Last call for house concerts 2023, new album(s), and the month of February in Yucca Valley
Can I play a house concert for you? The short answer is "yes."
Before I get started — my year is filling up fast! If you are interested in a house concert, all you really need is 30-50 people and a living room, and to charge about $20-$30 bucks a head. You don’t need a PA, I love the acoustic ones as well. You just need a good number of music-loving listening-audience independent-artist-supporting friends. Just reply to this email. I may not be able to do any more in TX this year and have a bunch on hold if a date opens up, but I will be touring this year in the U.S. in SoCal and NoCal, Joshua Tree and Palm Springs areas, the Pacific Northwest, Montana and Wyoming, the East Coast, the Midwest, and Colorado, plus BC, Ontario in Canada. If you live in any of these areas and would like to host a house concert, it’s one of my favorite ways to play and I love to “pepper” them throughout my tours.
On to the way of the life I live.
Many of you comment on my breakneck schedule throughout the year. I tell you a little less often that I am what is known in the business as “a 49-year-old developmental act.” A very good portion of you have heard my not-so-funny joke about “starting my solo career at the ripe age of 43.” I need to get after it. The fact that the transformation from side-person/accompanist to solo artist has happened so successfully so late in my career is humbling, and frankly quite mind-blowing.
So I have taken the second half of December and most of January off. Family, friends, writing for my new album (to be recorded in April!), and in general — rest. I’ve been teaching zoom lessons (hit me up if you are interested replying to this post) and doing some remote recording in my home studio affectionately known as “The Plank Tank” for some records and commercial enterprises that are not-of-my-own. Both are highly enjoyable ways to make a few bucks in my down time. I have to be reminded to not spend too much time on this. I have been getting healthy again with Yoga and H.I.T. workouts to try to burn off the road flab (which gets harder and harder at my age). I’ve also been co-writing with a ton of friends. I am more than ready with more than enough songs to record my new album. I would rather not say insensitively, “thanks COVID!” However, the truth is that months of isolation was really good for some of us writers. Looking back, I can say, it kept me from going completely bonkers.
If you are interested in becoming an executive producer of this album, and would like your name on the back cover with the others, send me a note. I am overwhelmed and humbled by those who have already put in, and it seems like patronage is “the way it works” these days. I already feel like anyone who pays $25-$30 of their hard-earned dollars to come and see one of my shows and hear some of my music deserves my respect and best danged show I can possibly give them. So the generous folks who help me make records, well it’s beyond gratitude. Hit me up if you are down for the cause.
Tonight as I write this blog/newsletter I am downloading 10 original songs for distribution and duplication. It is new album my great friend and long-time musical collaborator Michael O’Connor and I will be putting out on Bandcamp early next month, and then for sale on our week long tour in Texas in mid March.
“Nothing To Prove” is the title track, co-written by us, sung by Michael. Michael and I sat down for one afternoon in the middle of our last tour together and recorded 10 songs we wrote or co-wrote together or with someone else. We literally sat down on chairs and faced each other in Gabriel Rhodes’s Austin studio. Two very old friends, four microphones, and an album was born. We will be pre-selling this album digitally on Bandcamp starting on Friday Feb 3rd. This will be the only way to get it until we tour for a week in Texas in March where we’ll sell the physical copies. After that, you may or may not be able to get it! The plan is to make 300 copies only and see how it goes.
My wife and I were gifted a 5-disc CD player for Christmas, and I gotta tell you people — CD’s sound GOOD. Digital WAV files too (what Bandcamp is). Streaming services compress the hell out of music. Neither my wife are “audiophiles,” but we were astonished when we first took the leap to get Spotify, AppleMusic, and Amazon Music, to hear just how crappy it sounds. For a musician I do not have ears that can hear the intricacies from on mic to the other, one recording technique to another. But both of us, my wife being a horticulturalist by trade, look at each other and said, “this sounds REALLY bad, doesn’t it?”
I digress. The aforementioned streaming services are good for promoting music. You can check it out before you buy it, and you can send your own playlists to friends and family to get other people into your favorite artists. Let me check…my top city on AppleMusic from Dec 30-Jan5 was…drumroll please…Clovis, NM! I have never played Clovis. I would love to play Clovis. That is incredibly cool. I was expecting Paris or Tokyo I’ve been getting a ton of hits there lately. I mean, all that and I make maybe $100 a month on all the streaming services combined! But it’s still cool that someone digs me in Clovis. Very cool indeed.
So be on the lookout for “Nothing To Prove” I’m sure I will be pushing it on my only two social platforms left (Facebook and Instagram, I finally left Twitter). I’ll also be promoting it more here, on my website, through my patreon page and anywhere else I can get it in front of you.
Road Trip/February in Yucca Valley
Donyne and I used to drive from Vancouver Island to Texas and back every year. Usually it was about a 5-6 day haul, and we always tried to take a different route. Since March of 2020 when we made the trek in four days to catch the very last ferry from Port Angeles, WA to Victoria, BC, we have not done any traveling together. Our 10th wedding anniversary is this Saturday. Back in the summer, I was trying to get Donyne to take me up on the “let’s go live somewhere for a month, I’ll do some gigs to help pay for the trip” thing I have never been able to talk her into. Once my lovely and patient wife saw behind the curtain and realized that a 2 hour performance usually meant and 8 hour day (travel, soundcheck, load-in, hotel, meet-and-greet at the merch table) she quickly realized that coming to too many gigs would drive her nuts. And that being on the road when I toured meant she would hardly see me at all. I think she is really smart. She’s a gardener. That’s her sanctuary. She loves road trips, but not when I am working the whole time. But I truly believed that we could someday find an area we both agree on, go there for a month, I’d play gigs by myself here and there to help pay for the trip, and come out of it with a new area I could hit from time-to-time. Well, she agreed.
My gut told me that we should go someplace warm, maybe even sub-tropical. But as we perused AirBnb and all the beaches and cities along the southern coast of California and Baja, Mexico she was not impressed. This woman loves beaches. Just not commercial ones. I was afraid I was losing her, and I remembered that on one of our early trips back to Texas she was very fond of Joshua Tree. “It won’t exactly be hot in February,” I told her. She replied, “why would I care about that?” I love my Canadian wife.
We found a ranch house near Joshua Tree in Yucca Valley, CA. We took a leap of faith and rented it for the whole month of February. We’re packing up the Rav4 with two guitars and few clothes and a lot of cookies for our dog Alice and we’re doing it. I’m doing two gigs in Northern California on the way down. We’ll take 6 days to get there. Only 4 to get back. I have one gig booked in Port Townsend, WA the night before we get back.
Sadly, I have not been able to book a ton of gigs while I’m down there. One great opening gig in Santa Monica at McCabe’s Guitars, and a killer house concert series I have done in Huntington Beach, CA. Certainly not enough to pay for more than a fraction of the trip. But we’ve been married 10 years and have had no vacation even remotely approaching a month. Never more than a weekend in that time! We took the risk and knew it might not work.
I’m still hoping to pick up a few more gigs, but we’ll see. If you know anywhere 4 hours or less from Yucca Valley/Joshua Tree - let me know.
Happy New Year to all of you - wish us luck!
Last call for house concerts 2023, new album(s), and the month of February in Yucca Valley
Happy Anniversary to you and Donyne! I am so happy to hear you are making this time so special with a nice long vacation. Y'all deserve it! And Alice does too. Have a wonderful time!