I will not be performing at the Democratic National Convention. I was 'on hold' for it, thus, keeping me in the dark about my next few days and how we would all be spending them, as this is the middle of the tour, but whatever factors were helping me get there to sing, have now fallen away and thus, the campaign will go on without me singing. Which is ok, as I'm in lovely Chicago and plan to spend the next 2 days recording some new songs with my old friend John Abbey, and running along the blue lake.

Rah rah rah Obama/Biden.

I think I'm being stalked by a Rooster. I'm sitting on the porch of this house I stayed in last night after the Barn Concert in Rockford, Michigan and this gorgeous Rooster, who seems to live in the barn with his runty friend the smaller rooster, well, Big Rooster has followed me to the porch, throwing his colorful neck back and cockadoodling really loud and the whole house (filled with strewn limbs across chairs and couches from last night's drum circle that lasted from what I could gather trying to sleep in the comfy confines of the guest bedroom was 5am or so) is fast asleep ignoring Big Rooster who is hanging around me, and if I'd move to another chair, he'll follow, clucking around my feet. Can you tame a Rooster?

The Barn was gorgeous, all hanging holiday lights and peace flags, folks sitting on bales of hay and camp chairs they brought in and the fog lolled in over the fields from the back and Ralston opened for us, but I swear God was the 2nd opener, cause he/she brought in the sunset through that fog, which held little bits of faraway lightening, and most people listened to Ralston from outside the barn, holding their beers cozy next to their chests, heads tilted to the side and just silently watching the red burst like a jawbreaker filled with ink broken in a dish of murky water. We played 2 sets in this barn, great vibe, great people, great night (thank God after the last few) and then the drum circle around the fire began and we snuck off to bed. They tried to rope Jagoda into the drum circle, but he would not be drug...

Mr. Rooster woke me with his cawing, and the scent of the lavender candle my hostess lit for me in my bathroom lifted me from sleep and now we pack the van, the Rooster wandering about our feet, trying to hop into the passenger side. Back to Chicago.

Michigan has these unexpected places of total loveliness.

Well, one day you're playing in the sunshine for a bunch of folks at a folk festival where there's 20,000 folks milling about and you feel great. Or in a big theater in another country playing to almost a thousand at a sell-out crowd. Or, another you're in a new town where you've never played and somehow some strange occurrence of all the right planetary allignments or magic or something just clicks or some radio station plays your songs and you're playing this rock club in North Carolina for the first time (or the theater under the radio station in a town in Western Colorado) to a packed house of over 100 people who've paid to see you and you're feeling swelled with happiness that things are just working and the music is getting out there and each night the crowd gets bigger and you're riding this lofty balloon, high on life and direction.

Well, its always bound to pop.

And then you find yourself back at the beginning, or so it seems, playing at a rock club in Ohio to a handful of people (only ok with it as you hear that you've drawn 2 more fans than Amy Rigby last year, who surely is more of a rockstar draw than you are). Or you find yourself playing what you thought was a club but its really a restaurant with a little stage in the corner and you're trying to give the SHOW to the 4 kind people who are there listening while the 50 people outside eating dinner on the patio are looking at you like you must be the Cruiseship entertainment, a slight annoyance, interrupting their conversation, and the waiters drop dishes and clank glasses and something burning from the kitchen is making your eyes water. And there's really nothing to question here, as the roller coaster goes up and down and nothing is certain in this game, except that you have to go on and play your songs and do your thing whether its for 150 or 3,000 or 4. And leave the ego at the hotel, watching free HBO and eating room service while you do the job.

I gotta remember to update this more often, cause if I don't, I'm left with scattered images, blurred memories of the good times of touring. Like what I'll leave you with here. Its hard to go back now that I've travelled 2,000 miles to Colorado, played shows across Mountain Passes new and old, saw old friends and their new lives and bid adieu to the past, played for new friends in new places, taught at the amazing Rocky Mountain Folks Festival Song School which has become my home, watched friends play in the contest and play on the side and main stages, got to watch Patty Griffin rock in the rain and Josh Ritter smile like a Cheshire Cat while girls in clear ponchos danced in the cold, made new friends in new song circles and heard my oldest bestest friends play my old favorite songs with wine and cheese and Brandy and the same full moon every year shining over the Silo that now a younger generation has taken over, played my own set at the Wildflower Pavilion while it rained kitties and puppies on the mainstage, wrote a few new songs with my Algonquin Collective (Tom, Cary and Jagoda, Justin), shared tunes by the river of Jami's new house along the St. Vrain, flew away in a rainstorm to Philadelphia overnight to play the Philly Folk Festival, 20,000 fans strong, against the powerhouse voice of Steve Earle on the mainstage and had a brief conversation with my hero Janis Ian, then drove back to NYC to play at Joe's Pub for the Mountain Stage New Song Show, where a Japanese man who plays gypsy music took the crown, although I'd have given it to either him or the white dude with the Uke who rapped like a Beastie, to share wine with the rest of the artists at a Lower East Side Bar, talking about new ideas and community, to come home to rest in Jersey to clean clothes and my sweet-smelling dog to sleep the sleep of the dead for 2 days, to turn around tomorrow to fly back to the band I left behind to start it all over again.

I miss the Colorado nightskies already and the time is always too brief, although those days spread out like chocolate icing, rich and filling. Its never enough time in the thin air for me. Last year, major revelations that led to my writing of the album and this year we come back, new material in hand, new albums by Tim & Kate and Ellis and new songs and stronger ties and I miss them all.

And I've missed most of the Olympics, but I had my waterworks moment during the commercial where the runner from last time who fell and his father came out to walk him to the finish line and all I could think of was the effort, the wonderful effort of it all, the travelling, the writing, the training, the running, and that the result just doesn't really matter if you finish the race.

Meat, Potatos and Tornados

August brings long drives across the cornfields of America, every year. Like May brings flowers. I seem to be always driving I-80 around this time, first week of August, high heat, high corn, hazy sky. I left Jersey City yesterday around 6pm just to bite off Pennsylvania. Today was Ohio to Iowa. Gas prices seem to be edging right around $3.88, which is better than last month, but I am noticing less traffic, less SUV's with cargo carriers on top. The challenge is to find food off the path, otherwise you're stuck with fast food and semi-fast food (Panera's, Starbucks sandwhiches). In Illinois I saw a sign for Woody's Steakhouse, the kind of sign that has been up there in the trees since 1976, branches once young now overgrown. Its a small, dark sign, certainly cant' compete with Cracker Barrel, but I spotted it like a beacon and followed the arrows that took me into a small one-train-track town to a nondescript building with "SteakHouse" in red neon against the purplegrey sky. Inside, all wood panelling, low ceilings, dimly lit, with Heart and Foreigner softly playing. Melissa, my waitress, suggested the Steak Diana, which sounded intriguing, (who names their meat?), and after a 10 hour drive, it was pretty great. Tournados of beef drenched in bourdelaise sauce with too many mushrooms and too much salt, but damn if it didn't taste good with the box red wine and the baked potato with the perfect amount of sour cream. Can't do this that often, but I needed it tonight. I stood outside afterwards, at the junction of the Interstate, looking at the sky with my video camera, and watched the clouds come in a bit, thinking "wow, cool, a storm" until that turned to "kind of looks like a tornado" which became "holy shit that is a tornado" and threw the camera into the car and took off, following the few trucks on 80, doing about 90. I heard sirens, and turned on the radio to hear "Tornado Warnings.." as they named the county I was in, and the sky turned broiling dark and I tried to remember what the hell you do in a tornado. Do I outdrive it? Do I pull over, dive into a ditch and cover my head? What would Helen Hunt do?

In the end, I outdrove it. Probably wasn't as close as I'd thought, but with the trees bending and circling in the wind and with how fast the dark came on, I was convinced this is how I might go. Folkie perishes in a tornado.

Tomorrow onto Nebraska....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R9REyXqq20

God bless Joe Cromwell and his friends!

I just slept 12 hours. Went to bed at 1am and woke at 1pm and it feels rather indulgent. Blew off a few things and feel bad about it and now I'm wandering my apartment in that post-sleep haze enjoying the breeze and that my dog smells a bit, admitting that I love that my dog smells a bit. Just got back from Woodyfest in Okemah, Oklahoma. A country faire kind of festival, small, charming, hokey in the most beautiful way. A big field (pasture of plenty) surrounded by red & white striped awning tents of craftspeople and food, a huge softserve icecream cone that blew in the wind like the Michelin man above the trailer that served dipped chocolate cones next to the KettleKorn couple who I got to know really well as I was the kettlekorn whore. Lightening that blew across the periwinkle sunburst sky sideways. As is the case with most festivals, there was no sleep to be had. Too much music and too many friends, old and new. But more contained than most, just all of us in a parking lot or crammed into my room, fiddlefaddle and bottles of water on the floor, while David Massengil played my new favorite songs or Ellis Paul and DonCon just wandered in out of the rain to play one or two songs before wandering some more and Anthony DaCosta and I spent an hour or so trying to learn all of Byrd's new CD so we could belt "Prairie Girl" and "Clean" in the rain to strangers (that is, before we moved on to Ryan Adams and gathered a crowd with the entire Cold Roses montage). Jon Vezner playing new and old songs and John Gorka, a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a huge bag of Kettle Korn in the other and Jack Hardy and David Amram telling the stories and Jayne Toohey with her camera and without but always with the world's biggest grin and Sean Kelly like a 5 year old at Christmas and Radislov never taking a breath playing with everyone, and I mean everyone. And in the rainy parking lot at about 2am, a horse loped by my window. And no divas and no boundaries, nobody was emerging, everyone was equal, especially in the rain with Jimmy LaFave bringing all of us onstage to clap and sing and shimmy and shake the Oklahoma plains at this free festival, small but mighty, and even Judy Collins, birdlike and lovely, wind blowing her hair, singing "This Land Is Your Land" and "Amazing Grace" and we were all happy volunteers. And Okemah, a one-horse (and I saw it) town, swelled with something more than tourism this past weekend.

(I played with Malcolm this time last year. I'm cleaning out my computer files and found this. Must have scribbled this while watching his set at The Garage in Winston-Salem last June)

A man takes the stage and sits in a chair and the microphone angles at him from an unlikely direction, jabbing into his face in a way that he´s gonna have to scrunch his neck to sing, I think. Shades of ecru and grey, sweat already beading on his hairline, long hair, not quite brown not quite grey. He´s a man out of place out of time and the minute the soundcheck starts with his loud yelp, startling in not only its volume but also its wail a blues gruff but with tone, man, such clear tone. You pay attention to that tone. And then he leaves, shuffling off for a while before he begins again. This man takes the stage like he´s borrowing his space, apologizing to the floor for his footsteps. Then his boot stomps down the dust, rattling our skin. Then that yelp that voice a wail of a voice straight to my soul. His eyes burst out like a sunbeam and something seems to catch in his words, some kind of thought that travels from word to lip to mouth to breath and topples his center and he´s shaking his head, shaking off the sweat, an eccentric move to shake the space out and its crazycool and this man draws us in closer in that moment, some kind of god touched him, touched his hand and his thumb on the E and the growl in his words and the plaint in his singing and I think, man, this motherfucker is the real deal from the dirt and the mud and the swamp and he KNOWS something and that´s Malcom.

