the part of men who probably see themselves as good Christians. There's nothing especially southern about the flaws in the people I know, but for some reason Nashville has decided that the South needs it's own special brand of flawlessness.

Happy Birthday to Us

Shelle and I are turning 40 over the next couple of months. We're celebrating with box seats for REM. We just bought them with the help of a friend who (through some mysterious means) had access to advanced purchasing. The last time we saw REM they were touring Monster, and the acoustically dubious Atlanta Omni still existed as a rock venue. We waited in line before daylight at a Publix store out in the sticks with a bunch of friends to get a low lottery number, and still our seats sucked.

Of course, we'll have to sell the kids for scientific experiments to pay for them, but sacrifices must be made. Well, that will help with the babysitting, which will put the cost right over the top. Actually, our oldest will be jealous when he learns he's not going: he loves REM. Especially Document and Life's Rich Pageant. And the middle child loves their cover of "Superman." But alas, they will have to remain at home.

Speaking of concert costs and of the Omni, I remember paying $17 to see Van Halen when I was maybe 15 or 16, and we lamented then the rising cost of live music. Ha. These tix were >$80 each before all the usury fees. Well, we haven't had a big splurge show since Shelle bought Paul Simon tickets for me at double face value for the Surprise tour, which turned out to be worth every penny, so here's hoping!

Famous in China

OK, not really famous. Better to say "bootlegged in China," but I think this is kind of cool. Every now and then, I look at log files on the server where my mp3s reside to see if anyone is listening to the songs. Mind you, these aren't pretty charts or graphs; just raw server records that might look something like this:

xx.xx.xxx.xxx - - [17/Mar/2008:12:51:13 -0400] "GET /player/dep_noauto.xml 
HTTP/1.1" 200 1336 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; 
rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12"

Using my mad h4x0r skillz, I can write little scripts to parse these and look for things like "how many visitors downloaded an mp3 in the month of March"; or "what's the most commonly downloaded song on my site."

While doing just such an analysis recently, I noticed that one song was rather more popular than any other. And I don't mean five percent more popular; I'm talking about five times more popular. Hmm, that's strange. I mean, I like that song just fine, but it's not like "Stairway to Freebird" or something. This would require some investigation.

I scanned the logs manually, looking for any pattern that might provide a clue. I didn't need Velma and a box of Scooby Snacks to discover the regular repetition of a single URL where the referring server should be: http://music.soso.com.

I typed the URL into a browser and it brought up a Chinese site that seems to be some kind of music clearing house. I saw what looked like a search box (I couldn't be sure since all the text was Chinese) so I typed in my name and hit enter. Sure enough, there was a link to my song Shudder, along with the helpful (if totally inexplicable) title "Anniversary."

Of course, if my song were an actual Chinese hit, it would generate as many downloads in a few minutes as I'm seeing in a month. But it's still pretty interesting to see what a little bit of bootlegging can do for your stats. So here's what my friends in Kunming are raving about:

Download Shudder

Love to Hate Rhapsody

I've been a paying "Unlimited" subscriber to the Rhapsody music service for a couple of years now. And dammit, I hate Rhapsody. But I just can't give up the streaming access to all those hundreds of thousands of records.

Here's why I'm griping right now: I'm in the mood to listen to the Rolling Stones. Now, the Rhapsody music client is really, really slow on the old computer I run it on, so you've got one good shot at finding what you want before you get annoyed and give up. So I go to the search box (after slowly, painfully logging in for the fourteenth time; 'nother story). And I type "exile on main street" and select "Album" for the type of search. Then I hit "go" and walk away. I walk away because if I stand there I will get really mad and pull my hair out waiting for the search to come back. And I don't have the hair to spare. After doing some other things (work, like), I come back to find the message, "sorry, we couldn't find an album matching the search "exile on main street." Long story short, they had it cataloged under "st." rather than "street." That kind of thing drives me up the wall -- they can't implement abbreviation expansion in their search algorithm? Hell, they could just use proximity to come up with the right album.

So here are some other things that piss me off about Rhapsody, in no particular order:

1. When they have an outage and you contact customer service, they NEVER admit they've had an outage. They always refer you to a trouble shooting FAQ.

2. If you use the web client, you can stay logged in forever. It doesn't work very well and crashes your browser, but by golly those cookies persist like herpes! The real client? Forget it. Stop playing music for a few minutes and you're back into 30 second sample hell until you log in again.

