Return

It appears I departed from this blog many years ago. But today I have been listening to Radiohead's new album, "Moon Shaped Pool," and I felt like I needed to write something down, even if just to mark the occasion for myself.

It's weird: any work of art is a kind of broken conversation in which the artist flings something -- a bit of meaning? -- into the void, trusting that it will be retrieved and that it will signify. When you look at a painting, no pure meaning transfers directly from the painter into your conscious understanding. Instead, you employ your own imagination, intellect, discernment to create your meaning.

Ditto a book, in spite of the illusion that language has intrinsic meaning. The author can pack in all the description, exposition, explanation she wants, but without a reader there are only dead words. This necessarily collaborative feature of art can feel upside down if you think about it enough: In spite of everything an artist brings to his work, it's still the viewer, reader, listener who has the last word. You could say creating and experiencing art involves a kind of power exchange: It is widely understood that "the submissive holds all the power." The artist is Dominant in relationship with the audience, initiating and establishing the terms of engagement. But ultimately inception must submit to perception; the artist is utterly vulnerable, at the mercy of the audience.

Why is listening to Radiohead causing me to think through an obscure theory about audience and perception? I'm not sure, but maybe if I keep writing we can figure it out.

If the artist's vulnerability is key to a power exchange with the audience, this implies a further irony: The better the work is -- the more emotionally exposed, the more honest, the closer to the bone -- the greater the risk, the greater the vulnerability, and thus the greater the audience's power. Shitty, shallow work does not, after all, reveal or expose or risk much of anything, so the audience is just a consumer rather than a collaborator. Listening to "Moon Shaped Pool" I feel a sense of exquisite vulnerability. These songs offer themselves up anxiously in a "low-flying panic attack": Overwhelmingly powerful yet infinitely fragile, they drip quivering into the air around me, their perfection held only by the surface tension.

A Poor Finisher

I just read an article in which a well-respected artist referred to himself  a "poor-finisher," referring to the habit of starting and then abandoning many projects before ever completing anything. He asserts that this is a widely-shared characteristic among creative people, and that art is generally richer for it. Here is that article on line.

I needed to read that this morning, because if ever there was a poor finisher, it's me. Creative projects big and small take hold of me, and I may work obsessively until the idea peters out and I move on to something else. On the other hand, sometimes I can write complete, well-crafted songs, practically one after the other, in just hours or even minutes. Or I can produce complete drawings and/or paintings almost compulsively for days or weeks on end. But I have journals and notebooks and sketchbooks filled with starts and ideas and sketches and half verses never revisited.

Similarly, I started this blog as a "writing and recording project," but over time, I found it hard to complete posts, so I have come to rarely write anything. But perhaps I need to let go of trying to finish things and just post more of what's going on in my head on the "better out than in" principle.

Hemingway's famous advice to himself was, write one true sentence, and then go on from there." My true sentence for today is, "I am a poor finisher."

Just Noodlin'

I referred someone here today and just noticed I haven't posted in nearly a year. So this post is to preempt waiting until August and having to post a, "wow, it's been a whole year!" post. I've actually played out a bit since my last post, including at a wedding and a couple of school shows complete with bands. Added some new covers, dropped some others. And so on.

Been playing around the house a lot more these days now that my shoulder is better (I had a shoulder injury for over a year that caused me pain whenever I played). Enjoying digging out some of my old songs and trying to update them a bit. Now that we're all so wired up (or wirelessed up, as it were), I can pull out my smart phone and record stuff whenever I want. Not like the old days when I had to rig up a mixing board, mikes and a tape deck. As a consequence, seems like I hardly ever do record stuff. But I should, and then just wisk it right up here on the blog with all the immediacy of the Interwebs. Reckon I'll get right on that and make something of myself. And of this little blog of mine.

Well, okay; bye.

Memorial

My friend Cliff Tanner died a few weeks ago. The family asked me to play and sing at his memorial service this past weekend at Camp Lee in Anniston, Alabama. It was among the more moving, memorable experiences of my life, and I'm grateful to Marjory, Fara, and Seth for asking me.

Cliff was an adult friend to me at a time in my life when kids need the right kind of adults in their lives. I worked for him off and on painting houses when I was an older teenager (16 and 17 maybe?), and we worked together on "mission" trips like Appalachia Service Project and John's Island Service Project, improving and rebuilding houses. I can't really articulate how much Cliff meant to me, how much his influence shaped my life, but I can say that I only fully realized it when I learned he was gone.

Fara (Cliff and Marjory's daughter, who is my age) called inviting me to play a Brad Paisley song and to accompany and lead some other songs. I arranged to drive to Alabama on the day of the service with my Mother and Sister, and we arrived very early on that Saturday. Three hours early, in fact.

It was nice to be at Camp Lee with lots of time on our hands. While Meg and Mom went for a walk, I got out my guitar and found a shady spot to sit down and play awhile. By and by, it started to rain really hard, so we gathered on the screened porch of the dining hall and whiled away the time till the event rocking and talking.

