maybe I still got that dawg in me

good morning ~

instead of a new studio track this week, please enjoy this video of my big band playing one riff for 42 straight minutes

my buddy John Thayer and I are going to be doing a Northeast gentle music weekender pretty soon, including a set at a sauna in Portland, Maine where we will be soundtracking the schvitz, here’s the tour flyer:

Thayer has a great record coming out soon, too, you should give it a listen.

When I was a kid I never understood why my parents would consistently wait for us on the benches scattered throughout the theme parks or the county fairs while we went ahead and went on the rides. Felt insane to me, you don't want to go sixty miles an hour on this rickety thing? You don't want to get all jostled around and flip upside down? You'd rather just sit there, after standing in line all this time? How could you possibly enjoy intentionally sidelining yourself?

I thought of this common childhood situation a lot a couple of weekends ago when, for my 5th or 6th year, we saddled up, drove to Monticello and went to the annual rave at a summer camp (this is not figurative, it takes place at an actual summer camp that is normally used by children, think bunks, basketball court, mess hall, pool, etc). I think it's a pretty fair comparison - when I was maybe 11 years old I couldn't imagine anything more exciting than getting to ride roller coasters all day and when I was 31 I couldn't imagine anything more exciting than getting to go to this particular rave which, historically, was really hard to get into. It worked like this: if you were new to the rave, somebody who had already attended previously had to purchase your ticket on your behalf. They would then be responsible for your conduct and behavior and if you violated any community protocol egregiously enough both you and the person who purchased your ticket would be summarily banned forever. I was deep in my party boy era when timing aligned and a friend was able to buy my ticket and that first year of boogie was utterly rapturous - we collectively danced so hard at the smaller side stage that the floor broke - it completely separated from the rest of the building, causing a weird gravitational suck at one corner of the dance floor, and everyone's drink empties and spent vapes eventually rolled into that separation as the sun rose.

Would I still be out dancing three to five nights a week if COVID hadn't happened? It's possible, I really felt like I was going to live in New York City the rest of my life and going out and staying up late is really, really easy there (sorry NYC folks, it's not that you're any cooler than anyone else, it just literally never gets even close to all the way dark and you have 24-hour public transit - most of you would fall asleep before 10pm under an average serene, quiet, star-spangled upstate evening). I loved dancing so much, loved being at the center of the throbbing mass of limbs, loved the throb of the kick, loved feeling the coiled strength in my legs and ass, as I was also running really obsessively at the time (the activities were one and the same - I listened to dance music in my headphones and ran on the treadmill in the morning so that I would have the energy to boogie in the night). It was fleeting and never guaranteed, but while dancing I felt a comfort and a belonging and an unfettering and an unthinking often, a kind of manic serenity that I had only ever grasped a handful of times - maybe - while playing the guitar really loudly. Or when I used to ride rollercoasters as a kid.

I'm older now, of course - didn't we all age 1,000 years during social distancing? - and my body and brain feel less resilient than they used to be. I've noticed that minor cuts and scrapes don't heal nearly as fast as they used to and I'm really accustomed to getting a solid 8 hours every night. That resonant, corporeal joy is notably harder to come by. Plus where we live now doesn't make it super accessible - by necessity one of us needs to drive to the function, and last year, trying to get to my friend's really sweet techno event, my CRV clipped a bear in the rain, which totaled the car (but mysteriously seems to have not killed the bear, it remains at large). I did not make it to the dance floor that evening. I did, however, manage to rock as hard as I've ever rocked in my life pretty consistently this summer, played the guitar so hard I bled on numerous occasions, so maybe I still got that dawg in me.

What is the most exciting thing in the world to me right now? The answer to this question at various points might have been: dance floor levitation, playing music really sweatily for lots of people, making a beautiful record, finding true, earthquaking love, big gatherings of as many friends as we can fit, running a mile in under eight minutes, opportunities to see the world. All of these things are still wonderful, of course, but the true answer now surprises me - the most exciting thing in the world I can imagine is my wife and I being both still enough and secure enough to really enjoy hanging out together. One or both of us is always working or worried about something and nearly every trip we've ever gone on has included either a show of her sculptures or me playing a gig, grinding. So though we did do drugs and dance with abandon after we set up our tent on Friday night, I was far more thrilled when we started reading on Saturday morning in the small space of hours between sets of loud music. We set up our camp chairs and cracked open the books, eating hard boiled eggs with our morning caffeine beverages and holding hands as the dew evaporated in the September sun. Later we wandered over to the pool party where, for another few hours splayed on a blanket, we continued to read. When the vocal House finally fired up we stayed on the sidelines, you guys go on ahead, we're just going to sit right here.

But what about you? Could you use some quiet time? What metphorical dance floors are you no longer at the center of? What’s the most exciting thing you can imagine yourself doing right now?