3. Login from the desktop client is a pain in the ass and takes forever.

4. Playing a CD on your own damn machine contacts Rhapsody, logs you in (see number 3), and subjects you to occasional network stutters and other annoyances.

5. Sometimes the client just gets stuck between songs and keeps playing the last few seconds of a track. Man, I hate that. It even does it when you're listening to a CD. And each upgrade to a new version of the software preserves the old problems.

So why don't I cancel my account? Well, at the end of the day, $12 a month, or whatever it is, is a pretty fair price to pay for access to a gigantic catalog of music. And when it's working, it's pretty great. Like right now (I finally got what I want), I am listening to Exile, and after that I may dial up Bob Dylan's Live 1966, aka the "Royal Albert Hall" bootleg. A couple years ago, we put all our old stereo gear in storage and replaced with a laptop hooked up to a nice powered speaker/sub-woofer system and a high speed Internet connection. And for parties, I hook it up to a PA system out in the back yard. And Rhapsody employs some "editors" whose ears I've grown to trust and who put together rockin' play lists or "radio" stations.

So the library kicks, but the software . . . feh. I wish they'd just start over.

Bring Back Shuffletown

How come no one has ever heard of Shuffletown? I'm all the time mentioning it to music people as a record that had a big influence on me in the early 90s when I was struggling to find my voice as an acoustic musician after years of playing fast, hard, and loud, but I rarely meet anyone who even knows Joe Henry, let alone this great album.

It was originally released in 1990, but I didn't get it until 92 or 93 when a good friend gave me a cassette copy. Even thenI couldn't find the CD in the local record stores. And of course this was pre-Internet (at least in the shopping sense).

Evocative of The Trinity Sessions, Shuffletown was recorded live to 2-track tape and produced by T Bone Burnett. The sparse arrangements with instruments like mandolin and violin and muted trumpet draw you into the room and into the beautiful melodies in a way that make the words almost superfluous. But the lyrics are, by and large, pretty great too. Though occasionally vague, they're mostly vivid and compelling without being overly artsy or hifalutin. Shuffletown is easily in my top 10 or so records of the 1990s.

And yet the CD is out of print and I've lost my cassette copy! On the Internet, I can choose among a handful of used copies in varying conditions for about $30 (after shipping), or I can step up to a "collectible" copy pushing $50. There's no (legal) digital source anywhere that I can find. Pandora, Rhapsody, Last.fm . . . . Forget it. Every other Joe Henry album I can listen to on these services or order new, but not my favorite! So what gives?

It reminds me of when we bought a five-speed station wagon several years ago. We had to pay top dollar because it was such a rare car. Then when we tried to trade it in, the same dealer low-balled us because it was such an unusual car. Jeez.

(I know: don't tell me about specialized demand and how time-sensitivity creates an over-supply of exactly one when you've got an odd-ball item you need to move. I'm not looking for rational explanations; I want sympathy!)

Storm Notes

Here I was just last week writing about how beautiful the weather was, and then we spent the weekend crammed into a hallway with a bunch of pillows hoping our tiny house wouldn't be crushed. OK, not exactly, but our metro area had some mighty nasty weather this past weekend, and we were all caught a bit off guard.

Friday evening we had a little league baseball game, our first of the season (I'm the coach; my oldest son is on the team). The big discussion of the day was whether the rain would let up in time for us to play the game at 6:00. The clouds broke, the sun came out, and we played ball. We won 10 to 3, and the kids played really well. So the family came home in a good mood. Muddy cleats on the porch, showers, time for bed, the usual.

We put the kids to bed as the first major storm lumbered past us a few miles to the south. Shelle stayed with them in their room while I watched the weather both on TV and out the window. Reports were coming in of damage downtown and along an eastward corridor that kept looking like it should include us, but as I watched out the bedroom window, our big, drought-damaged trees barely waved.

Later, when Shelle came to bed, we continued to watch the shocking scenes of old buildings brought down by wind and sign and lamp posts twisted and torn, cars and trucks tossed and rolled down the highway like dice. We thought about our basement -- wet, low-ceilinged, probably ruled by some rodent monarch from a Stephen King story -- and wondered if the front hall wouldn't be safer after all.