Sometimes I have to look at my own website to remember where I was the previous week. That's either really cool (in the "my life is so spontaneous and alternative compared to my other late 30 year old friends" way) or its just lame (in the "my life is so damn weird, complicated, spontaneous, and unreliable compared to my other late 30 year old friends" way). I ran into someone I knew in a previous life today. Someone who played in a band of an old friend, kind of early influences on me and my writing. And catching up I kept feeling, well, rather odd, talking about touring and what my days usually look like to this old friend who was touring and playing the rock thing years ago and now has a "real life," whatever that means. And then I came home as the rain poured down on the skyhaze from the stereo fireworks (Jersey City over the Statue of Liberty, Macy's Fireworks over two places on the East River that we could see from our rooftop perch through the skyscraper peeks, and the "nice try" fireworks coming from both Weehawken and Bayonne). I put on the tv and there was a documentary on The Pixies last "reunion" tour and I watched Kim Deal (aka the coolest chick in the world), lines as deep as the sea along her face, rough and worn. Who rocks more than them? We played today in Liberty State Park, looking at a sea of barbecuing families, kite flying kids, dogs and couples and people hanging out, the Statue of Liberty off to my left, sweat blinding me off the first note. What a blast it was to play music today in my backyard, almost literally.

I remember. I was playing Woody Guthrie songs with Abbie Gardner, Steve Kirman and Anthony DaCosta the other day upstate NY. Hung out in the backyard studio just playing. I added another note to my famous-in-some-circles "one note solo", so now I have a "lick" (watch out Rich). Learned a few new songs. Auditioned a new bass player, which turned into a jam of every Stones song, every Faces song, Dylan, Johnny Cash, Band, anything we could all play. Since I picked up a guitar at 25 and wrote my first real song at 27, I kinda missed that high school basement jam session most have. That's what this week was for me. Like I said, I forget where I was. Makes it hard to make plans. Also makes every day a new one. Live in the now is not something that I have to learn. Its essential for me.

Canada is a different country. Now I realize that just may seem like a silly thing to write down and just admit, as if I didn't know this. But to many, Canada is just...well...north of Maine or Minnesota. Like an extension with better health care (depends on who you ask) and more Moose. But no. Different country. Entirely. I spent last weekend touring through Ontario, just a few concerts. Two in the outskirts of Toronto, one long drive up north ("there is a town in north Ontario..." -- couldn't help it) to South River to play Renee's Cafe. First of all, I was surprised I walked through customs without a hitch, considering my past luck. Got my car, drove to Hamilton with a few hours to spare, so I followed the signs to "The Mountain"-- a hill, really, but who's complaining. I come from the land of hills that are linguistically misnomered mountains as well (Maryland, Pennsylvania). I killed a few hours changing strings and playing guitar up on this green overlooking beautiful downtown Hamilton, "kind of like what Pittsburgh used to be," said three people to me. I met a slew of real runners who took me on a 4 mile run the following morning around a lake/pond. Then did an interview/performance at the local radio station before heading back to my car to drive 4 hours out of Toronto into "cottage country". To South River. At the south end of the Algonquin Park. Nothing much up there but pines and bear signs, which suits me fine. I played a show to a few people (turns out June ain't really a good time to go up there. Black flies and school's still in session. Who knew?). My waitress at Renee's was my morning waitress at the breakfast joint I stopped in for eggs and coffee. Small town. Radio in Canada is great. Freeform. Oh, there's loads of crap at the north end of the dial, like here, but the talk radio was entertaining. Turns out I was there for the first day of summer which coincided with Aboriginal Day. I was able to catch panel discussions on clean water in the tribal regions, native music and theater, and all sorts of issue-speak. As well, I caught some broadcast some DJ was making "from my bedroom in Quebec", where he did a show based on "breakup songs." He explained that he'd sent a few ladies he wanted to part with "mixed CD's" of breakup songs instead of having THE conversation. Really lame. He admitted his lame-osity, and turned it into a radio show. Chet Baker "Everything Happens To Me", Ella, Frank, to Carmen to The Stones. He'd punctuate the banter with singing and by playing a keyboard. At one point, he's talking about Chet Baker which somehow leads to a jag on Chuck Mangione and there he is, not just singing a bit of that Olympic Theme song, but actually scatting the whole thing, and then I hear this piano part come up out of nowhere. It was like being at Rose's Turn, the NYC piano bar. From there, he plays some Ravel song and after it, starts this conversation about Major 7th chords, plays a bit of a Stevie Wonder song that has a major 7th and pretty much the same chords as the Ravel, brings it all back home and here I am in Ontario listening to some basement tape dude in Montreal equating life and love and loss with a major 7th chord.

Milk in bags? I know. I keep mentioning this. Get over it, right? Canada is more Euro than American. I like Canada a lot. People are nice. Really nice. Like Minnesota nice. And walk slower. Arent' in a hurry to throw a Starbucks on every corner. In northern Ontario, I got into a conversation about music and realized who I thought was "semi-famous" were complete unknowns to them, and their famous musicians were unheard of south of their border. Across the great divide.

Was the inaugural house concert performer for a wonderful couple outside of Toronto, who were way entrenched in the folk world. Old school NYC rabble-rousers with amazing stories and a record collection to drool over. Wish I could have stayed longer to just hang out and catch more stories.

Back to Toronto for a night of listening to music and talking and then an earlier flight than planned out of town to get home. Sitting on the plane during the almost-hailstorm, it takes off, cuts through the muck of the greycloudday, and hits that lofty white-fluff cloud place where the sky cuts through with a glowing light and off the left side of the plane are two incredibly clear rainbows that seem to be guiding the wing and everyone is taking photos of this with their I-Phones and I'm just wondering what sign this is. And then I realize, Mercury is wandering its way out of retrograde and the storm is about to pass.

I've been to the promised land three times in a row and have come back cleaned, washed from the river. This year I come back ridden with chiggers--a totally unfortunate name and one we should change. Mostly just these red welts. Look like big skeeter bites from my Minnesoter past. They don't bother me much. Kinda like the crick in my neck I had from the tentsleeping that Kristin and the massage lady on the hill couldn't rid me of that has gone south to my lower back assbone that the chinese acupressure lady who speaks no english but just digs her fingers in and says "ok?" very loudly to me on Grove Street in Jersey City has maybe alleviated a bit more now that I'm back on the East "hotter than Texas" Coast. Goddamn its sweltering. The trees threatened to break the lights out last night as the hot sky broke open over Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side and we all stood out looking up, like that photo of me right there. Looking up, just hoping. Not caring that a stray branch might break on our pate. Jersey was lights out for 24 hours and the train was busted under the river, but I drove my gasguzzlingmotherfucker of a van across and under to get to my show and then back on nothingfumes and filled up for $80 and thought about the days of my ford focus and how it cost me about $12 to fill that one up and that was the year I first quit my mcjob to do this life and now here I am in the 9th inning stretch and wondering about how feasible this is with the gas crisis and life costs and all that's shifting.

People come and go and its all for the best but it just sucks and you wish it could all be the same but it ain't so you move on.

I miss my tent on the nonexistent creek this year, with my morning coffees in the Texas heat. I wrote a song with Byrd. I can barely play it but I know by playing it I'll get better and I love the song. I heard songs I want to learn to play. There was one by Chuck Brodsky that made me put the guitar down and happily just be listener. There were hummingbirds at Coho and fajitas and harmonica lessons and all sorts of loveliness and love out there in the hills. Kerrville is a mighty place. Changes my life and twists me up every time.

I had the great privilege of singing in Lorin Maazel's private theater this week. Maazel is the conductor of the NYC Philharmonic, a musical world I never have the privilege of lingering in and among. I sang in a concert for Paul Reisler's music, alongside Sweet Honey In The Rock's Ysaye Barnwell and musical crazygenius harmonica player Howard Levy. These folks have become friends after sharing music with them over the years through Paul's songs, but this concert was special as it was in this extraordinary theater, for an extraordinary community that supports the arts like no other, supports each other. You could feel the warmth, quite literally, from them. We were invited to stay on the premises and I stayed in a guest house that abutted what seems to be a little zoo, that featured Omar the camel. A camel. In Virginia. A few llamas and alpacas (what is the difference?), ponys, donkeys, a zebra and a zonkey, the result of ambition.

So the sand shifts, we find new alliances, we leave the old sadly but for the best and we move on. And we end up waking up with good coffee, staring at a Zonkey.

The backyard is blooming and the sky is blooming and everyone is outside with baby carriages and dogs on leashes and the ice cream trucks are circling the block and the gospel choir with the drum kit accompaniment is singing and clapping from the corner shouting and halleluiahing at all hours in this in-between neighborhood, the first Starbucks just opened up but everyone still goes to the Local Grounds and the best food isn't the nice burrito shop but the basement taco shack. I just got Kathleen Edwards' new CD "Asking For Flowers" which is a lovely thing and what's even lovelier is that her press release/bio is just a letter to all of us, telling us that she took some time to dig in a garden and work at a wine store and write the right songs for her heart and make the record she wanted to make and this really digs into me as I just finished the album I've been digging into write for a year that I holed myself away to a cabin in the woods to hear the real thing from within to play it quickly and fevered and to put the songs together in the order that makes sense from my head not from some business plan but from where I hear them and how they lay and it may be the most honest thing I've done and its flawed, oh yeah, its flawed, but its mine and I'm in love with it, although I have to hold onto it for a bit more, let it bloom a bit more until I let go and the thing is when you let go you just let go. Just give it away. So to the day of blue and the season of new we go.

I'm spring cleaning this week. Trying to simplify. That means taking a long hard look at my closet. I treated myself to a new Gibson last week, well, an old Gibson. A 1964 J-50, bought in Winston-Salem, NC as a celebration of finishing up the new album. I named her Smoke and next to Pearl, my 1942 Gibson LG-2 and my late 90's Southern Jumbo and my SG black from The Guitar Bar, I'm loaded with my favorite gear. But that means we have to clear out some things to make room, and sadly, that means some of the coats and shoes and other things have to go. So, if you're at interested in Amy's Garage Sale, head on over to Ebay. Help me clean some things away. You can view my gallery at seller name "aspax". I'll be adding things daily. I'm selling some beloved amazing cowboy boots, including the ones I wore at the Kerrville Folk Festival last year! Come by and make a bid.

Just stirred in the bay leaves into the sauce and ran into the control room to hear the mix. Do it again with the voice down a db. Then go stir again. The first robin of the season is pecking at the rental car´s tires, competing with the bright cardinal for leftovers. The green is bursting at the seams and today the air was warm on my cheek. Fresh basil and oregano, a bit more pepper, and just to give it the North Carolina kick, a dash of Bulleit Bourbon, for the experiment. No fool on this day with its sweetgrass scent and kick of tang in the gravy. Got only a few songs left to mix, then we begin to really play, ordering, intermezzos, mastering, art, piecing the puzzle. Hard to write with all this noise of albums in my head, but I got one silly one out last week, which I´ll post when I have a recording of it. An homage to my friends in the Department of Motor Vehicles, written in a half hour on the day of my concert last week. A few drop in friends today. Stir the sauce. Sally Spring and Ted Lyons, bringing gifts and levity for an hour. Then John Laird, my agent. Who drives to see me and hang out and hear some mixes. Lucky to be surrounded by nice people. People who I like to drop in on the first day of foolishness. Got a good line for a song today in something someone said to me, that really made me sad, but if I give it space, its a good song. But I wish I could have them not have to say it. Maybe that´s the song. Letting anyone down and knowing it sucks. Leaves a hole like a pinprick where the light falls through. Leaves a hole like a crater where the world tumbles in like a carpetspill. Stir the sauce. Make the mix. Let the hour of daylight fall into soft periwinkle. Let the 2nd day come and scatter the fools to their hiding places.

Some things that you think have become commercial, you try to not love. But they are good and you need them. Whole Foods, for instance. The Pog. "Revolver". "Pet Sounds". Yeah, everyone´s got them on their Top 10 Desert Island CD Lists and every guitar geek talks of Pogs and all cityfolk are obsessed with Whole Foods, but when faced with a new no-wheat no-dairy all-fresh vegetable juice no "dead" food until evening and you´re in North Carolina in a tiny town that thinks fresh juice involves frozen bananas and tons of sugar, well, then...a drive to the nearby Whole Foods is like the gateway to Heaven. I´m gonna write a book on how to tour and eat well, cause its freaking HARD. Hard to not want that blueberry muffin from Starbucks every morning, or that Moons Over My Hammy from Dennys...when you´ve been out to have a few drinks after the show and you´re really a) hung over and b) dehydrated and starving. So yeah. Whole Foods. Or the Food Lion organic section. When everyone says this one thing is the next best thing, sometimes you gotta say, yeah. Ok. That´s good. And then sometimes you gotta go against the grain and say, no that sucks ass. The Pog, however, is necessary and cool, no matter what you think. That´s what I´m saying.

