4.20.2005

envious destinations

now playing: counting crows, "goodnight elizabeth"


today is the day i pay for yesterday - i worked until a little past 1 AM, got home at a little before 1:30, and slept for shit...now today, i'm having a hard time holding up the weight of my head - not that this would be an easy task with a full night's sleep...

there's two happy hour gigs this week - tonight and friday. tomorrow night, i have my first rehearsal with the youngers in quite some time, in preparation for a couple of shows that will include their CD release party in june. mary ann has graciously offered to cover the usual end-of-day stuff here, and i may take her up on that...i have all my stuff in the back of the car, ready to roll for the happy hour thing, and my plan was to shoot back over here after i'm done to finish end of day...right now, the jury is still out.


the boys from poco are in montana this week, preparing for a live recording...don't know what the plans are with that, specifically - but i hope they're havin' fun.


i just got off the phone earlier with my buddy bob stirner, who plays guitar in living earth and has a new band called boris garcia that's starting to make some noise, and they're preparing a new record...and bob is excited. anyway, he called today with a couple of dates for me to add to the living earth site, and asked if i'd be interested in doing an "opener" here and there at some point in the future (an "opener", for the uninitiated, is when a lesser-known act does a short set before the "headliner", or main attraction, plays.). "sure," i said. "can i play american pie?"


bob has believed in me far past the point at which an otherwise logical realist would. he still tells me on a regular basis that if the right person heard my now eight year old record, it'd get picked up. and i know that when he says that, he believes it with all his heart.

but reality in the time of britney would beg to differ.

the kind of people who give a shit about this music just don't exist en masse anymore.

and believe me, en masse is important to the people who "pick up" records.


and if the truth be told, i'm really ok with that. my day has come and gone, and while it took me a while to make peace with that, i feel as though i have. in fact, i've been of the mindset for some time now that anything i have to contribute to the world at large will be in tiny, tiny chunks to a small handful of people. i don't feel that youthful sense of urgency to shove myself down the throat of the world. if you're at all interested, come on in - if you're not, feel free to move along.

i've flirted privately in conversations with a couple of friends of mine with the idea of making another record, and i'm feeling at this point like i want to move ahead with that - but i'm going to do it at home, in my basement studio, and i'm probably going to end up recording mostly other people's songs. in fact, i might start with an idea that jon rosenbaum and i cultivated together a long, long time ago...we were talking about doing an EP of Poco covers and calling it pickin' up the pizza (the first poco album was called "pickin' up the pieces", FYI...). but there are a lot of songs that i'd love to do that i want to take a swing at. for the first time in a long time, it feels like it might be fun to do so. i think i've had a bad case of the "blake allens" for a while...which is to say that i don't feel completely comfortable working in that realm unless i've got the space to myself. i know how goofy that sounds, but i think it's true. i'm only just starting to realize that. in the past, i've done my best work under those circumstances, and what happens from here on out is open for speculation...guess i'll know soon enough whether or not that's the case.

i'm amazed at how long it takes to correct inconsistencies in perception sometimes...today, i was driving back to work, and song for adam by jackson browne was playing...and after having heard this song somewhat regularly for twenty years now, i realized that he was singing his destination india, and i had none at all instead of what i had always thought him to be saying, which was his destination envious...after realizing that i was mistaken, it only just then occured to me that the grammar wouldn't have been correct in my assumption, anyway...his destination would have been enviable, not envious...unless he was going to a place that was very jealous of people who didn't go there.


twisted.


anyway, i have to get ready for my afternoon distraction shortly...wendy wants to come see me on friday, and i'm not sure how i feel about that. certainly, they're within their rights to come if they want - and it's honestly not about their presence.

it's about mine.


when it's just wendy, i feel like it's okay...she knows the score, as do i - she knows why i'm there and what the whole point of the gig is, and where i stand on the whole thing. other people, however, may lack her insight and might think that i'm actually enjoying this whole thing, or that this is where i'm at on an artistic level, and that's definitely not the case...so i guess you could boil it down to an analogy along these lines: would you rather observe a wild animal in its native habitat, or would you rather see the humiliated "petting zoo" variety, humbled by captivity?

maybe a little extreme, but that's the way it feels to me at some of these gigs when people whose opinions i respect happen to be in the audience, among the members of Jimmy Buffett Nation.


anyway, my time here is up. i must run....