We finally turned off the TV and went to sleep, but sometime near morning we were awakened by a horrible bang, loud as a shotgun blast. We both sat up in bed, and I realized in a moment the power was out. It had been raining hard but now there was a sudden, eerie silence. And then distant at first, a sound of wind, trees waving and the slight cracking of limbs. Gradually we were aware of a sound you hear about all your life: a steady droning, growing slowly in both volume and pitch. A sound like a freight train. There was almost no time -- mere seconds -- to react. I jumped out of bed and ran to the door to look outside, hoping for some visual confirmation I guess. The floor began shaking slightly, along with the pictures on the wall next to me. But looking out the window, I saw relative calm, not the torrid swirl of trees and brush I expected. Shelle was already getting up to get the kids when we heard a new sound, shocking, piercing, comforting: a train whistle. It was just the CSX, which comes through several times a night, and which we hardly notice any more.

We did actually spend Saturday afternoon under a tornado warning and crammed into the hallway. After Friday night, no one was taking chances, and the kids were all pretty scared. We're used to Spring storms around here, but I don't ever remember a storm where so many big, ostensibly strong structures were damaged by the wind alone. Usually we get a lot of trees knocked on top of things and low, weak structures blown apart. But this wind pulled bricks off of buildings and bent metal reinforcements. That's some serious shit right there.

WFH

I work from home as much as I can. My wife and friends like to tease me by putting quotes around the word working with their fingers -- "oh, he's working from home." We all know that's a joke. If I were in the office I'd be so resentful I'd spend the whole time blogging like everyone else does!

But today I thought I'd take a break from writing about abstruse data center technology to mention a little bit about how freakin' awesome it is to be working from home. See, yesterday I went to the office, and after just under an hour in traffic, I spent the entire day in mind-numbing meetings. I had one 20 minute break, during which I found a colleague who happened to have his classical guitar with him at work, and I played for about 10 minutes just so I wouldn't pull my hair out. I even ate my lunch during a meeting. Then it was an hour in traffic back home in time to work some more, then choir practice and supper on the run, and up late working last night. So this morning, I have a great appreciation for the fact that I spent most of the morning working in bed and listening to BBC radio 4 over the Internet. Then I got up and ate these little left over cakes I found in the fridge. Yum! Really sugary, and good with coffee.

It's sunny and warm outside; upper-sixties. The fringe flowers are in riotous bloom. Brown thrashers, cardinals, and a couple of different types of woodpecker are flitting through the woods in our back yard. I stood barefoot on the patio and finished my coffee this morning.

Working at the dining room table, I saw one of our local Cooper's hawks emerge from the periwinkles in the deep part of the back yard with a mouse in his talons. He's as big as a cat, and sitting on a low limb in the back yard, right by the kids' play set, he was the king of everything. Then the other male, smaller by about a third, swooped down and sat about 20 feet away, screaming. The larger male, annoyed, took off in a great swoop and flutter, flying toward the house and lumbering for altitude. The smaller male went after, and I took to the patio to watch. The females were high up over the street, and I saw all four hawks circling and screaming, for all the world like they were oblivious to the interstate just two blocks to the East.

After yesterday's misery, I need a little time to reflect: it could be worse. I could have to spend every day like that.

Billy Bragg

The first Billy Bragg song I ever heard was "Levi Stubbs' Tears." I was a brand new freshman in college and Talking to the Tax Man About Poetry had just come out. A guy on my hall named Jay heard me playing Bob Marley on my Sigma acoustic, and he invited me down to his room to listen to records. I was a little scared: Jay was a junior, and he was imposing. A giant of a man, with shocking blue eyes and thick dark hair swinging across his face. Faded black combat boots and a cheap plaid shirt like a tent. When he appeared in my doorway at 10:00 in the morning with a coffee pot full of water and a pack of cigarettes, I thought I might be in for some hazing, not genuine friendliness.

I left my guitar behind and we went down to his room on the other side of the pay phone and bathrooms. Right away I noticed a very big, very nice stereo with an actual turntable instead of a CD player. Jay pulled out a red and white 12" record with a picture of a well-dressed Levi Stubbs on the cover and BILLY BRAGG in block letters. "You gotta hear this," he said. Before even telling me his name, I think.

It was weird, really, because most of the guys on the hall wanted to hear me play, and they treated me almost deferentially. I would play stuff they expected like The Eagles and Lynyrd Skynyrd and "Magaritaville," and then I'd hip them to some deep Who or Pink Floyd cuts and some Kinks, Clash, U2, REM, Cure, and other things I considered edgy and tough. I reckon I was pretty snotty, playing and singing my simplistic versions of the things I wanted people to hear. But I was regarded as sort of the music expert on my end of the hall, and no one ever really pushed my boundaries. Jay knew from the get-go he was going to open my eyes rather than the other way around.

