I quit my job in January. This was the longest running restaurant job I held since high school. Eighteen months. The decision felt right, spurred on by a conversation with drummer Tim Morrison about how I felt about wearing a ponytail. "I'm sick of it", I said. "I'm putting in my two weeks notice tonight." And I did. The time I spent at work on the weekends will now be spent traveling to cities in the nearby states to play shows and sell my album.

The past few shows have all been out of town. It is wonderful to play in front of a crowd full of new faces. Wonderful and terrifying. I'm far more comfortable with my ability to be myself on stage now than I was a couple years ago, but there is still no assurance that the people will like who I am.

Thoughts on my next album are constantly firing around in my head. I went into Still Waters Audio last week as a quartet(Al Sergel, Chad Lawson, and Sarah Stephens) and we tracked six songs live. Everything was happening in the room, all at once. It was exhilerating. It felt like the monster developing from each starting point was contained and breathed within the constraints of each musicians relationship to one another. We watched what we could of each other's movements and tried not to mess it all up. I'm hoping to take a similar approach when I'm ready to track for my full length album. Lately I've just been trying to think of the best place for me to do that. Chicago with Steve Albini, New York with Tom Schick or London with Ethan Johns. Texas with T Bone Burnett? Maybe it isn't up to me. The next few months will be very telling.

Oh, by the way, I'm submitting House On Fire to the Recording Academy. Best New Artist nomination next year? Who knows...

Well, a record deal seems to me like putting a high school grad in the operating room with a fresh pair of scissors. It's gonna get messy. But this is what I ache for. The chance to let it all out. To produce. I want to step up daily and make decisions. And experience the results. I can make it sound professional and scientific but really I'm exploding inside.

Sitting in a dark room thinking about stuff like this at 1:14 in the morning is a bit overwhelming. Not really having anything but night and time on my hands. No real resolution but to dig in and think hard. But where does thinking land me but some apartment in New York City, five years from right now. Thinking about my next album and who I want to play on it. Who I want to ask to produce it and what studio we should use. The trick is to imagine my life, what I want it to be, and it naturally ends up that way. It is just so easy to waste time worrying about how. I'm going to do these great grand things that my grandma would smile so big to know about. And the only thing to do now is to dig in deep and write. But where does writing get me but into a few homes of friends and family and songwriters and who knows where else. Hopefully, a conversation.

I want to start by saying thanks. Really. Thank you from the bottom of my white, high top chuck taylor's to the tippy top of my shaggy mop head of hair. Thanks for listening to my music, reading my thoughts, telling me yours, sharing me with friends. Thanks for everything.

I assume that most people reading this are friends, and that allows me to be real gritty and special, just so I can give ya'll something interesting to read for a few minutes. Remind you that I'm trying to figure out how to make the world a better place to live and asking for encouragement that we can actually change it. I remember being really pissed off when Ira died. I spoke a few words, fighting back tears, at her graveside. I remember thinking about my role as a friend of hers and wondering how her family percieved me. I remember feeling incredibly let down by society and knowing that we have deep wounds as a human family. Our history is marked up and scarred, trying to heal, but fighting through constant injuries still. My words were shaky and frustrated, but I remember myself saying at the end, "This world is better than we let it be."

Let It Be. A friend of hers played it at her memorial service. There is a hint of acceptance. Acceptance of what? The brokenness of society? I was jarred by this song, not wanting to say goodbye and not wanting to submit to how incredibly demented the situation was. "...when the broken hearted people living in the world agree. There will be an answer. Let it be." I've come to see this command of "let it be" as nothing more than a head nod. A knowing glance in our community. The ones scanning with their eyes will meet the others also scanning and once we find each other, "there will be an answer."

    Something happened between being in the studio this summer and now. I got hit like a freight train by the need to play guitar. I forget about singing. Sitting in my apartment, playing the Fender - Deluxe with the volume on 2 and my volume pedal hardly giving a register, I realize that I've been playing a scale for almost two hours. Whoops, I accidentally solved a problem with my playing that I've been wanting to work on for years.