Friends don´t let friends live in New Jersey and try to fight parking ticket fines. My license has been suspended. Here´s the kicker. From a ticket that I SUPPOSEDLY got in 1994 (yep, that´s 14 years ago). I have told this story before, about the time I was thrown in jail for having a suspended license because of unknown parking tickets, only to have to pay off all of those parking tickets (some of which, I know, were bogus) and hire a lawyer to fight the system. That happened in 2000. On a tour. I had to cancel a show because I was in jail, and so, I named myself the Johnny Cash of folk music. For that day. So, since 2000, I´ve gotten my license renewed a few times, had to pay other parking tickets, even gotten my license suspended for a $24.00 parking ticket that I´d forgotten to pay, and yet, I paid it, paid the restoration fee and got my license renewed. You´d think at some point during these past 8 years, if I had any leftover old tickets or fines, they´d have come up right?

Wrong.

I´m being told that not only am I in trouble because I failed to pay a parking ticket from 1994 (for christs´ sake, I don´t even remember what car I was driving then), but that I´m in trouble for identity issues. Why? Because my learner´s permit, when I was 15 years old, says that I had Hazel eyes, yet my current License says "green". So I´m in trouble with the MAN.

I´m totally serious about this. I hate Jersey. I hate the DMV. They´ve told me that yes, a random ticket might just suddenly show up one day, for 50 years, and appear, beckoning your name and suspending your license. EVEN IF YOU´VE STOOD THERE AT THE DMV DESK ASKING THE IDIOT BEHIND THE DESK TO CHECK AND MAKE SURE THAT THERE ARE NO OUTSTANDING TICKETS OR FINES WHATSOEVER SO YOU CAN REST EASILY AND DRIVE LEGALLY.

But no. They can just pop up. In the State of New Jersey.

And the irony? I´m playing a show on Friday night this week at the Jersey City Courthouse. They don´t know what´s coming to them....

I came down this street to find The Pompidou, but I walked in circles distracted and got lost. Although getting lost in Paris isn't like getting lost anywhere else. Its not really lost. Its just the universe telling you that you shouldn't be where you thought you should be and rather this little bookshop is exactly where you should be, here, picking out a tattered copy of "The Great Gatsby" because you read it once in 7th grade and barely remember it but Paris seems the perfect backdrop to revisit it. And that Paris still has little bookstores with piles of books haphazard like a Jengo game. No blockbuster border barnes and nobles anywhere. Just hideaways you can linger in. I'm winding through the Marais, lost. I flew in this morning from London after a quick jaunt there and back for a radio show and the winds bumped my plane around and the ease of the landing took me by surprise as I know the metal really should have scraped the ground rather than float above and flesh and bone and blood are safe and intact. This was a good landing, this cafe on Vieille du Temple. Outside the heat lamps warm my neck as the rain pricks cold and bounces off the brick and cobblestone and my mottled french survives another conversation and I'm gifted with a cafe creme. The click clock of the thingirl boots stuffed inside jeans as tight as embracing counterpoint the rain. I have a desire to do nothing but listen and watch.

I saw a woman the other day in a peach wool coat, nipped in at her narrow waist by a tailored belt, the skirted pleats billowing behind like a geisha fan. She had long slender arms and legs and a long train of brunette that hung around her back, swinging with the pleats as she almost skipped ahead. She wore heels--not too high to be impossible, not too low to be sensible. I wanted to see her face, but all I could catch was halfprofile as she looked left and right for traffic. She kept disappearing and I felt she was this ghost, this spector of all things beautiful, of Beauty itself, Paris, like white gloves and pearls, and I felt like I'd wandered into an Audrey Hepburn film, some other time, skipped through a portal.

Comings and goings and landings and leavings.

So this is it we've wound our way from Edinburgh to Cardiff to Liverpool to Plymouth to Ipswich to Dartford and tonight is our last night on this crazy tour of wind-blown weather and drafty rooms and pots of coffee and many pints in the hotel pubs late after the music, pool games and candies and long-time fans telling me their stories of lives following Ian tours and guitar shops and pub lunches in out of the way villages, cozy fires and dogs at our feet, and crowds of fans singing along to "Dudes" with kazoos and green green grass and early daffodils and afternoon naps before the soundcheck and watching the show from the backstage, singing "Dudes", matching Jim and Steve's harmonies, hoping not to fuck up too badly, 2 weeks of the same black clothes (note to self: pack Febreeze), loads of food and wine and it all ends tonight so I'd better catch a cat nap before I get to put the boots and eyeliner on and do my last 30 minutes before heading off to wherever it is I'm heading next.....

What a ride.

We entered Wales today from the northeast. Like a revelation to me. You know how when you're a kid and you hear stories you picture the place in your head, cause most Fairy Tales or children's stories are oral at first, so there's no picture books... the ones your grandparents' tell you, or the ones your Dad told you to get you to sleep at night. The Tales of the Billy Goats Gruff is my Dad's best. His encore. In my head, during all those tales, was this landscape. Rolling misty hills, mishapen trees barkworn bare, low stone walls. We came in caravanning with Ian Hunter and the band for the afternoon's pub of choice for the Sunday Roast in a small Welsh village north of Cardiff and the sky was in a turmoil of almost-storm and I swear to you as we crested the hills the sky winked out and I had the landscape of my childhood memory in front of me. And it was like a revelation to me, that this was my kind of land. Like Vermont, but more mysterious.

I'm backstage in Cardiff at The Point, a converted old church. Tonight's show is the first "standing audience" show in a few nights. We've been playing in theaters, but tonight is a kind of rock show audience, a bar in the back you can see, folks with pints standing in the dark. Ian's singing "I still got your blood running through my veins".

We stopped at this perfect pub/inn that had dogs running through the bar and the dining room, lit by these fires, children and families and dogs. I had something called Fagouts that were like sausages but tasted like offal, that back of the mouth gamey taste that actually I really like. Then the traditional roast. Steve Holley the drummer is my wine buff friend, who can pick out the perfect wine to go with the meal. Jim is trying the local ales. Then we finish and drive to the soundcheck, me to the radio interview first, then to my later soundcheck. They needed to get the soundcheck done earlier today as Chelsea was playing and Scooby, our amazing sound engineer is a big Chelsea fan. This is the civilized way to tour, to stop for a lingering atmospheric diversion mid-afternoon before heading to work.

So I'm backstage after my set, with the sandwiches and the champagne and the band playing below me. Ian tells me these stories of recording "All The Young Dudes" ... "I did the vocals in about a half hour"... with Bowie teaching them the song the night before....I'm the wide-open fly on the wall, capturing it all in my memorynet.

Tomorrow onto Plymouth. My mother's mother's mother's mother came from Cork, Ireland. My mother is an Erin Go Bragh kind of American. All green in March. Feels drawn to Dublin. I loved Ireland. It was beautiful. I really like England, too. And Scotland is stark and stunning. But there's something about the countryside of Wales. Driving through it there was a stab of some old recognition. Maybe it was the roast beef or the sheep or the green green waves of farms or the dog that reminded me of Clyde....

I woke up yesterday in Aberdeen, travelled out west of Glasgow to the Firth of Clyde, then to Edinburgh. Already sounds like a song. I joined up with the Ian Hunter Acoustic Tour in Edinburgh on Tuesday but as tours go, this one has already been going for a year or so it feels like, but in the good way, not in the way where time drags, but where time extends, you get me?, just stretches like good boardwalk taffy and the days run into each other and its just one really amazing thing after another, broken only by windy Scottish drives dotted with pubs and sheep and traffic jams of farm equipment. I'm in Leeds, backstage at The Varieties Theater, an old Vaudeville Theater, with red and gold paisley velvet on the walls, evenly spaced lightbulbs in my 3rd floor dressing room mirror that I had to wind up spiral staircases to find, the volume from the stage is on so I can hear Ian sing, in his raspy soulstirring voice, just so incredible, song after song of beauty and rock and emotion. He's singing "Two Ships That Pass In The Night", just this lovely song that he wrote that Barry Mannilow made famous, but I much prefer Ian's voice on it, real and craggy, sad and hopeful, Jimmy Webb kind of melody. Classic. I'm here with Margo, my tour guide/manager/friend who keeps me sane and reminds me where to be. We've had a stocked and stuffed schedule of radio appearances, 3 a day, before sound check, all of this, usually after a 5 hour drive. I'm exhausted, but exhilerated. I was on BBC Merseyside today, in Liverpool, getting lost looking for Penny Lane, singing on BBC Mersey, BBC Leeds, other stations in England and Scotland. Playing my 6 songs each night before Ian gets on, hoping that his long-time fans are ok with this Jersey Girl. I've met his fans who have been with him for years and years and I sit backstage and hear "All the Young Dudes" and "Rain" and the new songs and I sing along and I wonder how did I get this lucky.

It's raining and windy here in Northern, England. Cold and murky, weather made for ghosts and Emily Bronte. Moors and dark rivers and longing and unfulfilled dreams. A place made for poetry.

With an almost heavy heart, at 3am this morning I put down my heavy hard copy of the 7th and final book of the Harry Potter series. I´m late to the ball on this one, having bought Volume I of the Potter books just as the final volume was being released and reviewed. I´d heard from adult friends how wonderful the series was, but I was reluctant, knowing how I read (voraciously, quickly, obsessively) to get involved. Its like a relationship. I KNEW I was gonna fall in love at first sight just KNEW it, and so I had to wait a bit for the timing to be correct. I bought the first book for my September journey to London. By my November jail-term in the Heathrow customs´ holding cell, I´d gotten to Volume 4 and was hauling hardcover books in my backpack on my tours, sneaking pages here and there in the van in between arguments about mono versus stereo in Who re-masters, and whether or not Clapton is overrated.

I spent all day yesterday in a studio in Hoboken, the same one I recorded "Songs For Bright Street" in. The same one I recorded "Idle Hands" from my first album, "Fable." The Pigeon Club. Partially owned by engineer Wayne who worked at Water Music Studios in Hoboken, the first studio I ever worked in, recording my very first album there with my band Edith O. back in 1997. Wayne was an engineer there then, and I remembered him when I re-met him to do one track for my solo debut in 2000. The Pigeon Club is a studio in a, now rare, one-story building in Hoboken (in a country filled with housing crises, this is the one place where you´ll find a surplus of condo building). The oldest continuously run homing pigeon club owns the building and still uses the front portion, which looks a bit like your Italian uncle´s basement or refinished garage. There´s a TV, circa 1979, with rabbit ears and aluminum foil. There´s a Mr. Coffee, stained. There´s wood paneling with posters and framed photos of the police force of Hoboken from the 1950s, Mummurs parades, Feasts of St. Anthony Parades, and random charts that I´m sure have to do with pigeons. There are no pigeons anymore. They used to be on the roof, but I´ve been told they´ve been sold. Instead, the club members simply hang out in the front room in their aluminum frame lawn chairs, plaid-thatched plastic to hold their tuchuses while they watch the latest Saturday afternoon game, smoking cigars, and calling me various forms of "Sweetie", "Toots" with much respect. In the back, Wayne has maintained a cozy, hip studio, not unlike Greg Brady´s room when he left the attic to forge his own hipster status. The required posters of The Stones, The Who, Zepplin, The Beatles, on the wall of the orange (not green) room. A control room with lava lamps and velvet elvises. And a large recording room with vintage gear strewn randomly about. This is the place where magic occurs. I needed to get away from home for this album to find some other magic in some other town with some other studio and another engineer, but we´ve come back here for a few days of overdubs, to bring in my favorite Hammond B-3 player, Mr. David "Where´s your ticket to rock and roll?" Jackson to you, the man with more soul in his Leslie than anyone I´ve ever met. He laid it down on most of our tracks in record time. We also were graced by Megan Gould, who came in to add fiddle on some things. James had some guitar crunches to put in there and I had some harmonies. But now, we are done. And we fly south like pigeons again in a few days to put the pieces of this record together. I´m still living on a cloud about it. The truth: I wasn´t that confident about a month before we recorded. I worried that my songs weren´t strong. My voice was shaky. My entire life seemed shaky, and I wondered if I would steady in time to make this record. I worried about heading into a new year, a year I´d vowed to make real changes, not changes that I trumpeted to friends to –in essence—get them off my back. But quiet changes that I could fill my heart with. Whatever form the change took. If it was a huge leap. Or even if it turned out to just be my toe moving toward the finish line, an inch at a time. So in the weeks before the holidays with little time to dedicate to this, I went to my cabin in the Catskills and listened to my heartbeat. I know that sounds crazy, but that´s what I did. I have no tv. I have no phone. I have my instruments and my fireplace and my notebooks and my computer. I went inside. And pulled out a few songs that were fresh and quick. And had a friend or two join me by emails and brief phone calls to finish some ideas. And by the time I got to Kernersville I felt half a million strong and felt like I had an album.

