the screens of phones held to heaven

good morning ~

(click the link / aurora to listen)

My Big Breakthe screens of phones held to heaven

today’s track is the first thing I made with a couple of new pieces of gear I treated myself to - you can accomplish amazingly irritating sounding things with a sampler, a desktop synth, and a couple of midi cables

really happy to be playing in the Lea Thomas band tonight and tomorrow - if you haven’t heard her album “Cosmos Forever” yet you should really give it a spin. I’m not even on it, I’m just a lucky fan who gets to play in the band. We’re at the Owl in Brooklyn tonight ($15 at the door) and then tomorrow we’ll be playing at a beautiful secret location in Woodstock (you can get tickets to that here).

On Saturday I’m also DJing with my buddy Jess at Love, Velma - an honest-to-goodness speakeasy in Ellenville. I think you have to join the club in order to go but I think some of you might dig being a member ~

I went to go buy popsicles from the gift shop - if you know you know, those popsicles are good as hell - dodging awkward conversations as best I could with people waiting to buy beers or utilize the port-o-potties. It was through the window behind the register that I first spotted Glenn. Always amazing to me that when you finally get an IRL glance at someone you admire that they look just like themselves. But what's this? He's got something in his hands, something lumpy and soft. I could feel the edibles kicking in, am I really on one right now? Is that a fucking hand puppet of a kangaroo???? I started panicking, delight overload - I felt like if the kangaroo hand puppet makes it into the set I might actually die. I scurried my popsicles back over to the picnic blanket just in time to see Mike take the stage. A fundamental difference in our personalities - he hates making the pre-concert announcements and I always love hearing myself through a microphone. And it was a more touching than usual spiel - don't go on the sculpture after dark, please, by the way this is the last ever concert happening in this bucolic space. Enjoy the show!

Season of endings - I was recently scolded by a person with influence over the future course of my life for publicly referring to what I'm going through at the moment, so let me just say that I am definitely not getting laid off soon, I am definitely not at the mercy and whims of mercurial rich people, and I definitely don't regret suffering in the service of the non profit sector. Nor am I pissed off. I'm normal, actually. And I am definitely not posting about it on social media - god forbid future employers think of me as capable of putting up a fight.

Regardless of what I may or may not be having a lot of phone calls about right now, I am forced to consider the ends of certain things. How does the end of a steady income affect me? What about the end of a title or the end of that reassuring feeling that the heft of a building's set of keys on my carabiner gives me? What about these massive undertakings I've given myself over to? Would it be a great tragedy if they were to never happen again? As a survival mechanism I've had to convince myself that the labor is essential, vital but that's hardly the truth of it at all. When people gather it can be a beautiful, challenging, extraordinary thing, yes, but they will find a way to gather on purpose or on accident whether or not I'm contracted to organize it, whether or not one particular repurposed industrial building is shared with the public.

We've been receiving a lot of wisdom from the elders, too - the Sachiko Kanenobu gig at Tubby's was surreal and delightful and her drummer and I agreed: may we both live long enough to tour and play 2 hour sets well into our 70s. Among all of this it was strange and reassuring to see Jonathan Richman play - has any other songwriter ever felt so immortal? Sure, he's aged - the songs are played more slowly now, I noticed he's got that cute thing that older men get where their ears keep growing larger, and his steadfast drummer Tommy Larkins no longer stands throughout the set, he's taken to the throne. But JoJo still dances a little salsa shimmy every ten minutes and he's still making up newly improvised verses to "Summer Feeling" on the spot. He muses sadly and wisely but the twinkle of the eye remains. He also said something that felt profoundly resonant to me - a song about spending quiet time with someone you love and the most tender confession, "I want to go downtown and spend four dollars." That is exactly what I always want. Inside, with the air conditioning turned off per the singer's request, we kept taking off layers. Outside, above the bar, the northern lights shimmered red on the screens of phones held to heaven. I've been seeing Jonathan Richman play for over 20 years and - though I know otherwise - it feels like we might get 20 years more. Some constancy.

I was thinking about Jonathan Richman while DJing a wedding this past weekend - both he and Miley Cyrus have songs along the lines of "Parties in the USA" and her name came up on the must play list. Gladly! The couple wanted a specific dance floor vibe - pre-streaming TRL 2005 dorm room iPod commercial Lady Gaga MySpace energy and I have to say that I aggressively delivered on this. It would have been fun if we had somehow cracked open a vintage case of Four Loko ("I've been saving these for a special occasion...") but I felt that putting on a turquoise trucker hat was an appropriate touch. Somewhere between LMFAO and Avicii I started to feel like regardless of what happens in the next couple of weeks I will be fine. I'm of worth, I can still have fun, money is important but it can be found, I'll nuzzle it out of the loam like a truffle pig if I must. It goes on and on and on. I will take comfort where we can get it and, geez, I'm so sorry for party rocking.

Back on our horse blanket in the quarry I was forced to reflect on the last five years - one of the first messages I ever sent Gracelee, long before we even met IRL, was me telling her to check out Keyboard Fantasies. A lot of life in the intervening time and here we were about to receive "Ever New" at dusk in the valley where we live. But first? An interlude for all of the young people running around. Here comes the kangaroo puppet, fuck! Glenn's eyes twinkled, too, and that's probably the secret thing I'm grasping at.

But what about you? Did you catch the borealis? How twinkly are your eyes feeling these days? Are you hiring?