Billy Bragg's unadorned electric guitar and brilliant songwriting -- along with his crazy cockney voice -- were unlike anything I'd heard before. It was a bit like the sea change I'd experienced a couple of years earlier when someone put The B-52s debut record in my hands, the way that had revised the way I heard pop music. But this was something different again. There was something punk about the record, but it was like singer/songwriter punk. This had an intimacy and a sparseness to it that was more arresting in its way than all the noisy swagger of "God Save the Queen" (which, by the way, Jay and I would also listen to that morning).

The flip side of "Levi Stubbs' Tears" included the amazing "Walk Away Renee," a starkly funny poem about a romance gone wrong spoken over a guitar version of the old Left Banke song. The imagery of that track has never left me. Jay also had the Talking With the Taxman LP, and we listened to the whole thing. He turned out to be the kind of guy who would suddenly throw his head back with laughter, then jump up and lift the needle -- "Did you hear that line? 'A man could spend a lot of time wondering what was on Jack Ruby's mind'! Jesus, that's great." And then he would move the needle back and listen again.

Jay never did much like to listen to me play my guitar and sing, though we would sometimes cut class together and sit in Rose Hill cemetery to drink beer and smoke while I played. In fact, whenever I tried to play a song for him I had written, he would just laugh enigmatically, but not in the "move the needle back" kind of way. Later he moved into a house and got so heavy into LSD that when I'd go over to listen to records, he'd maybe put the Sex Pistols on one turntable and Hank Williams on another and mix the two into an unlistenable cacophony, turning it up loud and laughing over at me in that "isn't this great?" kind of way. I'd try to laugh along, but I was way too much of a square to really find this funny. I always suspected he was punishing me for not wanting to get high with him.

When Jay and I were friends, I looked up to him a great deal. He introduced me to a lot of music and ended up changing the way I played guitar and sang. When I got a band going, it wasn't a laid back, strummy, folk rock affair. I fronted it with an angry, unadorned Stratocaster; and although we covered a lot of standard "college band" songs, I stripped them back to an essential few chords and played them fast, snarling out improvised lyrics in a way I thought would make Jay howl with laughter and want to move the needle back. But he never came out to hear us play.

As for Billy Bragg, he turned 50 last year and he's still making great music. He's always been known for his Workers First "this machine kills fascists" kind of Socialism. And I love some of his big political songs like "Help Save the Youth of America" and "There's Power in a Union" and "Waiting for the Great Leap Forward." I also have to admit that some of his political songs just suck, lacking the beauty and nuance he's capable of. What I learned from Billy Bragg most of all -- the thing that really stuck with me -- is how the personal is often the most political. His very best songs are, like "Levi Stubbs' Tears," songs about individuals trying to work out the meaning of very personal hurts, people trying to sort out the messes of their lives. We may be fighting an uphill battle trying to straighten out big-picture politics as long as we haven't got a clue about the little pictures in our little worlds.

Here's a very young Billy Bragg playing "Levi Stubbs' Tears":

Stay Close

I changed up the demo widget because I realized it's had the same old recordings on it for over a year. And also we have a new recording of "She Walked Away," which I thought ought to supersede the ones already over there. While I was at it, I added a recording of a newish song, "Stay Close to Me," which I briefly mentioned back when I first performed it. That song has come to be a favorite of ours, and it's a song people talk to us about a lot.

First, I reckon I ought to own up to my inspiration for the song: There's a scene near the end of Deathly Hallows (yes, the Harry Potter book) where Harry is really scared, and he whispers to a sort of vision of his dead mother, "Stay close to me." And it just made my face hurt when I read it, I was so moved. If you've read the book, I'm sure you know the scene. I won't go more into it because this isn't a book report. I don't really know why it struck me so, but there you go.

