Donkey Lessons

The Central Valley is creeping into the triple digits and California is starting to burn down, just like we thought. I am sweating it out in my second story bedroom/studio, with no natural light and no air flow, laying down tunes. It should be called Funky Hot Box Studios. Sweaty Man Cave Studios. Enticing, no? Come on over for a sauna sesh.

I just sent out the first batch of Songs of the People, what a process it has turned out to be! I vastly underestimated the amount of time it takes to produce a decent song. It’s definitely not like my young days when I might sneeze out a song at any moment.. my standards are higher for one, craft is something I didn’t know much about back then, and the sneezers are like shooting stars – they do happen once in a while, but don’t count on it to happen on demand. I have already learned so much about my process: songs can go through many forms before snuggling in to the one that suits them best; there are an infinity of options at any point in the song (no pressure); they can also be very donkey-like, in that no amount of tugging will coax them from where they want to be. I also found that when it came time to hand them over to their patrons, I had a severe hide-under-the-covers avoidance response.. I clicked “send” feeling like I had pushed the “self-destruct” button on my life boat. I did not expect to feel so vulnerable. People were then waiting for their songs without any updates from me, which made it worse. Normally I would have gotten drunk for a week or two. Well, more likely I would have just blabbered on about the project from my bar stool and never actually started it. I’m so grateful for this project, thank you to everyone for bearing with me, and sharing your beautiful and unique stories. I have four more on the stove, and four interviews to schedule. Shoot me an email if you’d like to jump in line! I promise I will schedule them reasonably this time, and keep people in the loop.

You may have noticed, but I spruced up my website in the last week; gone are the dark brooding, hard to read pages. I also finally started a Facebook Fan Page, which will help me get the word out about the many goings-on in my music world. Like it if you like, annoyingly the numbers do actually mean something in the music business world.

Other news is that I am booking for my Big Damn CD Release Tour in Aug/Sept! I’ll be on the road for a solid two months, if not longer, throwing my new CD at everyone I see, so look out. Starting in Sacto, I’ll head east to CO for a show with Jill B, then split some shows with Iowa boy River Glen, up to MN to play with V and the Dirty Pretty. Then I’ll head down to the Southeast to do a leg with Humble Tripe, then it’s up to the Northeast to do some shows with Bethel Steele. From there I’ll start heading west, I’ll do some shows with Ohio’s wonderful Wormz and the Decomposers. From there we’ll see what comes together. Shows are listed on the website, stay tuned and they will keep rolling in. If you have a suggestion for your area, want to bring me to your college, or any other helpful hints, let me know! If you can’t wait that long, want to hear some new stuff before I get to town, or want to check out two of the Songs of the People, you can watch the Empty Sea show on demand, at The Roots Channel, for only 5 bucks! What a steal.

I hope this finds everyone well. I have to say, none of this would be happening if I wasn’t sober. Gotta give thanks where thanks are due. It has been a weird two plus years since the beginning of Coyote Grace’s hiatus, this isn’t where I thought things would be at this point, but I’m not complaining. The lessons reveal themselves. They can be very donkey-like themselves. Best to just be a vessel and let them evolve.

j

Back in the Sac(ramento)

Back in the Central Valley after a beautiful springtime loop through the Northwest! Traveling can be so packed full of new experiences that two weeks feels like a month.. I am just coming back from the last week out in the far reaches of eastern Oregon, Idaho, and seriously isolated parts of Nevada. My favorite!

I had a great run of shows with Drew de Man, bringing his lap steel stylings to my tunes, joined by Brianna Blackbird in Portland and Seattle, the other half of their duo Pretend Sweethearts. I got to squeeze many friends from Eugene to Seattle, dropping in on the Camp Ten Trees annual auction, which is truly an event that can make a trans man cry. And that ain’t easy! I spent Easter with some great friends eating great food, then waddled over to Empty Sea Studios for the final show with Michael Connolly and the Sweethearts. The show will be ready any day now on The Roots Channel to watch on demand, for those of you who missed it. I’ll keep you posted.

Then, my lady friend and I took off for the Great Basin, and this happened:

 

 

Yes, that is a bathtub in the northern region of Washoe County, rigged up with a pipe flowing from an incredibly hot spring. Sarah and I found it following vague directions with flashlights after sunset, and saw a sea of stars like only Nevada can reveal. Here was another awesome one:

 

This one was outside the ghost town of Unionville, east of Lovelock. I swear, I could wander around Nevada for a year. One day I just may.

So as of now, I am trying to re-acclimate to the urban environment I live in, and am busy as ever writing songs and working on my solo album set for release in August, and setting up the tours for the late summer and fall. Songs of the People is trucking along, I’ll be putting up videos of some of them soon, stay tuned!

j

Turning New

The Seattle sun comes in the windows on 17th and Thomas, shedding light on sills thick with many coats of paint, through the frame green leaves fidgeting absently in the foreground of the power lines, brick buildings, and the brightly colored old houses of the Pacific Northwest. The city and the mountains are as clear as can be, far clearer than my journeying through the Rockies, vast expanses shrouded in particulates from all the fires. This is the Seattle that wooed me back in 2000, saying nothing about the soggy pants and shoes, freezing digits, and endless low gray ceilings that awaited me.

