From 1-4 p.m. today, the local gumptioneers at Volume One will be hosting a live membership drive. I’ll be on there with a couple of interviews I taped before the concert last week. Also appearing: a whole series of fine musicians, my friend Frank (you’ve met him in my books), the infamous Mike Paulus, and local singer/songwriter/acorn magnate Justin Vernon.
Producer/engineer Jaime and I up late (and phone/email conferencing with Long Beds guitarist Chris) mixing nearly-final versions of the songs for the new album. Won’t be out until next March (seems a long time, but barring the apocalypse it’ll roll around before you know it), but we’ve sure had fun concocting it. There’ll be more news starting in January.
For now, we’re just two guys up after dark on a cold, snowy night in a small apartment not far from my farm, two boxes of cold pizza remnants on the floor, a one-eyed cat checking in now and then, digital tracks scrolling past on a wall-mounted flat screen, and across the street a beautiful old two-story house blazing with Christmas lights chimney to basement.
Sent an email to my friend Jay Moore at Moose Country radio this morning (where the tagline is: If you [insert goofy jackpine knuckleheaded behavior here] … yer one of us.
The next time I smack my shin on the trailer hitch, I may have to just shut up and take it, because I’m pretty sure I used up my full annual allotment of naughty language during the hour-and-a-half it took me to hook up my “easy-attach” snowplow.
If it’s the blizzard of the decade and it STILL takes you longer to hook up your snowplow than it does to plow your quarter-mile driveway, you might be one of … well, OK, you might be ME.
Then again, if one of the great joys of your life is plowin’ snow with your little snow-suited copilots grinnin’ all gap-toothed beside you in the truck cab, well, then, yer definitely one of us.
It’s just snow, folks. Let’er buck.
He would have been five today.
Every time we hear an airplane…
If you follow the Long Beds, you know our bassist/secret-weapon-wielder Chuck is known not only for choosing his words carefully, but even more the spots in which he speaks them. Just now while listening to some raw footage from our recent Long Beds recording session, I heard myself make some reference to myself as “a machine.” A few seconds pass, and then Chuck (quietly and slightly off-mic) intones: “Better a machine than a tool.”
Revisited For Emma, Forever Ago, this morning because it was done by a friend and because for me the album captures forever the feel of being alone in the swamp in November as the last light seeps away and stuns you with your stone-cold mortality.
And right now Dusty Road to Beulah Land, by singer/songwriter Drew Nelson of Michigan. “Highway 2″ and “Waiting for the Sun” will give you a good taste. “Molly’s Home” is my favorite, for some of the same cold November reasons cited above.
Photographer Mike O’Brien shot the QuinnElizabeth/Long Beds concert the other night. You can see the rest of the photos (at much higher resolution) here.
Have had a throat/head cold thing going for a week or so (technical medical term: “the crud”). As a result, my voice has been pretty much shot. Didn’t say much ahead of time, but I was mighty concerned about how the Long Beds concert would go last night. Took a day off from talking (except for some Dr. Seuss stories for a certain 2-year-old), pounded some mysterious vitamins, spent a bunch of time with Mabis the Steamer, drank a bunch of tea (mostly Throat Coat and alfalfa mint), and did my vocal exercises (thanks, Tom) as any good diva would, and warmed up before the show (while listening to the gorgeous/powerful harmonies of QuinnElizabeth) with vocal exercises and a last-minute Slim Jim (mild).
Then when we hit the stage, we just let’er rip, and man, did we have fun. So thank you to everyone who worked to pull the thing together and pull it off, and thank you especially to the people who packed the place. It was good to see you, fun to play for you, and we’ll see you again. And thank you to the ‘Beds themselves; they are the great sofa of sound upon which I recline. It’d be mighty stringy without them.
In the meantime, here at 6 a.m. the following morning (doing this quick before the tiny feet hit the stairs at which point I will switch to cook and nose-wiper), I am croaking like a frog, but a grateful frog nonetheless.
The Volume One Backstage Concert Series will be broadcast by live webcam tonight. It’ll show up on the Volume One homepage. QuinnElizabeth on at about 7 p.m. CST, Long Beds at about 8 p.m. CST. More details here.
from $8.99
from $13.50
from $13.50