So I’m reading the paper a while back, and Alex Beam has a column in which he mentions that my pal Chuck E. Costa has been named the official Connecticut state troubadour for 2011 and 2012. Now, I live in Cambridge, which has an official poet populist (no laureates for us here, nosiree), and this got me thinking. I mean, I’ve been waiting for someone with real authority to take this troubadour thing by the horns – they’ve been doing this in Connecticut since 1992, but Massachusetts is virgin territory, state-troubadour-wise. But before we follow Connecticut’s lead, there’s a few things we probably ought to take care of. Read more »

A while back, my pal Jon Waterman had a gig on his birthday, to which his significant other secretly invited a bunch of us, to share his birthday, and perhaps a song, perhaps one of his. I ultimately couldn’t go, but when I was planning on going, I tried working on a couple of Jon’s songs, and nothing was really working, and it hit me: why don’t I write a song for him? How often might this have happened in his life? (More than zero times, it turns out – after all, his significant other is also a songwriter. But this is me, not thinking.) Seems like a good birthday present, right? Read more »

As most of my faithful readers know, I used to be in a band. This band was a happy-go-lucky ska/rock extravaganza called Agent 13 (named after the character in Get Smart who was always hidden in places – a mailbox, a sofa, a ship smokestack). One of the things I loved about this band was that we all really liked each other – I don’t think that the five or six core members ever had a stereotypical band quarrel in the six years we were together. Read more »

There is. No. Place. To Put It. Read more »

When my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I were on vacation up in Nova Scotia many years ago (if you haven’t been there, you must, must go), we encountered some remarkable collapsing architecture. It seemed that land was so cheap up there that, sometimes, when people needed a new house, they didn’t bother tearing down the old house – they’d just build another house next to it, and leave the old one there. One night, we encountered a house, surrounded by aimless cud-chewing cattle, which was deformed at a 5 or 10-degree angle, as if the TV station it was tuned to wasn’t coming in quite right (those of you who don’t remember analog TV may want to ask your parents about that one). Just sitting there, minding its own business, cluttering up the yard. Read more »

My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, is a member of the Davis Square LiveJournal group, which is apparently some sort of virtual community which hovers on the boundary of “you kids get off my lawn” status, as far as I can be bothered to notice. A while back, she went to their meet-up, which is apparently a gathering where people wear their virtual nametags (“Hello, My Name Is shakeyourbooty5876”) and find out what each other looks like. This meet-up, in fine Davis Square fashion, was at the Burren. Read more »

The oddest moment of any gig is that moment when you load the car. The audience is gone, and all the compliments have been paid and the CDs sold, and you’re there in the parking lot, or the driveway, or wherever it is that you load out, and you’re all alone. And the silence is overwhelming, and you think, “Something happened here tonight, but I’ll be damned if I know what.” Read more »

Here’s a quote from Sam Bayer’s Low Notes, April 13, 2006: Read more »

So here’s the story. About two years ago, my friend Jon Waterman finished his master’s degree in the history of disaster songs, and as part of a practicum on writing disaster songs, I penned “The Wreck of the Chicken Piccata”, in which, because I’m a professional smartass and I can’t take anything seriously, nothing particular disastrous happens. Read more »

Hold this image in your mind for a moment: 12-year-old me, with a full head of curly hair, struggling to strike a power chord on the stage while screaming, prepubescent Jewish girls attempt to rip off my clothing. Read more »