I´m going down again next week to piece the puzzle together. This is on the eve of my 40th birthday. I´ve been hesitant for years to say my age. Not because of any reason. Or because some folks assume I´m younger. (Note: Its my parents. Good genes. They look young. Hell, my grandma didn´t look 104 when she passed 2 years ago. I got lucky with things like skin and wrinkles and grey. My Dad probably didn´t go grey until he was 6o and he´s 71 and could kick my ass in tennis any day of the week). But just cause it´s….well… 40 and we still live in a world where 40 means a different thing to a woman than to man, or to the world´s perception of a woman than a man. Even if I fight with all my fiber against that, its still the truth. Name one major label record company that would take me seriously at 40? Screw them. Its why I love my label and yes you can quote me. I might be the only songwriter alive who can say that, but I am happy with my record label.

Back to 40. Its one of those BIG numbers. I remember when we lived in Minnesota my Dad turned 40. Or was it my Mom? One of them had a party where there were black balloons and a black cake and it was all very funny, surrounded by friends and family. But to think that´s where I am now. In that same place my Mom or Dad was. And they had a house. A nice house. And they had a family going and a life going. Sometimes I think what I traded in for this pursuit of my dream…. Not complaining, mind you. I am not rich. As Jagoda, my drummer, says about all of us in the band, "We´re not rich but we have rich lives" and honestly, I wouldn´t trade my journey for a 3-bedroom house in Wayzata with 4 children. But on the eve of 40, things like family and children and houses and landing … these things do come up. I want this album to be a wholistic thing that I birthed out of truth, out of speaking my peace, in my own scattered impressionistic way. And I want the tentacles of what I write to reach out to you and say something to you. Something that makes you think, or laugh or cry, or just want to pick up the guitar yourself. Go on your own Hero´s journey, whatever that may be.

I got to the end of the saga of Harry Potter, where all his innocence is sloughed off, and he emerges from the chrysalis a warrior, a man not a boy. And it was 3am and my dog June was next to me still awake in the light of my lamp and I wanted to cry but I couldn´t. I cry easily. But this time nothing. I just put the book by my bed and looked at the ceiling, knowing that soon I´d pick up book 1 and start again. I have a hard time letting go. I have a good friend, a great friend, actually, someone I love deeply who wrote a staggeringly true song with that line "I have a hard time letting go…" She´s one of the people that keeps me here, feet planted while sailing in the clouds.

So while I stare 40 in the face, let me say this. Whatever wrinkles come: I welcome. Creases and aging will make us warriors. We all need to journey at some point alone in the woods to hear our hearts beat without the din of the television. It is important to know when people who affect us hurt, whether they are our friends or just figments, like Brittany and Lindsey and Heaths and those folks who we don´t know but feel like we know. Or Harry Potter. Its important to mourn the beginnings and endings of stories. We find ourselves in there and we find our own Heroic path as Joseph Campbell wrote better than I. I´m trusting in you, though. That I say we are this age and we are still wide-eyed and have miles to go before we sleep. That you will own your own creases and crags, whether you are 20 or 60. All I wanted this year was perspective. I feel blessed that at least the moon is clear tonight.

Book 7 of the Harry Potter series is called "The Deathly Hallows". A hallow is a holy place. I think I´ll call my cabin The Hallow.

I'm sitting backstage in Tom's River, NJ in a library where I just did an opening set for the amazing Bill Kirchen who is onstage now with his trio just tearing up the place. Wireless and comfy couches and all the magazines I want to read while I can hear the band very clearly from the privacy of this room. I love these concert series' that are held in places like church's, libraries, court houses. There's a really amazing listening crowd of about 400 people out there, children through grandmothers, having a great time. I was about done with my set and I heard "What's your name, darlin'?" and I forgot that I was in New Jersey. Bill's voice reminds me a bit of Slaid Cleaves, one of my favorite songwriters lately, and I'm just grooving back here, thinking what a blessing to be surrounded by this good music on a Friday night. It would be better if I had a Juengling in my hand, but I think I'm gonna take a month off drinking and sugar to just see how it will feel. I drank too much bourbon and scotch in North Carolina. It was a good thing. A good way to make that record.

2 nights ago I was up until 5am in the studio waiting on the rough mixes, drinking red wine, talking guitars and dogs and the evils of things like dog fighting and Botox. Botox erases the good stuff. I don't get it. I like the lines. I like the dark spots that have started to appear on my hands, like freckles just spreading out. I like the rivers of crag that appear on people's faces. There's life in there. It's like music--you fix the pitch too much and you end up sounding like that Cher song from the 90's. I know there's a place for perfect, but I think we should allow for some of the messy. Isn't it interesting when you hear old records and you can hear the nail on the guitar strings? Or the snippet of conversation caught before the tape rolls? Or the reaching for a note that they might not make, but there's something cool about the fuckup. If Bob Dylan had been a great harmonica player, would it sound the same? Sheen has its place. I just wasn't interested in it this time. I'm on a high from making that record. Feels better than the giddy fall from the rollercoaster top. Or feels the same. Just a big bunch of joy. We didn't think too hard (that was Jim the producer's job). We just set up the amps, picked up the red guitars and played. I had a cold, but the scotch and bourbon kicked as much of the crap out of my voice as I needed, and kept enough in for character. I like it that way. Got to play Pearl, my 1942 Gibson for the first time. Broke her in during a loose almost-bluegrass session all around the microphone, laughing and singing. A few of the songs we did I'd written just before Christmas came, so they were like new wings just stretching out. Those are my favorites I think. I died my hair dark brown right before Christmas and I felt incognito. I'm not sure I like it and I know I'm heading right back to blonde, but the detour was cool and to have that detour while I was under the headphones in front of the mic was a nice place to playing around in. The North Carolina stars were out in the warm evening air and it was hard to get in my van and drive away from the studio and head back up I-81, the long crawl along the Blue Ridge, Cracker Barrels and doubletrucks and rainslick roads.

Oops. I just got called onstage with Bill and his band and damn if I didn't walk onstage in my comfy sweater with my hair up cause I'd taken off the lipstick and the "show shirt" to curl up on these couches, so I wander out onstage like a deer in the headlights and they said "So, let's play something together" and my mind went blank cause here I was back here writing this blog, listening to the tunes, and I forgot any country music that I might now, so me and the bass player are calling out Merle and Johnny and Hank songs and we finally settle on "I Still Miss Someone" and I'm so aflustered that I can barely remember the words and it was almost a disaster but it all came back and man, that was fun, so right afterwards, Bill says "one more!" and I remember that I know "Mind You're Own Business" and I know my key (thank god) and I say in G, and they start that damn thing super fast and there I am trying to babble out those lyrics and howl out that song and Bill slams on the tele solo and just that was about the most fun and thank goodness they were nice and cool about it, although I was unprepared, but now I wish I could just jam with those guys all nightlong. And here I was writing about things like spontaneity and mistakes and how beautiful those moments can be and I was just stumbled into my own little personal example of this whole damn thing!

Its a new year. Halleluiah!

Day One. Kernersville, North Carolina. January 3, 2008

The night before...
I left my family in the mountains of West Virginia to drive down the spine of the mountains through snow, through Virginia down to Greensboro, North Carolina to meet the boys in the band at the airport. The night before we begin recording, we celebrate with barbecue at Prissy Polly's for pulled pork, Lexington style with greens and hush puppies, christian gospel music on the stereo, and photos on the wall of WW2 vets. It was about 20 degrees here in North Carolina.

Day One.
Citywide power outage. Day one was thwarted. So we did what any self-respecting rock and roll outfit would do with a free day away from home. We went to all the guitar stores we could find. Then we went back to Prissy Polly's for more barbecue. Our friends Sally Spring and Ted Lyons were playing in a bluegrass group while we ate our pulled pork. It was standing room only in Prissy Polly's, with many of the audience joining in to dance with their sweethearts. One gentleman, who wore a white suit, also wore white tap shoes, which he used to accompany the band with rhythm, albeit a rhythm that Rich would term "jazz", while he shuffle-danced with his own sweetheart. Ted would smile and wink at him as he tapped along to their music. We finished off our pork with banana pudding (filled with Nilla wafers) and called it an early night.

Day Two. Official Recording Day One.
Mitch's studio is awesome. We're recording to tape, trying to get as much of it live (all of us in one room, except me, in an iso room next to the main room so that I can see everyone, but all of us playing at once, so the point is to get the vibe, to get the right "take", the one with the passion and the shared energy. Feels like being on a baseball team together. It's different than the way I've done records before, building the tracks off the acoustic guitar track. This time, we want to catch what the band sounds like, catch the energy of what we've been doing at our shows in the past few years. Not think too hard. Make music, not try to go over and over it and make it perfect. Things that are too perfect just aren't real. We want real. This is the place to make real. There's something in the water here in this area of North Carolina, with so many incredible musicians around. Ted and Sally. Mitch. Chris Stamey. Caitlin Cary. Ryan Adams. So many more I don't know. Today we got the basics of 4 songs down. "Something More Than Rain", "Would I Lie", "Blue Horizon" and "Piece By Piece" plus a few tries at "Haven't Learned A Thing". We cashed in the day at 11:30 and start again tomorrow.

I feel like I'm at camp. With better food. And less Girl Scouts.

Day Three. Trust and Tape.

The day starts, right after the first coffee, with Jim saying "Get out there and give me just two takes of the acoustic songs," trying to catch something before I wake up something maybe I slept with-- a fragment of a dreamcatch in my voice, maybe. Mitch is at the board with Morgan so I get into my little room, cozy now with its candle and lava lamp and heater, piano covered, glockenspiel or vibes or something, a student Wurly, my guitars, my three mics--one for the guitar, one for the voice, one for the room, I think--and I pick my Gibson up and before I even warm up my voice or my fingers... Roll tape. I sing. Right when I'm done, I hear through the 'phones "Do another right now" and without even breathing, taking a swig of water or blowing my nose, I go straight into the intro, that I practiced in my Jersey apartment, in my cabin, at my parents, in the WV cabin last week, practiced it every day that I could to try to channel Townes or anyone that could pick better than I know I can't and at one point in the 3rd verse I have this fleeting thought of the meaning of the song and something cracks in my voice and I just can't finish the sentence, so I hum, but I keep going and I finish the song thinking I'm gonna hear from the control room "One more, please." What I hear is "You're done." That's it. I'm not allowed to go back. And thoughts start to swirl, "But...I didn't hit that note..." or "I didn't sing that part, my voice caught, but..but..but" This is the kind of album we're doing. The one that's real. The trust thing. And, to my surprise, I walk away from that song. I do the same on the next. Just do one or two takes. Trust it. Walk away. Somewhere in all of this is Mary Gauthier's conversation from August.