This summer has been vast – no other way to describe it. My head if full of colorful experiences, each one clamoring to be written about, each worthy of its own personal essay. Perhaps this is the relative novelty of being able to not only participate in life, but to remember the experience. My world not too long ago had become very small. As a woman recently said about her hometown in southeastern Colorado; the sky isn’t just above you, it’s all around you.

When I look into the current collage in my mind, I see the rolling partially forested hills and mountains of Idaho, endless sage brush, streams running along side gravel roads on BLM land. I see new roads crisscrossing Wyoming, I see traversing back and forth along the Great Divide from Colorado all the way to Montana. I see small towns that have plenty of life in them, local coffee shops and outdoor music, murals and local pride, the overwhelming views that are their every day backdrop. I see tiny headwaters turn into mighty rivers; some clear and renewed high in the mountains; some dull, sluggish, and sickly on the platts from pesticide runoff of endless monoculture. The whole earth struggles for balance and sustenance in the ways that it has learned how, struggling to adapt, struggling to comprehend the entire massive ecosystem to which it belongs, struggling to feel some sense of serenity in the absurdity and to reconcile all of our highly subjective existential purposes.. It’s a big beautiful wonderful mess – we can only be where we are, we can only do the best we can with the tools we have. There would be no need for creativity if there weren’t any problems to solve.

I survived my first sober Song School at Planet Bluegrass in Lyons CO (not to be confused with Lyons OR in the last post). It was actually my sixth year, says Ingrid the historian, which was a little bit of a shock to me considering my sorry lack of coherent memories from the first five.. but hey, we can only be where we are. I think I made enough this year to seriously tip the scale. The week started with one of the greatest gifts I have ever received: I wrote the song “Flowers” on Now Take Flight about a woman I met in a songwriting workshop, and our goal was to write the other person’s story. I finally finished hers in rehab last year, and she teamed up with another fellow song schooler and completed mine. I was struck by the incredible significance of their effort – they took it upon themselves to walk in the shoes of a transperson, they even researched transgender issues to really understand as best they could, they spread out into new musical genres that seemed to suit the message, made many remixes, and just generally worked their asses off on this project. In the moment I couldn’t think of any greater gift they could have given to the trans community. It was truly a humbling moment to be sitting in the back seat of their car listening to their incredible labor of love on the stereo. I felt truly loved and seen, and felt that together we had made the tiniest dent in the breakdown of the great “us and them” conundrum of our time. Big thoughts for seemingly small gifts, but it was not small to me.

The rest to Song School was similarly packed with opportunities to connect with people, to bear witness to their defining experiences, to let them bear witness to mine. Awesome music, new skills, new friends, new networks, new understanding. I was able to really reconnect with my love of music and why I do it, with the skill of this craft that I have developed since I was a teen. I’m happy to report that it didn’t all get lost in the haze and the tumult (I may be the only one who needed that reminder), neither was it just a product of severe emotional turmoil and mental illness. One important shift was the re-framing of playing music as providing a service. At the heart of it, that is what it’s all about. Good business is all about providing goods and services, and art is one of the oldest known professions in the book. It isn’t about going way over the line either, into some martyr state of existence – it’s a service to everyone involved, and that includes myself.

I haven’t been back in Seattle in about a year, and an eternity. I walked around Capitol Hill and let the memories come – so many apartments I lived in, my friends lived in, parties held in; streets I walked down, businesses patronized, buildings no longer there, Broadway’s now gap-toothed skyline of gentrification’s turnover in full swing, complete with cranes, condos, and empty store fronts waiting to be endlessly occupied and vacated; so many experiences from so many different times of life and lifetimes. Not one familiar face on the street, mine familiar to no one. My history here is only evident to me. How many lenses of personal history are also associated with this very neighborhood, these very streets and buildings.. uncountable. It is dizzying. Among the many ways that I grew in this town, I also struggled immensely. Sobriety seemed completely elusive despite my best efforts, and there was no way I could wrap my head around the idea that things could actually be different. And here I go, walking down the street, sober and fairly well adjusted, digging my life and comfortable with the slow but steady passing of time and the change it brings, grateful for every card I was dealt… What the hell happened??!!! What happened to the self-absorbed, fuck-it-all, last man standing, wounded dog battle cry that I once was?! I used to rip through this city drunk and righteous as if it owed me something like I would never die, speeding and over caffeinated and swearing at everyone, cigarettes butts flying out my window every ten minutes, hell bent on being in control of my reality at all cost.. Now I am concerned with balance, art, service, health, and seeking the truth of the way things really are, convinced that the whole of existence is really all gravy. The seriousness has drained away, the panic and bewilderment has subsided to acceptance and contentment. I am astonished and flabbergasted, completely dumbfounded at how far a perspective can really shift.. I knew people changed, but damn! Many associations aren’t without their sting, but the whole experience is far greater than the individual feelings, and feelings are also just feelings – as shifting as anything else. I am again at ghost boy status – a stranger to many, with very little history of this new lifetime under my belt, with nothing better to do other than be here now. What a trip; truly the wildest trip I have ever been on, and that is saying a lot. I’m into it.

I am overwhelmed in the best of ways, happy to be riding such awesome waves. I am also very much looking forward to playing music for the Sunday webcast at Empty Sea Studios, I hope some of you tune in and check it out! Music is turning new again.

j