When people started to arrive, it was clear there was going to be a really big turn out. Ended up there were a couple hundred. When it came time for me to play, the mood was downright funereal. Which is appropriate for a memorial service I suppose, but it felt like it was time to lighten up a bit. Not least because the song I was about to play had tearjerker potential, and that wasn't the way I wanted it to go. So I felt compelled to crack a joke or two before playing to ease my own anxiety as much as anything.

As it happened, the song went fine, and the rest of the service was moving without being maudlin. At the end, the family had asked me to lead a "camp" song of the type we'd have sung when I was a kid playing guitar at youth camp. And we closed by singing together the "Irish Blessing," "May the road rise to meet you," a song that we had alway closed vespers services with in my youth, when Cliff and Marjory led all us gangly and uncertain teenagers through the maze of doubt and awkwardness into adulthood.

After the service, I realized that having the opportunity to participate in the service in that way had been a great gift to me. From the time I first heard of Cliff's death, I had struggled to say what he had meant to me. By giving me the chance to offer music to his memory, Marjory, Fara and Seth allowed me a rare chance to say goodbye in a way that really meant something to me, and I hope helped others to say goodbye as well.

Injured Reserve

A couple of nights ago Shelle was out with some friends so EW (who's five now) was snuggling up with me to fall asleep. She asked, "will you play, 'You've Got My Brown Eyes' for me Daddy?" A sure enough lullaby I wrote for her, and the which I like to play at times like these. If you've seen my little girl, you would know that any daddy would walk barefoot through hot coals for those little brown eyes, let alone play and sing a song.

I got out my old Taylor and lay back to play a lullaby or two. And I did play the song she asked for, and then "Hush Little Baby" and "Amazing Grace." But the hell of it was, I've got this rotator cuff injury? and man, it hurt! I guess this was the first time I've played lying on my back like that, but I just could not find a way to get comfortable. I tipped the guitar up into all kinds of weird positions to find a way I could play it that didn't force my right arm into a weird angle, but most things I tried either left me unable to play or left me aching something fierce.

If anyone has any ideas about playing a big, wide-bodied dreadnought guitar with a torn rotator cuff, please send them along. Otherwise, I might have to start playing lullabies on the Stratocaster.

Live music coming up

Wow, we have another gig coming up.What are the chances?

As last year, we're playing a lunch time show at the Druid Hills Artist Market. This is a great opportunity to cut work, see some great visual art and listen to good music. There'll be a nice big shady tent and good food where you can relax and let the tunes wash over you.

Part of what makes this so much fun is the great cross-pollination of musicians. Coincidentally, the line up includes a bunch of people who know each other, so we end up sitting in together and creating some interesting collaborations. Last year Shelle was unavailable to sing, but John Willingham joined me on classical guitar. This year I'm going to play drums for my friends Bob Ballou and Sarah Dmitri-Carlton, who are on just before Shelle and I play. John follows us, so with any luck we'll talk him into joining us for a song or two.

Come out if you can and bring the party with you!

Druid Hills Artist Market
1410 Ponce de Leon Avenue
Friday April 16th 
11:30 am (PB to play percussion with friends)
12:15 Shelle and Patrick play

Invitation Only

People ask me "d'you ever play out anymore?" or "what's happening with your music?" or similar daggers to the heart. I tell them, "these days we really only play when we're asked." The truth is, practicing and playing are great fun and don't intrude too much on our very busy three kid/two career life. But the work of promoting music is a different story altogether! emailing, calling, visiting venues and asking if we can play there, and then promoting shows, printing and hanging posters, blogging, sending email, and all that to get people through the door. Now that's a lot of work! I'll venture it's virtually impossible to successfully write music, play and record music, and promote music while holding down a demanding job and being even remotely attentive as a husband and father. But I could be wrong: maybe I'm just lousy at it!

Unwilling to give up music (or our family or the means of providing for our family), Shelle and I have settled on a fairly meager compromise: when an opportunity to play comes along, we take it! But we rarely seek out opportunities. I have my guitar and a drumset and my son's upright bass sitting in our bedroom to remind me I'm a musician, and we'll be playing a lunchtime show at the Druid Hills Artist Market in April. But we don't have a plan beyond that. I guess we'll just take it as it comes!

Baptist Coffee House

We played a show last night at, of all places, the First Baptist Church in Macon, GA. They do a quarterly "Coffee House" event to raise money for Habitat for Humanity, and invited us to play a couple of short sets along with some poets and other musicians, all of whom were quite good.

The audience was warm and receptive, and the atmosphere was great! Good coffee, pizza and sodas, and nothing to remind you it was a church basement beyond the genuine friendliness of the folks and the earnestness of the cause. On the whole, I find I preferred this to an audience of sullen nihilists. But maybe I'm getting old. After all, I do require glasses now to see the lyric sheets. Which I require because my memory isn't what it once was.