I love the sound of the tape reel rewinding. Thick tape on metal on a contraption that looks like its from the 70's.

Everyone is playing their asses off. It feels like we're kids. This is one of my favorite things to do, hole myself away with these guys and play these songs, build the track, play it live. Catch the thing that's slippery. We're just blowing through these songs, all playing together, sometimes without a click, flying without a net.

So far, nine songs, two days. We still have some hours to go tonight. We've gotta catch "Storm Warning" before the buzz goes. Then tomorrow we do it all again...

Day Four. What's Important.

1. Screw the click track.
2. Balvenie, Doublewood.
3. Rod Stewart. Neil Young. Emmylou.
4. When hitting the wall, get Ted to come play mandolin.
5. Set up one mic, have everyone play at once. Preferably drunk.
6. Screw the click.

The holly is out the lights are lit everyone's singing and dancing about the holidays and my mind has jumped a week beyond Christmas and all I can think of these days is that I'm recording the next album the week after the holidays. My sister emailed me last night to say she's become the holiday cheeseball that we both usually become--its the day she's decorating the tree with her kids so you know the stockings are up and the pine-scented candles are lit and she's got Rudolph on 24 hour DVD patrol and the Santa Mouse book with the corner chewed off long long ago by the family dog is out and the kids are making lists and checking them thrice and she's sitting by the fire at night in Maryland and emailing me, probably with a glass of wine in her hand, asking me to hurry the f*&^ up and get down to Maryland so we can act like the little kids we become during Christmas week. Well, not so little, but we definitely revert a bit. She's my best friend. She wasn't always. But now, and maybe wine has helped us, we can sit up all night long and talk about anything and she's the Keeper of Perspective in my life, the one who can deduct everything to its barest numerals and tell me the black and white of it all. Well, she'll say, Amy, it's obvious what needs to be done here. And she's always right. Always. Terrifying. Since I didn't even think she was worth conversing with until I hit 25. I missed out on years of advice when I needed it, although I was busy being a poetrysingingartsygeek and she was busy being cheerleaderpopularhomecomingqueen. We always shared a room. So Christmas Eve when we still believed in Santa, we'd sit up as late as we could and listen through our door and try to peek out (and then we'd hear a booming "Close that door!" from Dad, who was probably trying to figure out how to put together some toy under the tree) and we were hyper, staying up late, maybe getting only a few hours of sleep, then bursting through the door at 6am and demanding that everyone wake up with us. I clearly remember who busted our Santa myth. The babysitter who we hated who was mean to us one day just showed us the closet where the presents were hidden (but had the To: Amy From: Santa tags on them). I don't know...maybe I was 6 or so. It was traumatic. Terrible. We ranted and raved and then were sworn to secrecy for my little brothers' sakes. Funny how myths go. You lose them and then they make you part of the conspiracy and then you're at the adult table and you're so excited that they included you in the story that you forget that you're pissed that you just lost an entire belief system. I don't remember when I lost faith in the Catholic Church, but nobody made me complicit and let me sit at the table that day. It was more quiet... but I'm digressing... what was I writing about? Holidays and missing them. Ah yes. So my focus is internal these days, re-writing and re-writing and thinking about all the chords and melodies and whether this rhyme works or that verse is complete and do I really need that bridge (cut all the bridges!!!) and how many days in the studio do we have and can I really cut the vocals live in one take and then the holidays will pop up and I'll realize I haven't bought my Dad a present yet. The band just finished a short residency at The Rockwood in NYC where we were working it all out, playing sets of all the new songs, warts and all. It was like standing on a wire, a bit scary. Lyrics in front of me, arrangments fresh and new, chance of trainwreck imminent. A good place to be sometimes. Get rid of the shoepolishperfect and just fucking play the songs and see where they land. A hard town to be brave in, though. Last night I was singing one of my songs, a new one, "Haven't Learned A Thing" and my mind was on Townes Van Zandt while I playing it and I was imagining harmonies that maybe Steve Earle might sing on it (these are the things that go through my mind when I play sometimes to disassociate from a big emotional song so I don't lose it) and then all of a sudden out of nowhere like a wave the song hits me and my eyes well up and my voice cracks and there's like a hand in my gut that reaches up through my neck to my voice to my face and pulls out tears...in a club in NYC...which sometimes happens, whatever...but when it happens its always a surprise and not really a gift but something to not have happen when you're trying to just play a song and give it away not wallow in it yourself in an indulgent way but just be neutral and play the damn song and there I was completely unable to finish the song and it was just where I'd rewritten the hook line to twist it a bit and I was a bit proud of that twist and I couldn't get the words or melody out, I just had to bow over my guitar and continue picking and let the song end quietly and hope nobody thought I was an uncoolfreakazoid and then, like a freaking gift from Santa, comes this lovely quavering voice from the audience, and I've played this song only once before in public, and its Asa, a fan of mine, from the back of the room, singing the 2 lines I couldn't sing myself, in perfect pitch with a lovely vibrato, and the song ended and I was able to pull myself back together and get on with the rest of the set. Gifts come from all around. And as uncool as it may seem, sometimes you gotta let this shit affect you. Whether its a song or the fake pine scented candles.

Cool is totally overrated.

This is the second time in a week that I went to sleep in the dark and woke up in the dark, having slept straight through the light. Travel does that. Strange how our bodies are on these geographical clocks, that my body knows East Coast American time, it just KNOWS it, and when I leave that time zone, my body rebels. Even if I'm just going to Nashville, it will wake up at my East Coast wake up time or try to start sleeping at about midnight, no matter if I'm in Oregon or Chicago or even across the ocean in Munich. And then, after a few days somewhere else, my body gives up the fight and relaxes into the suntime of wherever I am. I went to sleep last night in New York at 9pm and woke up today at 5pm, the sun had already set and a blanket of snow was on the bushes and I'd missed the sun. There's a fairytale kind of zone I feel like I dipped into on these days when I miss the sun, as if I'm stuck in this fantastic night that lasts and lasts as long as the ball might last with the day of the week being unimportant and the down comforter around me like I'd been asleep for years and the vines of the frozen roses wrapping slowly around the brick of the wall of the apartment that I don't own and maybe, just maybe, someone will leap the fence and make the day wake up again. This is jet lag. Deep jet lag. Delta lost my guitar and I'm doing my best to do my pranayama breathing and not panic and trust that person in Bombay that I spoke to when I called the Delta 800 number to ask about my lost baggage, hoping that it was not "lost" but just spent an extra day in Paris than me. I have this trust in systems, which is completely against what I really believe, in the inherent wrongness of system. But there it is. It's my latent Catholicism, trusting the ghost behind the machine to just do right by us. It's embarrassing to even admit this, as I question everything and trust little but magic and poetry but I sometimes am the person that says, "just wait. they say this will work. give it time, it's supposed to work." So here I am hoping that the person who is in India really did know that my beloved Gibson in her flight case did get delayed in Paris and will be driven directly to me tomorrow morning. I don't want to think of the horror stories I know of Delta. I never fly Delta, and really my ticket was from Air France and as I arrived at Charles De Gaulle to board a Delta plane, something in my stomach dropped.

Something my band does that always makes me smile. If there is an outside ramp, walkup thingy to a plane, not just a skyway from the gate, but you have to walk outside and board the plane by a staircase, each member of my band arrives at the top of the stairs, turns to the rest of us, and waves. A la Nixon. I've never gotten the courage up to do it myself, but Jagoda and Matt say that it is the most satisfying feeling. I'm pretty sure the Parisians, under their breath, would be muttering "Silly Americans".

Silly is good sometimes. Like the joy I get buying a little clay paperweight of a snowglobe with an American flag in it wrapped by Eagle's Wings that you can find at truck stop shops on the turnpikes. I was hoping to find something in Germany for Rich like that--a snowglobe with a man in Leiderhosen holding a German flag. Instead, I found Reisen candies, cans of Coke Light and Mango juice and Jack Daniels and Coca Cola. And NY Yankees caps. Munich looks like Christmas like a stop-action holiday special. Weihnachtsmarkts are everywhere and in each town they look exactly the same. Chalet stands with garlands and little lights each selling either crafts or dolls or gingerbread cookies, some huge, with icing sayings (Ich Liebe Dich), wursts and other foods, and Gluehwein and Punsch (mulled wine -- yum -- and some awful vodka/kool-aide drink -- yick). We stopped for lunch in each town at the markets, and I had enough Gluehwein for a lifetime. Now, I'm back in Jersey and I miss it. I miss the lights and the classical music coming from the square and the brass band quartets in their scarves and hats playing "O Come All Ye Faithful". I kind of miss TV there too. There aren't many channels. Only a few. In Vienna, only 3. There's always the CNN in English and what I love about the CNN is that the anchors aren't the usual news anchors. The one I loved best was this woman who looked vaguely Indian or a mix of Asian and European. A light mocha skinned woman with very nice but not model-beautiful features, with her hair long and straight like a college student, with a nice deep voice, but without any of the "anchor" pretensions in her voice. Just someone telling you the news who looks like she could be your college roommate or the girl who works at the local coffeeshop. Not a Prada/Chanel wearing pseudo-model. A girl in a Gap sweater who's probably smarter than you. I liked her. I trusted her. MTV Germany was odd, too many shows that might have been game shows or reality shows, but you weren't quite sure, and too much James Blunt. There was some channel dedicated to the announcing of Lotto (or something like it) and it was always some busty woman in a bikini, sometimes completely topless in high patent leather white boots. I did come across a show that I did not understand at all, that reminded me of that Saturday Night Live Mike Myers "Dieter" sketch. And then, on the last night, I watched a Christmas special from Munich. It looked like it was being filmed in a very large Brauhaus, long picnic tables, everyone was in their traditional Bavarian dress with very large mugs of pilsner, and on the stage was a chorus and orchestra of people in traditional dress playing carols. Low production values, but it made me feel like a little kid. And I could sing along to "Oh Tannenbaum" in German. The sun set in Germany at about 3:30pm and it was cold, but not wet cold, just a nice dry cold.

So I'm back in New York/New Jersey cold, a bit displaced. I feel like I'm waiting now. Waiting to get home, not sure where home is. I've missed Thanksgiving 2 years in a row. This year I will spend 2 weeks with my family for the Christmas holiday, so I can have more than a short weekend to play with my niece and nephew, stay up late drinking wine with my sister and brothers and my mom and dad, and let my body get used to being in that rhythm again. This career is a bit Sisyphusian. I get asked all the time, do I get tired of so much travel. Of course I do. And the rock I push up this hill...it slips and falls and stays in place and the top is a fantasy, there is no top, there is no crest, it is all pushing. But like Camus wrote, you can't imagine it a struggle, you must imagine Sisyphus happy. Happy travelling in the dark with magic to light the way.