Listening to: B.B. King - Sweet Sixteen

    This morning it was really tough to get out of bed. I didn't do it right away. First alarm went off: ughhgh, (shuffle)... snooze. Second alarm: "man, I'm really not that tired" ... snooze. Third alarm: "if I don't get out of bed right now I'll be late for class"... exits bed.

    Tonight I go through the 100 Greatest Guitarists of all time according to Rolling Stone. It's all about the blues, man. Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King. Pure struggle.

    "Struggle," I almost whine at my momma on the phone. "I'm being honest about the struggle of life, and people can relate to that." She is upset that I have lyrics referencing pre-marital sex. I try to assure her that the message of my songs is more than, "I am a rock star that sleeps around for fun." My music brings people into the same room. The ones who have questions can ask around because the answer isn't going to come from a song. The answer only comes from relationships. 

    Every work of art is a very special form of bitching. Someone is watching the world from their eyes, crying, "Unfair" or "That's not how I see it" or "I want it my way". These days everyone can be an "artist." Slap that face on a book cover or some album artwork and said individual wanders the streets of their hometown with crossed fingers waiting to be recognized, murmured about, included maybe. But few of these people are any good at bitching. I have to say, college is teaching me an awful lot on that. To figure out what is wrong with something is the beginning of making it better. To think critically and suggest alternatives, or inspire someone else to. This is the stuff of art. Artists critique the world, their world, however infinitesimal or grandiose it exists in their mind. It must be personal, it must be bitching, it must be about one's own world.

    Art as business. Eh, pass? This is the world of a college student artist musician. It may be the most prevalent topic being discussed in the young twenty-somethings blogs/radio shows/classrooms. Making a living off of your passion. Maybe the EP that gave me so many excruciating headaches while making it over the summer taught me more about this topic than about being a musician. While recording a song, there are a billion ways to bring in new instruments or write new parts or make the song sound hip and flashy. For a songwriter, this stuff is all just the fashionable excess. The song is the message. The instruments dig and burrow the message somewhere into the listeners being.

(while writing this, I’m listening to Wilco’s “Sky Blue Sky” and I think to myself, what about Nels Cline’s guitar work? Isn’t it just as pertinent as the lyricism and melody of the song? My answer is that the jury is still out on that one. Sorry.)

    I want to pay off my college debt. That’s the only reason I want to make a penny off of music. But why do I have college debt? It’s because I wanted to get really good at music. I still don’t know how to make a living by playing music. Music is free these days. People are downloading albums, shows are free, we can’t go anywhere without some radio playing in the background. We are a culture forgetting how to listen, how to read, and maybe even how to communicate. I go to a bar late at night and see some rip-off of the scene in “Being John Malkovich” where all the people in the restaurant have the head of John Malkovich and they are all conversing with each other using the incredibly limited dialogue of, “Malkovich, malkovich, malkovich. Malkovich? Malkovich malkovich.” Except all I hear is, “Sex sex, alcohol, sex, longing.” You’ve heard it too. You’ve been the one saying it. Have we lost our language? I don’t mean we have too limited a vocabulary. Have we seriously lost the language of our souls? We're desparate to communicate without the proper tools. One of them being relative sobriety, perhaps. (eh, tangent)

    What I learned is that the song I wrote and worked so hard on in the studio, the album I spent so much money to create has done two very valuable things to me. It has given me a desire to share myself with my community so that my voice is one of the collective of voices changing our world. It has given me the desire to continue making albums. To continue speaking to my community, sharing my ideas, inspiring new ones. It has shifted my expectation from being noticed or recognized, to finding community, opening dialogue, and sharing ideas. To reexamine the language of the soul and figure out what words we’ve lost. If you've made an album and it made you not want to play music or make another album, you did it wrong.