America is an atomized and disconnected space. I’ve felt that disconnection in a visceral way since January 21, 2017. That’s the night my wife and I learned that our only son had been killed: walking along an isolated stretch of highway in Florida. Mark had just turned 33.
In my case, loneliness feels exacerbated by social media. To be truthful, there are moments when it seems like it might be part of sinister plan concocted by our overlords to keep us as divided and disconnected as never before. Why even make the effort to remain connected when you can push a button on your screen?
I don’t know a lot about Ben Sasse, senator from Nebraska. I’ve heard him speak on news shows and I know he has a book called Them: Why We Hate Each Other—and How To Heal. Personally, I have little hope that we’ll stop hating each other—that’s not my point, here. But in reading something over the weekend about Sasse and his book, I was reminded again about my opening point: our isolation (and how I cope daily with my own).
Sasse’s book addresses elements like an “evaporation of social capital,” which is the “glue that binds us together,” as I’ve written about before. This one item struck me just like someone had slapped me in the face. “Loneliness—not obesity, cancer or heart disease—is the nation’s number one health crisis.” Sasse writes that “persistent loneliness reduces average longevity more than twice as much as does heavy drinking and more than three times as much as obesity, which often is a consequence of loneliness.” Or, you could be so fucking lonely that you just end it for good and kill yourself. To feel isolated day after day takes a toll. Continue reading →
Last year at Christmas, I could barely play 5 songs. By “play,” I mean sitting with my guitar and being able to make it through a song, knowing the words and chords without relying on sheet music. I had a couple of songs I was close to “nailing,” but the others I cloyed my way through.
A year later, I can now play an hour’s worth of music (or more) and my setlist is now in the double digits. I’ll still miss a chord change now-and-then, but I’m confident in my ability to play music. This from someone who believed the messaging that he’d never be good enough to perform with a guitar.
What’s the difference a year later?
A good portion of my growth can be attributed to practice. Most of the previous 365 days of 2020 (in the midst of a global pandemic), I spent hours alone in my basement: just me, three guitars (two electrics, one acoustic), a combo amp, a laptop, and a small Bose speaker. I acquired a two-channel PA midway through 2020 and a couple of microphones. These tools allowed me to approximate the live performance space, or a reasonable facsimile.
I have no crystal ball and hence, no sense of the next time I’ll be in front of an audience of flesh and blood humans. Once our “esteemed” leader, Governor “Crackhead,” shut everything down this fall, she deprived me of my weekly opportunity to get out and hit open mics. This was an essential part of my growth as a performer. No matter how much you practice, standing on a stage in front of a bunch of total strangers is an entirely different animal than sitting alone in the basement. Songs you’ve nailed time and time again become clunky messes played live in front of an audience. But, falling on my face made me better. Continue reading →
Another attempt to find a drummer today. These inquiries launched into the digital void haven’t delivered a timekeeper, yet.
All-too-often, some guy wants you to “hit him up,” which seems to be code for “when you do all the work of writing the songs, scoring the gigs, call me and maybe I’ll show up for the payday.” Or something like that.
A week ago Tuesday, I followed a three-piece in Mechanic Falls that were amazing. The band were two brothers (I think) slightly younger than me. They’d been playing for awhile. The drummer who was co-hosting with Chris Floyd was a young man from Jay named Bobby. He has a band of his own, The Only Hope. I appreciated Bobby (and Chris) backing me on “Creep” by Radiohead, and my own song, “Walking Down the Road.”
For the past week, I’ve been thinking how my experiences at open mics might become remarkably different if I could show up with a bunch of songs that I’d been working on with a drummer, instead of hoping the band that I just met minutes before playing will be able to follow me in my own original songs. Then, in some settings, I have to have what I want to play vetted, ensuring the house band knows the song. Maybe I don’t want to learn a bunch of songs that everyone else plays.
Yesterday on my drive back and forth to Brunswick to see my chiropractor with a side jog to my old hometown to see my sister, I listened to Teenage Fanclub. The Fannies are one of a host of bands I could probably listen to daily and not grow tired of. I’m so glad I made the trek to Boston a year ago in March to catch them. It was another one of my solitary adventures.
Prior to my trip to the Hub, I tried banging out some of my faves by the Fannies. For whatever reason, I didn’t have much success. I’m a better player now than I was back then. Maybe that’s why I was able to work this one out, even transposing it in a different key so I wouldn’t be forced to play it dropped down a step and could keep my one electric in standard tuning. That will be good when I roll this one out, live.
What an amazing fucking scene from 1992. It’s Reading, in the rain, and the crowd is being transported to some other place by a bunch of 20-somethings who’ve managed to continue making meaningful music nearly 30 years later.