It's 6am in Munich and I can't sleep anymore. The beauty of European hotels is most of them have breakfast included, and not like the Super 8 dried Cheerios and stale muffins under the plastic cake platter, but a real breakfast and here in Germany that means great coffee, loads of fresh bread, usually dark chunky warm breads, platters of ham and salami and other loaf kinds of meats, cheeses, liverwursts, nutella, jams, etc. Ham sandwhiches for breakfast. It's raining this dark morning. Yesterday it snowed as we drove from Habach to Munich, leaving at dawn to avoid the city traffic on the way to dropping Rich off at the airport. The sun rose misty over the farmlands with the mountains in the distance and each white house had a spiral of smoke pointing skyward and I imagined the wood beamed kitchens starting to smell of baking bread. This morning it is raining and dark and I can feel the chill from the hotel doors as the 6am rain might become 8am snow soon. I have the day off after this 6 day tour. Came over with Rich and Jagoda and Julia and met up with Oliver from O-Tone, who was our tour booker and manager and all-around great guy. First show in Vienna (feels like a month ago) at Vienna Acoustic, a nice little club, listening room, with candles and small tables and chairs and a bar but a nice stage with a nice soundsystem. The green room had tables lined with white tablecloths and fruit and meat and cheese platters. I had no idea what to expect from this tour, having never played in Germany, but the album had come out here in June or July and Oliver said people were responding to it. So when folks started dribbling in and then all of a sudden it was kind of full, I was so surprised. The translation of humor is a bit different, imagine every night trying to explain the Double Wide Trailer song, but for the most part, I got people singing on Dreaming and I learned a couple of Germany phrases so alles klar all around. In Vienna, we had a few Texans in the audience, some Hungarian girls who had my CD already, and a bunch of folks from Vienna who both had my CD and didn't but had heard of me, or just showed up because the club has good music. Great sound and one of those soul-satisfying shows where you get back to enjoying the same old songs because for the audience, they are new. We even threw in some of the new songs for the next CD to see how they'd go over and those were the ones that seemed to make the most impact, which really makes me excited to go into the studio. My fingers and voice are itching to record. The next day a drive through Bavaria into Altdorf to Jimmy's Cafe. Altdorf is a small town and Jimmy's Cafe is the only game in town, but what a game. We show up and its like this large trailer kind of place, Jimmy built it himself, and the front is a large bar with a dance floor and its someone's birthday and they are Cuban, so the entire Altdorf population of Cubans have shown up to dance all nightlong. They've brought along homemade cuban food and invite us to eat with them. Yucca and pork and black rice and beans and just amazing food. They speak spanish, of course, and I don't speak German, so I'm happy that I can habla poquito with the Cubans. I feel a bit like I'm home in Jersey City. The walls are painted hot pink and decorated with busts and portraits of Jazz and Blues artists. In the backroom, where we are playing, the walls are hot pink and hot blue and decorated with country artists and I'm "Amy Speace, American Country and Western Singer" and as the crowd comes in, they are decked out in Stetson hats and Wrangler Jeans and again, some have my CD already and know all of the words. We play till midnight and then meet some of the audience, one guy said he saw an ad for my CD next to a Wilco ad and he's a Wilco fan so he bought my CD on faith. That just makes me giggle. Jimmy had been pouring Ehrdinger Weisse beer from the tap but at the end of the night, poured Ouzo for all of us, and then ended out the night with fresh mojito's. Before laying my tired head down in our hotel, I took a load of aspirin. The next morning we woke to the best breakfast platter, served by the owner of the Inn who had the most amazing spit-curled mustache and a very large smile and what seemed to be a very dry sense of humor, although I didn't understand a word of it. We drove through snowstorms on the autobahn at the speed of sound to Bonn, birthplace of Beethoven. Winding cobblestone streets hung with garlands and holiday lights, the markets open, serving Pounsch and Gluehwein (holiday warming up drink of vodka and koolaide or mulled wine, the mulled wine is better). I played alone this night, as I was opening for an artist from Vancouver named Melanie Dekker who tours mostly in Germany and Poland and the Netherlands, so the boys stayed back in the Inn to sleep. Our Inn was a really old building and my room was at the top, like an artist's garret that looked out over the Church steeple that rung me awake the next morning. No heat that night. I slept in my clothes and socks, bundled in the down. The show was at a bar, like a sports bar, filled with football fans, as there was some big German game going on. Then they put on the Giants game and American students piled in. Great beer again. I did a short opening set for Melanie, saw a few familiar faces (from my tour with Ezio) and my friend Andy from Radio 1 (I think.... the NPR station in Cologne) who has the world's smallest Smartcar and he's about 6'7". And my driver from June's radio tour, Steffe, and some others. Melanie invited me onstage for her encore to sing "Country Roads" by John Denver and then we all went out for drinks and dinner late night, and Andy invited me to drive his Smartcar (I'd buy one in a heartbeat but it won't fit my guitar). I couldn't sleep late as there was a thin layer of frost on my pillow, so I woke early, and had a nice breakfast (ham & cheese sandwhich) and wandered through Bonn just early enough to watch the Monday morning food stalls opening up, the strong current of Lindberger cheeses, loaves of meat, gelled together, tongue and carrot and salamis and hams and fresh breads and the brightest fruits and vegetables. I walked along the Reine towards Beethoven's house just to see it, and then back through the Cathedral yard to find myself again in the Christmas Market where Julia met me and we shared a bowl of mushrooms in an herb and onion sauce, window shopping the stalls of painted gingerbreads, handmade sweaters, toys and jewelry, carousels and lights. We drove to Hannover, an industrial city, to play a club called The Blues Garage, which was outside of town in a warehouse, but inside reminded me of a cross between NYC's Rodeo Bar and a dance hall in rural Texas. Henry runs the place with his wife and daughter and the backstage was filled with homemade foods, cakes he told us that his grandmother had made for us, bratwursts, chinese food. Monday nights, he's usually closed, but he made the exception for us. There were about 40 people there, many in Stetsons, a few who danced country waltzes while I sang "Make Me Lonely Again" or "Two". We stayed around for a while after the show to finish up the wursts, fresh off the grill. Onto Berlin the next day. We arrived early at about 2pm to a swanky hotel and the boys stayed inside to check emails and nap and I took a cab to Potsdam Platz to see where the wall once stood, wander through those buildings I remembered from CNN in 1990, my skin tingling standing on history, or was it the 25 degree frost... Soundcheck at 5pm for a 10:30pm show at Quasimodo's, a great club, and autograph seekers outside waiting for my arrival, which is a first in my life and made me giggle a bit. The club is great, dark and large with framed posters and candlelit tables on levels, an amazing soundsystem which made the show our favorite so far... Back to the hotel at 1:30am to wake at 6 for the 7 hour drive to Habach, a village outside of Munich in the farmhills, through the snow, crammed together in our van. Oliver and Julia talking in German and Rich and Jagoda and I fascinated by the German directions the Tom Tom guide would speak. Links abeden. Rechts abeden. Ausfahrt. (and I know I'm mispelling everying) We took a turn on a little road that wound down through a hill to a complex of what looked like a chalet next to a large barn next to a few outbuildings, sculpture dotting the yards, holiday lights strung between trees. The Village is like an artist complex, recording studio, venue, gathering of visual artists, and inside it was cozy and warm, with a fire in the corner, low wood-beamed ceilings, a dog wandering about, a small stage, upstairs rooms for the band, a kitchen and dining rooms and a bistro. Dieter makes electric guitars, a series of Telecasters lined up on stage for Rich to try. Last show of the tour with a warm audience and the fire going throughout the show and my upstairs room with my large down comforter as the snow fell outside, and we drank whatever the local brew was, which is just so far superior to any beers I've ever had that I realize I'm risking cliche here by saying I might not be able to ever drink a Budweiser again. Or even a Shiner. And an early early morning drive here to Munich for a day or two off to sleep in, yet I'm up at 6am and the scents of the cheese platter and coffee and warm rolls surround this hotel lobby computer.

I have so much to be thankful for. Seriously. I must thank first and foremost my new friend Robert, who I ran into on the streets of Vienna, who pointed me towards one of the most amazing meals I've ever had, which was my own private solo thanksgiving meal, and which I will now call my "penalty meal". I am thankful to have this forum, to have people like you who read what I write, to have friends and family, to have my legs that run, to have my lungs that breathe, to have fingers that play guitar and a voice that sings and people that make me feel like I am loved and I belong. I am thankful, too, that I am able to show the people that I love that they are loved. That they mean something to this world and to me.

I write all this goop as a kind of preface, to make better this crazy day. I'm beginning to feel like (karmically-speaking) I might have done something, either earlier in this life, or in a past life. Remember my fist fight in Glasgow? Yeah. That might pale in comparison to my saga of The Great Thanksgiving Adventure.

So I leave for JFK at 2pm on Wednesday 11/21, to avoid the traffic that all the newscasters are predicting for a 6:30 flight to Heathrow for my show on Thanksgiving Day at 12 Bar Club in London, which I've been looking forward to. The worst travel day in the history of travel days and all and ... there's no traffic (lucky me) and get through security and to my gate with about 4 hours to spare. What's a girl to do at the International Terminal besides Duty Free Shop (believe me, I'm over it. Clinique and bad perfume and expensive Scotch...over it)? I head straight to The Spa and start my journey with a nice foot massage. Why not, I think, as I've got 2 weeks of heavy travel in front of me and I'm giving up the Mamacita of Thanksgiving Dinners for this. My family on Thanksgiving? You can't get much better. We gather at my cousins house in VA and we eat and we debate and we talk and there's much toasting and tears and there are little kids running about and I feel so proud to have been born into this crazy family and I'm giving this all up the second year in a row for a low-paying (but career building...as they say...) gig cause I love my job and I love music and I wanna do this... but still. I deserve a foot massage.

I get on my flight to London. The plan is that I get in at 6:30am, I go to my hotel, crash (I don't sleep in planes) then go to Boots and pick up various things for friends who need things from Boots, and do my gig, go to Mon Plaisir for a nice meal by myself on thanksgiving day (cause the only thing that won't make me feel sad would be great Coq Au Vin and Bourdeaux and good fromage), then wake up early, meet the boys at Heathrow (as they fly in the next day) and we fly together to Vienna to play on the 23rd.

[Side note: I have to add here that the Thanksgiving Meal they served on the British Airways flight was really nice: turkey with stuffing and cranberry and pumpkin cheesecake and the free little bottles of bordeux, which are actually good. And free. I love European airlines that offer free booze. That's so civilized. I sleep not a wink and watch movies and drink wine all nightlong. I wanted to sleep, but it wasn't happening.]

There's a hitch. Cause lately, there's always been a hitch with me. Remember the fist fight? This is better....

I get to customs in London. I'm chatting up the guitar player for Natasha Beddington or Beddinfield or some Natasha who's a pop star, who sat next to me and we're talking about life and music and travelling and I invite him and the band to my show. I get to the customs agent who asks what my purpose is in London and I say "to play a show I'm not getting paid for" (this pay thing is important for things like work visa's) and he asks if I've ever had any problems with immigration. I say no. He says "Are you sure?" I say "Is this a trick question?" He scowls. I say "No, sir." (adding the "Sir" as an afterthought to make him happy. It doesn't.) He asks me to wait. I wait. He comes back and takes me to a little closed off place in the public big room where I wait for another 45 minutes with four or five others who looked scared and a bit lost, as the line of passengers dwindle. Then he comes back to ask me more questions about this visit and questions me about my trip here in September and I answer his question and begin to get a bit worried. See, I've always been told that if I'm not getting paid for a show, I don't need a work visa. I trust my manager to these things. And so now I start to sweat and worry that perhaps the information I've gotten is, perhaps, unreliable, and the axe might come down on my head. He leaves. An hour later, a customs agent (Serious looking woman but kind) comes and escorts me to a "holding cell" kind of place. I have to leave all of my belongings with them (I manage to finagle my copy of Harry Potter 4th book, so that I have a 700 page book to keep me company, because when I ask her how long I might be waiting, she can't give me an answer and I've heard the stories and I don't want to get more nervous by twidling my thumbs with nothing to do but stare at the white walls). The customs jailers are kind folks, and point the way to the free vending machines which kick out cappucinos and lattes and water and offer me sandwiches. They call me Madame. Its not so bad being detained, really. But they search me. And search my things. Then they take me into a little questioning room and further question me about every time I've ever been in London and why I was there and how much I made and all these details and I'm getting nervous. They are nice, but firm and I'm honest and feel like an idiot that I have to play the "other people set these tours up for me, so I don't really have any details because my tour manager will be meeting me in Vienna.." game. I tell them I am staying only one night in London and then I'm onto Vienna for a rather important tour that is making money but that I'm 100% sure that I don't need a work visa there and please please please don't send me back to NYC on Thanksgiving Day because then I'd have to turn around and buy a new ticket directly to Vienna and it would probably cost me more than 3 months rent and I'd miss my gig anyway. And the customs officer seems to take pity on me, as I do have to resort to the last weapon I've got after honesty: tears. Yes, I admit it. After 8 hours of this, holding my composure through all of it, not getting too nervous, at this point, I'm nervous. They don't allow me to have my cell phone with me so I can't even call anyone to get information. So I cry. That seems to work a little bit. And they finally, after 9 hours, tell me that I am being deported from England, I am not allowed to step foot in their country, but they have called British Airways and will put me on the next plane to Vienna, and that I'm lucky, because by law they really have to send me back from where I came. But I'm not allowed to simply just go to the gate like a normal traveller. Two customs police officers will be escorting me personally to the plane, putting me on the plane and giving my passport to the stewards who will only give me my passport when "your foot hits Austrian soil" (just to make sure I don't run off or something). Seriously. So I am escorted through the terminal with my bags, while I'm frantically calling my manager and my band and anyone I can to explain that I will not be able to make my 12 Bar Gig and that I'll be arriving in Vienna a day early and will someone get me a hotel room and will someone please come to the airport and get me because I have now been awake for 36 hours without a real meal and I feel scungy and a bit like a criminal and I'm kind of pissed and kind of sad...

