Last Sunday, I woke up at 6:30 a.m., threw a change of clothes and four granola bars into my backpack, and took an Uber to a train station north of Boston. The morning was cold and dark. I walked around […]
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In my last column, I mentioned that one of the things I was most looking forward to about my upcoming months off the road was practicing music. It’s difficult, bordering on impossible, to maintain a serious practice routine on tour, […]
Once again, I’m writing from the tour van, which is currently on its way home to Boston from North Carolina (a 14-hour drive that my bandmates have bravely chosen to undertake in one day). We’ve just completed a weeklong run […]
As I’ve written before, I love touring. One thing that often weighs on my mind, though, is how incredibly unsustainable it is to make my living by driving a loaded-down minivan all over the country. In the wake of the […]
A few days ago, on the bus home from the grocery store, I was absorbed in a book: The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson. A passage in the book struck me by reminding me of a recent situation in my own life, […]
As of today, I will have been to 26 of the 50 states in this country (that’s a majority, for you mathematicians out there). I’ve seen a fair few music cities and music communities in my time touring, and as […]
Tremolo. Delay. Overdrive. Fuzz. Condenser. Dynamic. Phantom power. Daisy chain. Ground, lift. Passive, active. EQ. Direct, bypass, signal, gain, frequency. Musicians standing still onstage with an ear cocked toward the monitor and an index finger held in the air, signaling […]
Recently I was at a music camp in New Hampshire, playing Appalachian old-time tunes on a porch with a few other musicians. Someone suggested a tune called “Indian Ate the Woodchuck,” which is one of my favorites, but I was […]
Recently I had brunch with three friends, all fellow musicians. We were catching up and pondering what it means to succeed in music. One friend expressed that she’d been feeling creatively uninspired and paralyzed by self-criticism, and she felt that […]
This is how it happens: I have an idea for a song, I start working on it, and then it starts to get difficult. I have a good lyric, but I can’t find anything to rhyme with it. I have […]
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