A few nights back, I got a email from the mailing list of one of my faves, Kristen Ford. Kristen used to host the open mike at Bloc 11 in Somerville, quite a while ago, and she’s living in Nashville now, spending a lot of time on the road, touring, and she passes through Boston relatively often. Kristen does the sort of thing I love – high energy performance, eclectic power folk/pop, just a pleasure to hear and see. And on that very night, her email said, she was playing at the Lizard Lounge with two other acts, and lo, I just happened to have the evening free. Kismet! Read more »

As I write this, my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I are decompressing from our three-week car trip around Northeast America, where we saw lots of art quilts, visited a ton of friends, and spent two nights in a luxury yurt (and now I need to write a song which only uses “u” as a vowel). It was great to get away, except for the bugs that feasted on my shins, and the occasional opportunity that would have fallen into my lap if my lap had been there to catch it. Read more »

So the other morning I watched the Wimbledon men’s finals, all five hours of it, the longest men’s final in the history of the tournament, and Roger Federer lost, which is an awful shame because he’s thirty-seven years old, which is a hundred and nine in dog tennis years, and, at the end, having spent more time running in this one match than the total amount I have run in my entire life, he did not look tired. And maybe the quality of his tennis had dropped a bit from five hours before, but it was still magnificent, and, apparently, this is all because he was a dilettante when he was a child. Read more »

So there’s this guy. He calls himself Snake. Read more »

I just wrote a chorus, there, a few days ago. Read more »

A few weeks ago, I was sick as a dog. Not a big, friendly dog, mind you, but one of those tiny little yappy dogs that have a Napolean complex and insist on using your ankle for teething practice. And it’s still with me. This is the cold that will not die, the cough that will not end, the Virus That Came To Dinner. It’s the house guest who scatters his towels on the bathroom floor and never puts the milk away and argues loudly with his girlfriend in Armenian. Read more »

I do not get out to hear enough music. Read more »

When my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I went on our most recent two-month car trip around the country, in 2016, we took a picture of our beloved Honda Civic hatchback in Joshua Tree National Park. We suspected that it was approaching the end of its life, and wanted to commemorate its daring and adventurousness. And lo, just a few months later, our mechanic declared our Civic to be in hospice, and this spring, shortly before a car trip to Springfield, Missouri, it chose to breathe its last, and so we scrambled around and purchased a brand new Honda Fit, which was delivered three days before we left. Read more »

For a while there, I had three pianos. Read more »

As a songwriting god, I occasionally encounter a situation where I am invited to write a song on a particular topic. At this point, like may other songwriting gods, I could probably put together an album of them. For instance, there’s “Shlomo the Dreidel Shark”, which I wrote because my friend Jon Waterman invited me to contribute to an album of original holiday music he was putting together. The song didn’t make it onto the album, because Jon was concerned that it cast the Jewish religion in an unflattering light – but hey, I’m Jewish, I get to do that. Or, perhaps, there was the songwriters’ night for which the topic, chosen by the previous month’s audience, was “surrogate mothers for orphaned animals”. I countered with “It’s Not Over Till the Cat Lady Sings”, which, you’ll have to agree, is the only suitable response to that sort of epic lack of judgment on the part of the previous month’s audience. And so forth. Read more »