Last night I opened for Taken by Trees and El Perro del Mar at the Knitting Factory, and it was fun. I didn’t forget too many words, my fingerpicking wasn’t too clumsy and I could just hear myself above the chatter. The crowd seemed to like it. El Perro del Mar was hypnotic. This is the sort of thing I came to New York to do–hopefully it will become a more frequent occurrence as the weather warms up and I feel more energized and inspired. This coming week I will be doing something I am even more excited about–an interview and recording session with David Garland at WNYC’s studios in west SoHo/south West Village (which is it?).
When I left work today, the smells of impending spring were all around me, and it wasn’t as cold as it could have been. It may only be mid-February, but one can dream.
The winter slowly eggs me on. I have some ideas for how everything will culminate in the spring, or at least in the summer, but who knows, really? The most I can do at this point is, true to the season, piece together some of my remaining scraps of ambition and protect them until the weather improves. For one thing, I am going to start making myself play an increasing amount of shows on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn. My first step is on the 30th–an afternoon show at Rockwood Music Hall. Soon some more recordings that I have been working on will be premiered on a terrific team-run blog called Ampeater. There will be two “digital 7-inches”, four tracks in all, all rough mixes of songs for the third record, including a slightly revised mix of Bluebells, the song that I posted a few weeks ago. I sort of feel like going all Philip Glass and renouncing everything I have done to this point (current work excluded). I don’t feel like the person who made those songs anymore. I don’t feel like someone capable of making as many concessions to comfort or to comprehensibility. Instead, the most satisfying approach is seemingly to embrace my own limitations, both as a producer and as a songwriter, not to smooth them over with such delicacy that what results no longer has any relation to my reality. I am playing guitar solos now (or something resembling them), and my guitar work in general has taken on a strange angularity that feels more like me than anything I have done recently. I have started to play drums, however haltingly. And so the things that I once thought better suited for other people are slowly becoming my own, or at least partly my own.
It’s no secret that what you listen to affects what you make, if what you make involves sound. I have been listening to a lot of wintry music over the past month, on the way to and on the way from work. Arthur Russell’s World of Echo (there’s a bit of an Arthur Russell namecheck in one of my new songs), Richard and Linda Thompson, especially I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight (“Bluebells” takes a heavy dose of inspiration from “The Calvary Cross”), Fairport Convention’s Liege and Lief (I’ve been trying to write a folk-boogie like “Come All Ye” for a couple weeks now), and the Anne Briggs compilation A Collection (Her rendition of the Child Ballad “Willie O’Winsbury” is particularly beautiful) have all been especially heavily played.
Life kind of feels like a Shepard Tone these days (thanks to my brilliant friend Trevor’s Bandcamp site for the introduction to this idea). The illusion of movement, of ascendancy, but not a whole lot of ups and downs. I guess I’m a bit too busy for those. I guess I’ll have to go create some ups, and hope that no downs ensue.