Here's what we played:

I Didn't Feel
Moonshiner (traditional)
101 Degrees
Angel Band (Ralph Stanley)
Stay Close to Me
She Walked Away

New, Quick Work

I used to write songs quickly, then make quick and dirty recordings of them, then stick them up on my old blog with a little write up and just go with it. I guess the reason I stopped doing that was because I quit recording stuff quickly, then I quit writing quickly, then I sort of quit writing.

Last night I once again wrote and recorded a quick song, so I'm posting it. When I say quick, I mean less than an hour from concept to uploaded. I was playing around responding to a great flash story about breaking up with the comma -- a story with no commas in it at all. So I wrote a brief narrative about a blues song with no "C"s in it -- neither the letter nor the note. Once I'd gone to the trouble of writing the ultra simple lyric (which really doesn't have any "C"s), I decided to go ahead and put some music with it. I cheated on the key though: it's in G, which does, in fact, contain plenty of "C"s.

Well, without further fluff, here's "Break of Day":

[Break Of Day]

Live at the Attic

Back in April, Shelle, Matt and I had the pleasure of performing at Eddie's Attic in Decatur in support of the Atlanta chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. I've used this space in the past to write about this cause and how important it is, and we were pleased to participate again this year.

As an added bonus this year, AFSP and the folks at the Attic teamed up to record the event, and the masters were passed along to me for editing. The bad news is, I've been really busy with all sorts of things, and I've only edited about half the performances. But the good news is, we were the first act and I started at the beginning. So our songs were among the first ones I finished. So while I work on the rest of the shows, I'm posting a link here to download the MP3 of our performance of "She Walked Away" from Eddie's Attic last month.

Enjoy!

Download She Walked Away

Promotion

I suck at promoting my own music. Always have. In fact, sometimes I think I have a self-sabotage thing going on.

Way back in college, me and some friends had a band called "Fits of Rage." We did not suck. In fact, given the mid-eighties college scene, we were pretty good. And with a little ambition, we might have done a thing or two. We kicked around and shared stages with kids who went on to play in very successful bands. And our drummer, Rob, was always sitting in with the best musicians and toured with some top acts after the F.O.R days. There were always some small-time industry people around, and folks would approach us after shows to talk about recording and that sort of thing. But we never even made a demo. We didn't return phone calls; we didn't re-print t-shirts when ours sold out; eventually, we petered out and went our separate ways.

In the mid-nineties, my folky acoustic group made a lo-fi recording in my apartment and got it on the air at the local college station. We gigged regularly in Athens and Atlanta, and we even got some decent press. The Atlanta Journal did a feature on open mike shows one night when we happened to play. The writer raved that we "gripped the audience with [our] tight . . . set"; while an Athens paper did an interview feature on the band, complete with photo layout and song (mis-)quotes. We drew crowds at the likes of Decatur's Eddie's Attic and Atlanta's Red Light Cafe, and people we didn't know knew who we were. So how did we capitalize on this momentum? We stopped playing in Athens altogether, cut back on the number of dates we played generally, and changed our name. How's that for guerilla marketing!?

So it should come as no surprise that in the age of the Interwebs, I have MyBook, SpaceFace, LiveBlogz, Twiggles, and all the rest, but I don't use these technologies for anything like a coordinated "promotional strategy." I have, however, started using a single tool to coordinate mailing list, press kit stuff, music downloads, and those sorts of things. It's called Reverb Nation, and it integrates with this page, with Facebook, and other services. I've had the account for some time, but they've been improving the service over the last year, and I've come to believe that the convenience of the thing outweighs my instinct to try to make everything "do it yourself" (an instinct that results in half-completed and abandoned projects).

So drop by the "Patrick and Shelle Bryant" profile on Reverb Nation and check out the downloads and the "be a fan" widget and whatever else is there. I'll be glad you did!

Nothing to Report

It's been over two months since my last post, and I don't think anything of musical note has happened since then. Oh, my mom gave us a Yamaha keyboard for Christmas. That's been fun. And I've touched base with our producer about getting the CD wrapped up. I have some great musicians lined up to play, but I still don't have drummer. The real challenge is the budget: we don't have one.

While I'm ruminating about nothing in particular, I'll brag about my kids. Their school had its annual "Peace Celebration" this weekend. Each class prepares and sings a song about peace in honor of MLK. Because it's Montessori, my boys (11 and 7) are in the same class. They sang "Dona Nobis Pacem," first in unison, then in a round. It was good. But the really amazing thing was, My 11-year-old son directed the class rather than the teacher. She had assigned him, along with a younger student, to learn the piece, teach it to the class, and conduct all the rehearsals. So when it came time for the performance she asked him to direct that as well. Needless to say, we were rather proud. And his little brother did a great job of singing too!

In the course of this rambling, I've thought of some actual things I want to write about. Which was sort of the point. So here's hoping I'll get off my duff and get back to being a music blogger this year!

-pb

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.

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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.