So I end up on a flight to Vienna and get here by 5pm. Julia my tour manager meets me at the airport and gives me that kind of "oh baby, you've just been through a bad day" look, gets me into a cab and takes me to the hotel. And at first, I think, I'm just going to crash, but then, as we drive through the center of Vienna I realize, well, I can make lemonade here -- this has given me a 2nd night in Vienna! So Julia goes off to her planned dinner with her family and I check in, wash my face, change clothes and venture off to St. Stephensplatz to wander through the holiday decorations and find myself a nice meal. I'm wandering and I feel like I need a very very stiff drink or a great bottle of wine. I don't want tourist food. I'd take schnitzel but only if its good. Now Kal has told me a story of when he was a paralegal at Cravath back in the early 90's, he was working on some big case where 2 rich huge firms were suing each other and all the lawyers and paralegals were staying for months and months in Los Angeles and working 14 hour days for weeks on end. So at the end of the case, the partner in charge took the lawyers and the paralegals out to dinner at the Four Seasons. They all had steaks and he ordered a good bottle of wine, probably at about $100. Then, by the time the steaks were served, he ordered a $300 bottle of wine. Then, at the end of the meal, the partner announces that it is time for the "penalty bottle of wine" and proceeds to order a vintage Chateau Margaux. Probably worth about $3,000. The penalty bottle of wine.

So, last night, I had my penalty bottle of wine meal. I treated myself to dinner at Zum Weissen Raucheangkehrer and basically told the waiter to bring me the best 1st 2nd and 3rd course and a nice bottle of whatever red would go with this. And I sat down to perhaps the best dinner of my entire life. And the journey washed away and I thoroughly enjoyed myself and got back to my hotel at midnight. And slept for 13 hours.

Now, I have to figure out how to get a work visa in a week or I'm going to stay in Berlin. Maybe that's just better.....

Life is a journey.

I've been thinking about suitcases a lot lately. Suitcases and boots. What few things can we get along with and still feel comfortable. And how to be portable. I schlepped too much on my last tour, in a too-big bag that was too heavy. And so this time I vow to pare it down. I've been trying to pare down so much lately. My life. My views. My lyrics. I'm all about cutting the fat. Do I need that line in that verse or did I say that before in the first verse? Cut it out. Write what I want to say, then take out 1/3 and leave the rest to the mystery. Let you figure it out. Pack all I think I want then take out 1/2. I overpack on shoes. So this time out I'm gonna try to make it by with my one favoritist pair of boots. That's it. (sidenote: maybe I take my sneakers cause I love to run along rivers in foreign cities as the sunrises and the mist rises. I tend to take one really great run on my second day on tour, and then get too tired and blow it off the rest of the tour, but this time, I will vow to run every day. so. maybe 2 pairs of shoes. sneakers and my boots). I write a lot of lists. When I'm on tour, I will spend free time making lists of things I packed that I didn't wear or use in order to compile a comprehensive list for touring. I definitely needed the black jeans, but didn't necessarily need the cords. One great warm sweater was all I needed; not three. And luggage choices. I was trying to get by with cheap softcases, but I think I need to shell it out for some hardshell durable Samsonite and suck it up. It's all I think about. As I've been living out of a suitcase for over a month now. 2 really. I haven't seen my cabin since the 2nd week of October. I've been to Paris and London and Texas and Boston. It's snowed one day then I flew to Houston where it was 80 degrees. It's getting cold here in NYC where I'm living out of a suitcase and I don't have time to go back to my cabin to restock supplies, so I'll just pare down what I've got here to haul it back to London again, where I think it's probably colder this time than last, which was just 2 weeks ago. I drool at the thought of the perfect coat or boots or suitcase which would solve all my fashion/space/packing problems. I have my eye on this one pair of Fiorentini & Baker boots... But as my mama says, my eyes are bigger than my stomach (or wallet). This is my life. And these are miniscule concerns in a world where there's so much more to think about than wool and leather. I'm working on the final writings for the next album, writing and rewriting and rewriting again. Obsessing over details and story and whether I've said too much or too little. wishing I had more time to write more. But wanting too to jump into this adventure half-formed and see what emerges. Its a strange space to be in, on the verge of the new while the old (Bright Street) is new to Europe. Trying to find ways to make the old new and the new old and live in the comfort of less. Trying to love the skin I'm in and stay contained and quiet for a bit while these things gestate and mutate and take form and shape. The holidays are coming like a freight train, all tinsel and crowdcrush. So I think I want Santa to bring me less this year. Just to bring me perspective on the lessness of the whole and the sparity. And maybe to bring us all some universal healthcare without fear of it making us all communists. And perhaps, I'll send some forgiveness to the guest house lady who punched me out, because I figure that somewhere in my life, karmically-speaking, I deserved it.

First of all, find out if the car you have ordered to drive is a manual. :) Driving stick shift on little roads in the Lake District of England while trying to manage the map, the Tom Tom, and your Starbucks, which I hate to admit has become necessary as some mornings its tough to find a good latte... let me just admit firstly that I've killed no farm animals. Yet.

Edinburgh was lovely. The castle was stunning at night and crowded by day, but it was my first castle and even with gift shops on every level, still quite thrilling. Glasgow...well, there's a story. We played at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut, a very famous rock club. I seem to recall it's where Oasis was discovered. It's a great club, a la Maxwells of Hoboken. Probably holds up to 300 or so. Great sound system. They feed you and treat you really nice. There's a fridge in the green room where on the fridge door, delineating the fridge shelves, they have the names of the artists playing. On my level were 10 Stella Artois, a bunch of fruit juices and cokes. The guy who played first had Tennents instead of Stellas and I traded him a few. Ezio had 2 shelves. La di dah. The show had lots of people there and it was a really fun show. I hope to get back with my band sometime. Ezio and Booga and Graham (sound guy) and his friend and Leighanne (my Tour Manager) and I went out for drinks afterwards and ended up drinking beer till about 2 or so.

At 10:30am there was a really loud knock on our guest house door. We'd not gotten to sleep until about 3am or so. Check out was at 10:30 and we'd set our alarms, but obviously had overslept them. The woman who was the receptionist at the BOTANICA GUEST HOUSE IN GLASGOW, SCOTLAND (believe me, I'll post the address...) had been totally unfriendly and completely rude to us from the minute we called for better directions the day before. She'd flat out refused to call us a cab to the venue until I had to get a bit Jersey on her. She just seemed bored with her life. I left it at that. But when, at 10:30am my bed was spinning and the door was being pounded upon, I had had enough. Leighanne is a really nice person, and answered the door in her pj's, hair tousled, half asleep, and was trying to have a polite conversation with this total bee-atch who was insisting that we "leave. immediately." Seriously. So I get out of bed and try to reason with her. The check out had just passed and could we please have an extra 1/2 hour to simply shower and get ourselves ready and pack to go? She said no. Check out is now. Go. Seriously!!! I was in total disbelief and thought either she's insane or a pod person. I said something, perhaps sassy, to the tune of this is silly, we're taking showers and we'll be down in a heartbeat and if you have to charge us so be it. Well, this insane woman pushed the door aside, hitting me full on in the face with the door, grabbed the handle of my opened suitcase on the floor beside me, and started pulling it out of the door, to forceably evict us! I was flabbergasted. I was offended. I was $%*(ing pissed off and pushed her hand off my bag (which, did I mention was opened so my things were being strewn all over...) and she... she...she....

SHE DECKED ME. SHE HIT ME FULL ON IN THE FACE. I SWEAR TO YOU.

My nose. She punched me in the nose. Now. Listen. I have not been punched in the nose since I was in Junior High and Vivian Sigh (who we all said "Vivian Sigh, Killed A Guy" as in some nursery school tune) went to punch me out for no good reason in the girls' locker room and Laura Kline stepped in front of me and took the hit. But this freaking crazy Scottish woman punched me. I was so shocked, the piss and vinegar was just gone from me and I was in complete silence. I slammed the door on her face (lucky I had enough sense to keep my hands by my side) and we packed in a major hurry and left, yelling obscenities and threating to call the cops. I don't know why we didn't, except that we were admittedly shocked and scared and knew that we wanted to get out of there. And we had a long drive and I knew I didn't want to miss the show. Let's keep track of the important things.

So. People. Please. THE BOTANIC HOTEL, 1 ALFRED TERRACE, GREAT WESTERN ROW, GLASGOW, UK
info@botanichotel.co.uk
0141 337 7007

Avoid this hotel at all costs. And feel free to call a local delivery nearby and send them 45 pizzas. On me.

The summer between my junior and senior years of college, I begged my parents to buy me a Eurorail pass so I could travel. I was allowed to travel as long as I found a summer program to study, so that it was not all play and no work. I planned to travel for a month and then was enrolled in a language study immersion program in Madrid where I'd live with a family. My plan was to fly to Paris for a day to meet a friend, then take the train to Madrid to meet another friend, where the two of us would then travel through Italy. I met my friend in Paris, had a whirlwind day (the Louve to see the Mona Lisa! Wine and bread under the Eiffel Tower! Espresso in a café!), and then got on an overnight train to Madrid. Where I met a boy and all plans went out the window and I ended up on an entirely different trip than I'd planned.

That voyage was almost 20 years ago. Unbelievable to me now how time has passed. I was on a train this morning from Luxembourg to Brussels, the first European train I've been on since that journey, watching the sun rise over the misty cold fields, reminiscing about that trip so long ago, the boy I'd met and wondering about whatever happened to him and his brother, their friend from New Zealand who was on that overnight train and who we lost in Seville, the other brothers who were on their Hemingway quest, who I met in the Barcelona train station one night and rented a car to Valencia, who I ran into randomly a week or so later in Pamplona, both of them dressed in white and red. There was a randomness to that time, a serendipity in connections. Life seemed wide open.

I got up early on Tuesday in Paris to run along the Seine. Saw the sparkling sun creep up over the water, the yellows of the trees shimmering. The streets were quiet, the shush of the street sweeps trailing my run. I'd planned on only a half hour, but got dizzy with the idea of running through the Touilleries and made the carousel my goal, which extended my run by about another half hour. Well worth the sweat, as watching Paris come awake is something that everyone should do once.