“Everything Flows” is not the type of song a 25-or-so-old kid writes: a plaintive ode to the passing of time with lines like “see you get older every year/but you don’t change, I don’t notice you changing.”
Looking forward to playing this one live in the near future.
Oh, and the biz card makes it official: I’m now calling myself a musician along with writer.
The business of music.
And since one can never have too much of the Fannies in their lives, here’s a show they did in NYC back in ’93 for some Japanese television station.
We are in that transitional time between late summer, segueing into early fall. I have felt a sense of being adrift. Six months into Covid, with little abatement in sight, the looming darkness and colder days don’t bode well for anyone preferring light and summer breezes. Simply, summer has offered some respite from Covid lockdown. What’s coming, I’m afraid, is a dank, Dickensian dystopia to be endured over the course of the winter.
Last week, a well-known local musician touched down on Facebook about his bookings drying up as the summer places began shutting down for the season. A drive along East and West Grand in Maine’s premier tourist Mecca, OOB, on Sunday revealed summer’s dying embers. Many of the places that had outside entertainment like the Sunset Deck and Myst have closed until next May. Others are open for another three weeks at best. Who knows if The Brunswick will have indoor entertainment come late October.
For the past 44 months I’ve been journeying through the loneliness that apparently is endemic in those relegated to living with the loss and associated grief that accompanies the death of someone deeply loved. During my sojourn, former associates have disappeared. Not sure why. I’m guessing that surface relationships can’t come to terms with darkness of death, subsequent depression it delivers, and all the associated fall-out from an event inflicted on someone.
On days like today, my first inclination used to be to sit down and write a blog post. Given that Mondays don’t require me to check-in at Whitey’s Farm until later in the morning, I went down the stairs to my bunker and picked up my acoustic. As I’ve intimated before, I’m not certain I’d still be here if on that dark day in August of 2018, I hadn’t opened the dust-covered guitar case housing my Yamaha guitar, rather than seeking the alternative hidden in the closet upstairs. Continue reading →
On Sunday, I ran through 8 songs in my basement and posted the video(s) on YouTube at my music page. I figured these 8 songs were a good representation of where I’m at in terms of songs and music I’m playing, at least electrically. My hope is at some point to find a drummer, hence the name of the video (parts 1 and 2). I split the set due to a glitch right about midway through.
The title is a reference to both a Big Star song, when drummer Jody Stephens sings “Way Out West,” and Alex Chilton says, “let’s give the drummer some.” Of course, if you know your popular musical trivia, then you know that James Brown says “I wanna give the drummer some of this funky soul, here…” in his song, “Funky Drummer.”
I actually just finished A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton by Holly George-Warren Here’s a review of the book, here. Actually, I like this summation of the book, better.The book was kind of depressing (at least in parts) due to how Chilton pissed away his considerable musical talents through the trifecta of rock and roll, “drugs, booze, and sex,” or at least that was my perception. I’ve written a song about this and will be rolling that out in an upcoming video or recording.
I received positive feedback about the videos from those who watched them. A couple of people asked about lyrics.
Here’s lyrics to my songs and links to the covers (below):
Walking Down the Road
Verse 1
Walking down the road alone, I saw a country lost at home
A mission of hope carried me forth, I lived each day for all it was worth
A president came while I was away, I planned to counter him every day
Hate and division won’t carry us forth, come together and be a force
Chorus:
I wish I had just one more day, I know I had so much more to say.
I love my dad, I love my mom. I’ll miss my friends forever yon
Verse 2
My family back home sent me their love, I wished I got back to give them a hug
We all know what we think we know, but can we strive for a greater hope
Friends I lost along the way, but still I walked another day
Saving earth was what it’s about, some of the haters would jump and shout
Chorus:
I wish I had just one more day, I know I had so much more to say.
I love my dad, I love my mom. I’ll miss my friends forever yon
Verse 3
One hundred days of joy and pain, my feet moved ‘cross the fruited plain
A dirty hippy or something more, why can’t they see my higher road
My face and words live on today, I often wonder what people say
I gave it all held nothing back, but in the end was it done in vain
Chorus:
I wish I had just one more day, I know I had so much more to say.
I love my dad, I love my mom. I’ll miss my friends forever yon
[Instrumental break]
Verse 4
Walking down the road alone, I saw a country lost at home
A mission of hope carried me forth, I lived each day for all it was worth
My family back home sent me their love, I wish I got back to give them a hug
We all know what we know, but can we strive for a greater scope
Chorus:
If I had just one more day, I often wonder what I’d say
It hurts my dad, it hurts my mom. Please remember them from where you roam
Came up with another song this week. I “found” this chord progression one night before bed, just noodling around on my acoustic. Wrote most of it on the electric, which is not usually how I write–at least in this brief seven month stretch since I’ve been developing songs.
