I moved to New York in 1987 and immediately noticed how everyone talked about leaving. You'd walk up to people chatting at a party and hear someone going on about how the art scene in Cleveland was so much more happening. Or how much space you can get for your rent in Baltimore. Almost everyone … Continue reading Slave of New York →

I wrote most the following right after those first videos of Joni Mitchell at the Newport Folk Festival were posted. Of course, she just performed at the Grammys. Looked a little slicker than Newport, but you get the idea. Like a lot of other people, I got very weepy watching the videos of Joni Mitchell … Continue reading What a drag it is getting old →

I’m listening to REM while I write this. “Gardening at Night” at this particular moment. My friend Craig referenced that song title in a story he told me about a guy he knew who tended a large marijuana grove on a secret island in a Mississippi lake. That strikes me as a quintessentially Southern image. … Continue reading REM in the Deep South →

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5kM3iwYVi0&pp=ygUjbGNkIHNvdW5kc3lzdGVtIG5ldyB5b3JrIGkgbG92ZSB5b3U%3D The other day, I visited my friend Hearn who was cat-sitting in Greenpoint. After leaving his place, I took a bike home to Park Slope in the early evening. Dusk. I headed down Driggs through a crowded McCarren Park. We were having a few mild summer days.  Hundreds of people were still barbequing and … Continue reading Missing out on Williamsburg →

A few weeks ago, I rented a car to drive upstate to bring my daughter back to Brooklyn. Hertz gave me a modest Volkswagen four-door. Running errands around the neighborhood before hitting the highway, I discovered that the air conditioner wasn’t working. The temperature that day was approaching 100. So I drove back to Hertz … Continue reading Kali Malone will make you trip →

Back in the 1990s, I met a bass player named Kevin. He played a gig with my friend Cody 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. Now in the age of computers … with “digitization” … the idea is … Continue reading Can I Upload My Soul? →