I knew right away I wanted to write something called "Stay Close to Me" that evoked some of what I felt in that passage -- the sense of vulnerability in the face of fear, maybe. And I wanted it to be distant enough from the source that I wouldn't have to go around calling it "that Harry Potter song" for people to get it. I also wanted it to be a simple song. I have a tendency to overwrite things, to use six words where one will do, to use broad epic similes instead of just coming out and saying what I mean, to ramble along in multiple, dependent-clause-infused sentences like this one when I should be moving along to the next thought. So I was determined eschew verbosity and to keep the imagery sparse. It did not take long to get a draft worked up, but I had to fight hard all along not to keep adding verses and a bridge and more transitional material and so forth. During revision, I ended up cutting a lot of excess baggage to pare it down to this:

    

Stay Close to Me

Darkness closes in on me
I can't see the way ahead
But if I know you'll stay with me
Then I can face this dread

Stay close to me
I don't want to be alone
Stay close to me
I'm sinking like a stone

My heart is beating in its cage
I'm embarrassed by my fear
But the strength I need is in your gaze
And now my path seems clear

Stay close to me
I can't do this alone
Stay close to me
With you I'm almost home

Stay close to me
Stay close to me

Thanks!

We had a really nice turnout for Saturday night's Java Monkey show, and it might just have been one of our best shows ever. At the expense of getting all left field on you, it was like we were lifted up out of ourselves by the audience's energy. It's something I don't really know how to describe; you just have to feel it. But if you could feel that all the time you'd just about get lost in it.

We did a lot of new songs, but we also did some old ones. And we did several traditionals, like "Moonshiner" and "A Rovin' On a Winters Night." I did Falling, which I've written about badly here. And I played a Townes Van Zandt song, since he's been so much on my mind lately. Of course we did the "Waves" and "She Walked Away" like we always do. One song that Shelle and I were particularly pleased with was "101 Degrees," so here's a new demo of that song, as recorded a couple of weeks ago:

101 Degrees

Enjoy!

Without a Trace

After several postponed studio dates, we finally got one we could keep on Saturday, Feb. 9. Under the expert guidance of our producer, Ryan Williams of JimmyEther.com, Shelle and I recorded seven songs in a fairly relaxed one-day session. We just stood in front of microphones and performed much like we would on stage, except the equipment was better and we could always back up and try again when we made a mistake!

Many of the songs we recorded were new, including "Without a Trace." Shelle had never sung it with me and I'd not performed it until the night before at an ad hoc Java Monkey show where I filled in for a friend. I wrote the song some weeks ago while I was noodling around on the guitar with the TV on. I needed some words to proof-out the melody, and there was a crime show on called "Without a Trace"; that title happened to fit the syllable count just right. One thing led to another, and pretty soon I had what I thought was a decent little song.

That song turned out to be one of the pleasant surprises of the recording session. We were about to give it up after a couple of mediocre takes, but Ryan said, "I really have a feeling about this. If you're willing to give it one more take, I think you guys are going to nail it." Well, you can be the judge of whether we "nailed" it. But in this quick session mix, I feel the seeds of a better song than the one I dashed off distractedly while watching TV.

Download it here: Without a Trace

Townes Van Zandt

Something I share with a great many musicians and songwriters is a love for Townes Van Zandt's songs. Something I may share with fewer is a love for a 2001 record called Townes Van Zandt Live at McCabes, based on an intimate concert that took place in Santa Monica two years before Van Zandt's inevitable early death. I have recommended this CD to friends only to have them come back to me and say, "did I get the right record? that was pretty bad."

By certain objective measures of good-record-ness, I suppose I can see why people don't like Live at McCabes. In fact, I often hedge my bets by saying it's my favorite "bad record." Bad because Townes sometimes sounds so weary, you think he might be too tired or too drunk to play. Like maybe he won't make it all the way to the end of the show. His fingers kind of scrawl and scrape on the strings and his voice scratches and waivers past the notes like a man trying to aim a pistol with a hangover. He'll start off a song, then seem to lose the beat for a second or stop altogether to bark off a laugh, maybe tell something funny he just thought of. And the audience's laughter at these times often seems a little forced, almost nervous.

So there's a roughness to the whole thing that's more than the ordinary lack of polish for a live record. I guess it's this rawness that turns people away from it. Why I like this album so much better than any mere collection of Townes Van Zandt songs is, I suppose, as much of a personal matter as it is something intrinsic to the disk.

At some point, I became aware that Townes Van Zandt was "important" and "influential." The way you come to realize you should listen not only to Bob Dylan but to Woody Guthrie too, even if you suspect in the heart of your heart that listening to Woody Guthrie will make you want to put a rock through your radio. I had started to recognize Van Zandt's songs and name all over the place: My wife and I had learned his "Tecumseh Valley" off a Nanci Griffith record, and I'd heard various versions of a Steve Earle anecdote declaring that Townes Van Zandt was the best songwriter ever. Then there was Willie Nelson singing Townes's "Pancho and Lefty" and the Cowboy Junkies covering "To Live's to Fly" and all that kind of thing. I decided I needed to go to the horse's mouth, as it were, and get hold of some Townes Van Zandt albums to listen to.