I think I was probably six or seven-years-old when I first heard this song on WPNO that local AM music “blowtorch” based in Auburn, back in the day. This was long before the AM side of the dial opted for talk-radio over tunes.
If you follow popular music and know a thing or two about it, you’ll know Barry McGuire had a major hit with this song written as a Vietnam War protest. If you are a music geek (or maybe you heard it mentioned by Dick Clark on American Bandstand), you’ll know the writer of the song was P.F. Sloan.
The other day, I was thinking of songs that might be worth learning for these days of Crona (borrowing that one from Bob Marley, the comedian) lockdown and McGuire’s song was one of a handful I thought I’d tackle. It’s a simple one, really, in terms of chords.
I’ve mentioned meeting Jorma Kaukonen, one of my musical idols at Raoul’s Roadside Attraction probably 30 years ago. Jorma told me at the time (when I asked him for tips on learning the guitar) to “learn songs.” That’s what I’m doing these days and have been for months, now.
Since I can’t get out to open mics while the world’s shut down, throwing up a video now and then will have to serves as a stand-in until someone re-opens things.
I came home from work on Wednesday. My guitar lesson was cancelled for the third successive week. Not to be deterred, I wrote “Stuck in a Nightmare” in the span of about 45 minutes. A few edits and I had a playable song be the evening.
The song touches on our current belief that staying at home and “sheltering in place” will somehow deliver a magic result. Somehow, we’ll avoid harm and in a few weeks (months?? years??) all will be well and we can go back to our lives of buying junk we don’t need.
The fear-fogging line is one I had to laugh about. Other than my sister, I’m the only other person that I know who has appropriated this excellent phrase that captures what the media does best.
I wrote a paean to Rachel Maddow late in 2019, but she’s become one of the biggest fear-foggers out there. As a result, I’ve stopped watching her show.
For me, who knows better than anyone (other than my wife), some things are beyond our control. In fact, Choice Theory is something I now understand and try to frame how I view the world. Yet, I see the disavowal of something that’s clear—we can only control ourselves. The other stuff we need to let go.
I’m still trying to find a way to up my fidelity on these home recordings. At some point, I’ll figure all this out. Maybe then, we’ll be released from “house arrest” and be allowed to go back to bars, clubs, and other venues and actually play real, live music again.
These are uncertain times. During upheaval, decision-making can be affected. Formerly easy choices become more difficult: for some, paralysis sets in. Of course, if the height of choice difficulty for you is deciding what over-priced, foodie establishment to eat at, you are in luck—you won’t have to contend with that dilemma today (or for the near future).
Doubts about what may happen tomorrow can lead to hearkening back to the familiar—those places where we’ve found answers or solace in the past. Insecurity causes dissonance and discomfort. Fear in turn forces us back to places of familiarity.
The internet can be a source of trusted information. It’s also a breeding ground for the dubious and even fallacious.
I’ve been a blogger since 2003. Over that period, I developed go-to sites. These were written by fellow blogging travelers I developed trust in. When lost without answers, I could go back to them by default. I also incorporated ideas and ideologies from them.
Many of these sites are now shuttered. If still online, it’s been months (or even years) since they’ve been updated with a new post. Disappointing for sure, I simply moved on. Meanwhile, I’ve stayed with it, even following the floor of my life opening-up. I’ve shared with readers from a place that at times felt like freefall. Persisting in the face of dissonance, upheaval, and even tragedy is what resilience looks like, especially if you fancy yourself a writer. Continue reading →
I started this song back at the tail-end of 2019. I had two verses that kind of captured some of what I was feeling heading into the holidays, which always suck without Mark.
Not sure where the spaceship theme came from other than sometimes, I wish I could get into a spaceship and find another planet to live on.
Jump in a spaceship and fly away
Then, the song sat there.
I initially developed the chord progression and riff after working on Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl,” which is played in Double Drop D tuning. The tuning lends itself to some stuff I’d been listening to from a guy that had been based in Boston and now for some reason I think he may live in Maine, Cole Kinsler. He records as Space Mountain and I bought his “Togetherness” cassette that came out in 2019. Perhaps if he ever heard my stuff like this one, he’d demur.
Verse three came to me yesterday when I started playing the song again. It seemed like a better way to deal with my angst about all that’s been going on re: the Coronavirus.
It has no chorus.
Spaceship Blues
Verse I
Life it sucks and then you die
Storm clouds in a darkened sky
Fucking morons are all around
All I wanna’ do is leave this town and roam
Verse II
Idiots tell you just to smile
Don’t have a clue, ain’t walked one mile
In land that’s filled with shit
Jump in a spaceship and be done with it and fly
Verse III
Coronavirus its shut us down
Like sheep we’re led around
Trust the experts they’re rarely right
Load up that spacecraft with supplies and leave today
