Black Mountain (home)
Monday, January 28, 2003
9:15 PM
Dear friends,
The paint fumes are subsiding and Dan the Tan Van's
getting restless. Must be time to hit the road again.
It's been a lovely winter break for me, hanging around
town over the holidays and spending some time with my family
and Deanna. I got my nephew a "Bop It!" game for Christmas
and we bopped it mercilessly for days. Got a bit of hiking in
at the Joyce Kilmer National Forest, and Deanna even came over
and helped me take on the junk room. We managed to herd most
of the dust buffalo out into the yard. If I'm not diligent in
my efforts to maintain a certain level of chaos, there's a serious
risk of my having the house more or less organized before I really
hit the road again in the next couple of weeks. Order... terrifying.
Joyce Kilmer National Forest
We painted the bathroom and living room, too. Twice.
In each case we made a dubious decision based on a paint chip,
and when the paint hit the wall it was all wrong (the blue in
the bathroom looked like it had batteries). That's the great
thing about paint, though. Slap some more on there and it's fixed.
It's not like war.
I've taken the opportunity to do a few things in the
community here, too. I love this little town, and often feel
frustrated that I can't be more involved with it, given that
I'm gone most of the time. Last night I had the opportunity to
offer a 'healing concert', as the college president referred
to it, at Warren-Wilson College, where there was a dorm fire
last week. Only one student was injured, and she's going to be
OK, but many lost all of their possessions. The dorm burned to
the ground. I got to go hang out with some guys at the local
juvenile detention center, too. We had a good time.
My last show before the holidays in early December
was to celebrate the release of Carolina Folk, a new compilation
CD of North and South Carolina singer/songwriters. It features
just about everyone you can think of in the contemporary folk
scene in the Carolinas. We'll have it available here soon.
I also broke my break for one show in Texas in late
December, and I'm so glad I did. My friend Lucy Nell Andrews
turned 75 a few days before Christmas, and apparently told her
kids that all she wanted was for me to play at her birthday party.
So I took a plane to Houston overnight and whooped it up with
Lucy and her friends. I learned after arriving that at 75, this
was her *first* birthday party. We had a ball.
Nature abhors a vacuum, as they say (or is it 'abhors
vacuuming?'), and it ended up that my break from performance
facilitated a little music-making in another form. When I leave
time for reverie lately, my musing is often turning toward making
a new record. I've about got the songs together, and early in
December I made a rough recording in order to start planning
for that project. Adam Johnson, who did all the live recording
for Good Tar, brought some recording gear over and we made living
room recordings of all of my new songs. It's been fun to listen
to those songs and dream on them a bit. At this point it looks
like I'll make the CD mostly here in Asheville, where I recorded
S.S. Bathtub, and partly out in Seattle, where Corners was born.
Chris Rosser, Evan Brubaker and I will share production responsibilities.
The working title is "Element," and it's my hope to
record it late spring/early summer and have it out by August
or so.
recording the demo
I know that's starting to sound like a hectic break,
but it really has been lovely, and fairly slow. And the coolest
part is that while I was busy not being busy, my career seems
to have gone on without me. In early December the USA Songwriting
Competition announced the 2002 winners, and all three of the
songs I submitted won awards. In an international contest with
32,000 entries, that's pretty darned affirming. S.S. Bathtub
won first place in the Children's Music category, Lens Cap took
second in the Folk Category, and Dark and Deep received an honorable
mention. The contest organizers said in their newsletter that
this was unheard of in the history of the contest. That sure
did perk up the holidays for me, I must say.
Around the same time I got a note from the booking
folks at the Kerrville Folk Festival that I'm booked for the
final Saturday of this year's fest (it's an 18 day festival).
I've been making the annual pilgrimage to Kerrville for almost
ten years now, and have played many a song around campfires,
and even sat in with friends on the mainstage a time or two,
but this is the first time I've been as a main stage performer
myself. This will also be my second year of teaching at the Kerrville
Teachers' School, which is a continuing education program for
public school teachers about how to integrate music and writing
into the classroom across curricula.
There is so much to celebrate in the midst of so much
to mourn. I'm walking daily through the bizarre dichotomy of
tasting such good days in my little life and seeing the world
in such a mess. I read an article this morning about Warren Zevon,
the brilliant songwriter who is sadly best known for his song
Werewolves of London. If you don't know his writing, it tends
to be incredibly vivid, often dark and pretty steadily witty
and wry. In reading the article this morning I was reminded of
an old friend's description of Kurt Vonnegut as "a sweet
pill with a bitter coating." Zevon's that way too, I think.
He will be dying soon (doctors estimate a couple of months) from
a particularly aggressive form of lung cancer, and is currently
working on making an album. In the interview he was talking about
why he's working on the record, and why people write songs in
general, and said, "And they write because the world strikes
them as being a marvelous place, and they want to keep bringing
that to everybody's attention. You know, a scary place, a menacing
place, an exciting place because it's scary and menacing. But
mainly, kind of glorious." Yep.
This month I'm celebrating twelve years as a full-time
musician. That's about 1600 shows, between twenty-five and thirty
thousand CDs, who knows how many miles on five cars/wagons/vans
and hundreds of airplanes. And how many conversations? Tears?
In the next twelve months I'll be playing in Vermont, California,
Alaska, Texas, Florida, Montana, Hawaii, Germany, Australia,
New Zealand, and many points in between. Certainly much to celebrate.
I hope I'll see you somewhere.
Peace, peace, please peace,
David
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