When I take a mind to get to know about something, my first stop is usually the library, and our local DeKalb County Public has a pretty good CD collection for what it is. So I figured to check out all the Townes Van Zandt CDs I could find. But the thing about that CD collection is, it's made up of donated records, which is to say, chiefly stuff people bought and didn't like. It turned out, therefore, the only Townes Van Zandt album on the rack was this one, Live at McCabes. I checked it out and took it to work the next day to listen through headphones while sitting in my quasi-efficient, open-backed cubicle with its pilled side fabric, florescent lighting, and overhead storage like a Greyhound bus.

At first, I was kind of put off by those things I have described, the creakiness and the sort of wild playing and all that. But soon I was also getting pulled in by the sound in my headphones, the scraping chairs and throats clearing in the quiet parts. And the exposed rawness in the voice, creating a feeling almost of embarrassment, like sitting too close in somebody's living room when he's playing you a song and you don't know quite where to look. At one point, the singer jokes, "boy, if it gets any quieter in here, I'm going to preach a sermon." Another burst of nervous laughter. There's a sense in these moments that the audience is witnessing a kind of struggle, some profound wrestling match between the man sitting before them and something unseen. Or maybe I'm just describing my own reaction, because somewhere along the line I crossed over completely from my nondescript beige cubicle. Fell right through in my imagination into the fidgety, small-room audience witnessing this balancing act between revelation and self-destruction.

Toward the end of the record, there're a couple of light, jokey numbers with Kelly Joe Phelps sitting in on Dobro, and then a hushed, long, mostly spoken new song, "Marie." A dirge of a song, a homeless man's desperate resignation to his lover's death and his own impotence in the face of it. By the end of "Marie," I was surprised to discover I was weeping. Not misting over, you understand, but sitting at work, slacks and buttondown, expensive laptop and all, and crying like a beggar in the rain. I'm hoping to hell no one will try to talk to me because my eyes are full up and my throat is hot and tight, beyond speech. The shock of it brought me back to time and place, and I got up and went to wash my face and so forth. No harm done to my day job.

Since then I've listened to a lot of his records, and frankly very few of them are great beyond being good gatherings of exceptional songs. Live at the Old Quarter is very good, and if I remember correctly, I really like High, Low and In Between. Ultimately he's a songwriter who's songs are greater than any single collection of them or any single recording or performance of any particular one. There's a new release of Live at McCabes out that starts out with a different song ("The Hole" rather than "Pueblo Waltz") and swaps out a couple other tracks here and there. All-in-all, the new one feels a bit slicker, lacks a little bit of the rawness that I responded to on the initial release. On the other hand, this one is missing a studio demo that follows "Marie" and mars the end of the original. I don't know which record most closely resembles the actual 1995 concert; for me the performance took place inside my head ten years later in a bland office cubicle in Atlanta.

Being the Bad Guy

Andy Whitman is just about my favorite music critic. Among other things, he writes for Paste magazine, and I always look for his reviews first. He recently wrote a blog post for Paste extolling a record by Jacob Goldman called Revenge Songs. I haven't heard the record (it's not out yet), but I was taken by Whitman's description of it, especially a song called "Zero Integrity": I never claimed to be the better man / I've got no integrity to cling to.

Thing is, most songwriters can’t resist a little touch of pro-singer spin. Neil Young’s “guitar fighting the TV” or Paul Simon’s assurance that he, too, was “concerned with the child she carried.” It takes something for a character to reveal his own shit-heeledness without flinching. To say flat out, "I've got no integrity to cling to."

I think there's something worth exploiting in that difficulty, the tendency characters have (oh, hell, that we all have) to take that little turn away from the harsh light of self-examination and put in a little plug for themselves. Though I'm not saying I'm any good at this, at turning that light on myself. For one thing, as I've discussed in this space before, I'm no great pour-your-soul-out confessional songwriter. And the truth is, it's part of my own lowness of character to lack the forthrightness to face my own failings with that kind of courage.

So I go at this from another angle, creating characters who don't seem to realize what wretches they are. Who keep telling themselves or their lovers or whoever will listen, "Any one of you'd have done the same thing," or "I'm not the man you think I've been; / Just let me hold you close tonight." Does it make good songs? Probably not as good as those of braver writers, but I like them.