We took the train to Luxembourg, carting large suitcases filled with CD's and t-shirts and extra sweaters. I opened for Fish, a huge rock star over here. We played in what looked like an airplane hanger, huge open warehouse space with a large stage, huge sound, light show and dry ice. It was about 30 degrees outside and in and it was Halloween night and Fish is a BIG ROCK STAR OVER HERE, so I felt a bit like "one of these things is not like the other" and walked onstage thinking "these people are gonna hate me", knowing the chances were slim to none that the folks would listen to me when they were paying for the BIG ROCK SHOW only to have a folk singer open, solo, too. But listen they did, and sing along and laugh and I had a great time. And Fish was a really nice guy, although a BIG ROCK STAR and I have a new goal in life: to get big enough that I can afford to hire Chris, the guy who runs his merch table and owns and drives the band bus. Love this guy! I now have a Fish ski hat and Chris is wearing the Tearjerks workshirt at Fish gigs!

The next morning was brutal. A 6am train to Brussels, to another train to the airport to one flight to London to another flight to Newcastle, to pick the car up to get the stick shift car and have to navigate for the first time ever, driving stick shift on the other side of the road with my left hand in the dark during rush hour. But it was worth it as the show was incredible. I'm on tour now with Ezio, a really wonderful singer-songwriter from Cambridge, UK who's touring with his guitar player Booga, who's a great guitar player. Ezio is like a cross between Andy Garcia and Steve Carrell, with Carrell's sense of humor, Ryan Adams' voice and songwriting style, throw in a bit of humor and a British hooky thing. I really like his music and we're doing a week of shows together. Last night's show in Newcastle was packed and everyone was singing along to every single word (and inflection!) of Ezio's songs. They were really nice to me, as well, and the club was great—The Cluny.

Today we drove along craggy cliffs to Edinburgh, Scotland and played at The Ark. I ate haggis for the first time (and it wasn't a dare…when in Rome….) and I liked it. This is my job. This is my life, but the great thing is its beginning to resemble a bit of that trip back when I was in college. We could have taken the straight road to Edinburgh, and we would have gotten to the guest house more quickly, taken a nap, changed, put on some makeup and warmed up for the show, but instead, we took the scenic route, saw the sea and a lot more sheep than i've ever seen anywhere. I changed quickly, forgot the makeup, lingered over a pint and some new food that I'd never thought I'd eat (or like!), and got to the soundcheck at the last minute. And had the opportunity to play once again for a supremely polite crowd who listened and then came to say hi while they bought CD's. This is no straight line kind of life. I'm 39. My college friends have houses and kids and mortgages and have 15 years of career-climbing under the belts, while I have had a tapestry life, and am just beginning to emerge into some semblance of a "career" which doesn't feel like a job but the best way to spend my days. I don't have a $75,000 a year career or a house or even the promise ever of that. And I'm still struggling to figure out how (or if) to have a family. I struggle with getting older in an industry (and let's face it, world) that is defined by the under 20-somethings, when I know that I was still learning the language back then. I didn't figure out how to wrap my tongue around my own viewpoints until I was in my 30's. But I wouldn't trade my "just getting by" salary or the emerging lines on my face or any of it. The journey now is so much richer than when I was a twenty year old, following around that boy from Connecticut, who I ended up dumping anyway to go to Pamplona to run with the bulls. I'm following around a Gibson guitar now. A better choice.

Halleluiah
Current mood: calm

So...today I'm in Dallas, staying at Cary & Tom's house for the first time and they are not here. It rained all night last night, thunder and lightening like I described off that mountain last week and again I couldn't sleep, wrestling with my own demons. This morning I woke lazily, had a lot of coffee, padded around the empty house enjoying all the books that aren't mine and the silence and took a long run around this neighborhood that's not mine. In my ears--Darryl Scott. Now, one thing I left out about that last post, was that during Darryl's set at Rocky Mountain Folks Festival, he invited all the Song School teachers up on stage to sing backup for him on a song. Our part was simple. Halleluiahs. In harmony. We all stood there, arms around each other, just so happy to be together and singing. I remember standing surrounded by Arthur Leland and Steve Seskin, our arms all around each other's shoulders. Singing halleluiahs. At the time, I couldn't even tell you what song of Darryl's we were singing, because I was just so charged to be on this stage with these people singing behind this master. It was one of those communion moments.

I wrote of that week, feeling isolated, looking for space and silence, wanting to reach out. I wrote of last week being up on the mountain searching again for silence and footing and a place to call my own.

I was running today and that song of Darryl's came on. The song I sang on. "There's a Stone Around My Belly" is the name of that song. Here's what I heard today for the first time:

There's a stone around my belly, keeps me up at night
Makes me want to feed it, makes me want to fight with the world
I got a heart full of darkness, I got a headache full of dreams
I got a lifetime full of memories I don't know what they mean to this world...

I've been up on the mountains, I been rolling like a stone
Searching this whole world over for a place to be alone
Alone to see the sunsets and to count what I have lost
Alone to read aloud Walt Whitman and a little like Robert Frost

Don't anyone tell us there is no magic these days....

To me, there's nothing like the smell of wet burntorange leaves on a pinebed forest floor after a rain. Deep hemlock forest with newgrowth birches. I read that the Catskills were once heavy with hemlock until the tanners came in and stripped them down to use the bark, slashing through the deep dark until little was left, leaving room for the hardwoods to come and take over, maple, elm and birch. I love birch, but I really love the pinegrove like a visceral thing. Like the 5 year old misplaced memory I have of my walk on the Cedar Trail in Glacier National Park with my father, the tall bridge over the waterfall, the spider in the firs...misplaced because for years I thought this was a dream I'd had or a scene from a fairy tale told to me by my father. Until 10 years ago when I revisited Montana and walked those steps again to have that "a ha" realization that I'd been here before and this was the scene of the dream memory. Firs, pines, evergreens, hemlock ... home for me. You think I'm a city girl but it's a lie. I'm a little girl wandering through the woods with a compass with my dad who once lived on the top of a mountain in Oregon watching for fires. I just emerged from the mountains, hills really geologically speaking but who's mincing here? 4 days, 3 nights in the Catskills, hiking with my dog, scrambling up rocks and down wet moss, in and out of the rain, not a soul on the trail for days. Rice & beans at night, oatmeal in the morning, my breath in little clouds, fog rolling off of Thomas Cole Mountain. And silence. Utter silence. In and out of my head.

I tend to write these half-truths here. Why do we blog? To unearth ourselves in the glare of others' reading? Or to don a costume of cool, to show off? Or to shed? Journaling for me is a random art. I do not write in my journal so that after my death someone will find ME in there. I fill pages with lies, with questions, with circling around what I already know, convincing myself? convincing others who might peek? Or just to write words that sound nice together. But here in public, yet private, it must be different. It is a sharing here, I hope. I just spent the morning reading other blogs and was struck by my friends Cary and Tom's writings on a certain week in August that I shared with them. And I was struck numb by the truth in what they wrote. And felt like I've been casting shadows around myself here. Not getting to the heart of it.

August was a life-changing month for me. Affirming, ego-sucking, bruised and battered and wonderfully soul-charging month. Let me begin at the beginning.

The band and I had toured from Memphis to Colorado together in my van. We are all close friends, and have a mostly wonderful time together, but of course, with any friends who work together, so much closeness brings tensions and we had our share on the road. Mostly small things, natural crankiness, stress when we were running late. All in all it was a great tour. Jagoda had to leave for a week to get back home to spend time with his family. And then he rejoined us, after we'd spend time in the mountains and hot springs. I wrote about that tour earlier. Jagoda and I landed for a week in Lyons, Colorado at the Rocky Mountain Folks Festival Song School, which has been my summer retreat home for 5 years now. I've made some of the best friends of my life there. I've gone through significant changes due to that place. I met my teaching mentor, Paul Reisler, there. I've written some songs I really am proud of there. I look forward to this week every single year like I used to stay up waiting for Santa. My skin tingles when I think of this place. It is magic to me. This year I would be teaching an elective class on singing and performance, which I was really excited about, as I'd thought a lot about what I could offer to this community that had given so much to me, and I'd be assisting Paul Reisler again in his demanding class "Directed Writing". As well, I was really excited as I'd been named a finalist in the songwriting contest for the 2nd year in a row. I was a finalist last year. I got up on that large stage, overlooking the cliffs and the river and thousands of people, a dream kind of stage. I started quietly, said almost nothing, and starting picking out "Make Me Lonely Again". Then I conjured up my inner rockstar and started in on "The Real Thing". I felt triumphant, like I'd just given everything I had. I felt like a winner. I was thrilled. Contests are really hard things. You have so little time to show everything you can be. You are nervous. Really fucking nervous. And emotional. And on edge. And usually you've had little sleep the night before. So when I pulled out what I'd hoped was a winning performance last year, I was so happy I could have thrown up. I did not listen to any of the other performers in the contest, so that I could avoid being in any kind of comparing mind. Just wanted to do the best I could do. I won fourth place. Which, honestly, last year, was disappointing. I'd be lying if I said otherwise. Of course, I was happy to be in the finals. Of course 10 out of 900 is a huge honor and 4th is a huge honor. But I played to win last year and in my mind I lost. You can say that sounds like a poor loser, but I'd disagree. Of course, I was happy to place and after about 12 hours, I could enjoy the 4th place "win", but immediately as my name was announced, my heart sank. That was last year. After a year of "losing" contests that I'd been a finalist in (Kerrville, which was also disappointing), I'd thought I'd never enter another one again, but here I was this year, I'd entered again and gotten to the finals again. I had a new song, "Weight of the World" which I just felt was really strong, and I was excited to try again. Of course, this year, I'd be competing with good friends Cary Cooper and Sarah Sample, both of whom are really wonderful writers and singers and just outstanding performers, and I thought the whole thing would be really fun and I wasn't going to take it too seriously, so that I wouldn't be disappointed in the end. The other thing is that last year, I was in the contest and had never played on a stage that large. But this year, I'd come off of playing the Kerrville Folk Festival (after having not won the contest) and playing huge theaters with Judy Collins all year, so I felt more at ease on large stages and felt stronger about my music and my performances. Just more comfortable.

I'm fast forwarding too fast. Let me go back a bit. I get to the Song School the night before it started as my band was playing in town. I was so thrilled that so many of the staff and the song schoolers came out to hang out and hear my band and I invited a bunch of friends to come sit in with the band and it just felt like such a wonderful community gathering. The perfect pre-camp bon fire. I was on high, although my body was really tired from the prior 3 weeks of touring. I arrived to camp to find out that Paul Reisler and his wife Julie Portman, who teaches performance, wouldn't be making it due to illness this year and I was asked to teach Paul's songwriting class. My heart did a few flip flops. Paul and Julie are my mentors and have been family to me. I love them dearly and I wanted to crawl away behind a rock and bawl my eyes out. I was terrified for them. And, I was also so touched that Steve S. the director of the School felt I could handle teaching Paul's class. Right away I knew that this year would be different. I wouldn't have the leisure time to spend by the river writing songs by myself or with friends. I'd be teaching almost every minute of every day. I went through so many thoughts in that first night--can I do this? am I a good enough songwriter to stand in front of other songwriters, of all levels, and offer them information? will they respect me? will I fall apart? will I have nothing to say or forget what to teach? I had that feeling like when I was 12 and was last picked for the kickball team and felt like everyone was looking at me. What if nobody signed up for the class? The contest fears evaporated. I forgot about the contest. I had to teach. I had to offer more than I'd bargained for and more than I'd prepared for. The truth: I was excited to try it. Like getting to the base of the mountain and realizing it's higher than you thought. I like these kinds of moments. I wanted this. I was ready for it. But there I was, surrounded by the tents of my friends, songwriters I admire and respect, people who make me feel wanted and liked, people who make me laugh and cry. And I just didn't have enough time in the day to fall into the net of them and I began to feel very distant from my friends. Seperate. Then alone. And I didn't even think about it until the last day. My friend Cary who was in the contest with me was a ner