Back in the 1990s, I met a bass player named Kevin. He played a gig with my friend James at a bar on Avenue A called Brownies. Then I invited him to a jam session to work on some of my material. He got really excited about my fingerstyle playing and asked me to come … Continue reading aromatic music
https://videopress.com/v/3Wlmy9Kn?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true We had a false autumn over the weekend. I spent both Saturday and Sunday morning at the Blue Bottle cafe on the corner, sitting at a table under a tree (oak? sweetgum?) in the back of the graveled patio. These false autumns are almost more melancholy than the actual one that comes a month … Continue reading False Autumn
The big struggle of my day is now stopping myself from buying a chicken sandwich at Popeyes. Work is catastrophically boring now ... and I mean the pure existential reality of being a 56-year old man at a job. My actual job is pretty good. But it's still a job. And I've been going to … Continue reading Popeyes
I was working on a song with a line about the world being upside down and kept picturing an actual room turned on its side. It hit me that I was picturing a fun house at an amusement park I went to when I was a kid. Delta Village. In Tallulah, Louisiana. There was an … Continue reading Delta Village in Tallulah
Everyone seems to think we’re close to being able to upload our brains. Or, at least, I feel like every time I watch any show or movie set in the future, it’s taken for granted that consciousness will eventually be transferrable. Moveable. With computers … with “digitization” … the idea is superficially less terrifying. In … Continue reading Upload me, baby!
Notes from the early days of quarantine. Along with the virus, New York has been invaded by “the real” — an elusive concept. I was telling an old school New Yorker about an encounter I had at Coney Island once. Super hot day. Blazing midday sun straight above. My children were little. I was taking … Continue reading The Real
It's one of those days at work where I'm absolutely paralyzed. Hogtied. Brainfreeze. I can't do anything. So what do I do? I go to Google Street View. I take a drive in my childhood neighborhood in Jackson, Mississippi. Take a look at the old house. There it is. There's the lawn I mowed a … Continue reading Manhattan Academy
We had a big field behind my house. Somebody twenty years before then grew soy beans out there. But now it was just a big field covered in tall grass. It was a great place to fly kites. The remnants of the old rows made the ground a little uneven as we ran to get … Continue reading Cedarstone
This is a story my father told me about his youth in Kosciusko, Mississippi during the 1940s ... I’m gonna tell you about something that happened just about one block off the square to the west. There was a pool hall down there behind the building that was on the corner of the square. At … Continue reading Pool Halls and Mayor’s Courts
I’m always happy when something strikes me as “Southern.” My sister works in a retirement home in Ridgeland, Mississippi. A 95-year old resident gave her a little frosted-plastic, crystal-looking Christmas tree to sit on her mantle. Inside it, a soft glowing light gently cycles through the color spectrum. My sister said that the next time … Continue reading Southern Subjectivity
Kenny Nowell 