Constellations

No big ideas (of my own) in this newsletter. Instead, I’d like to point your attention toward a few things in which my practice has been a minor influence.

I snapped this photograph on my 1952 Rolleiflex at a house show in Austin this spring, and Jo Alice liked it enough to use it as the cover art for her most recent single, That’s No Way. This picture was taken while she was getting set up and sound-checking, and it’s a great reminder that iconic imagery springs from any moment, including the most mundane ones—ergo, always be snapping!

I love the texture of the popcorn ceiling against her hair and the sharpness of the guitar frets and the binding around the edge. This photo actually came from a bad batch of Rollei Retro 80S film, which I will not buy again. Because of the thinness of this film, light manages to penetrate the plastic film base and reflect off the backing paper onto the backside of the emulsion. The backing paper is normally printed with black ink, but the ink is not perfectly matte and has a kind of mottled look. The result is a kind of contact print—in addition to the image coming from the front, you get the texture of the paper coming from the back. So every frame has a weird mottled overlay that appears profoundly pox-like when the subject is a person. When I discovered this on my first roll, I figured I had been too careless with my developing temperatures. But when I got the exact same effect on the second roll I knew something was wrong with the film itself.

I did a lot of hair-pulling and slider-sliding “in post” to get this picture to an acceptable state, and I very nearly trashed the whole thing because I didn’t feel that it met my own standard of quality. But Jo Alice loved it, and in the end so do I. Lesson #2 from this picture is don’t trash the whole thing if you can help it!

Sam Graf is releasing a record soon and I took the portraits that comprise the cover art as well as all the singles. Live Outside is the fourth of such singles and was released four days ago. The other singles (and photos) are available through that YouTube account. I’m not sure what happened to his Bandcamp page, but at least you know I’ll never link you to the green app.

In addition to being a great songwriter, singer, and instrumentalist, Sam plays the drums on a number of Guma cuts that I’ve been working on for my next LP.

Vibraphonist and percussionist Carolyn Trowbridge has a full-length record coming out which I produced. It was engineered and mixed by Gary Calhoun James Jr., a name that should be familiar to anyone who has ever read my own liner notes. We cut the record at Estuary Studios, where Workingman’s Guma was recorded and mixed. It was a productive two days in August 2023, with Carolyn’s quartet augmented by harpist Elaine Barber, who plays with the Austin Symphony, and prodigious jazz flautist Alex Coke. The photograph above was taken on my trusty ‘68 Canon QL. Found Memories comes out in January 2026, but in the meantime you can listen to the first single Duchess of Sheba.

Both Carolyn and Gary can be heard on last year’s Guma album Riprap, and along with Sam G. (and Alex Coke!) they’re also on the next Guma LP, which is shaping up to be a return to the more (or less) conventional songwriting for which I am yet known.

I got a haircut over the summer for the first time in five years, mainly to avoid having to deal with my hair while I was hiking on the Kungsleden. Speaking of that trek, last week I appeared on KOOP Radio’s Art Spark TX Radio Hour, where my friend Celia Hughes and I talked about hiking, its mental and physical benefits, and my photography. You can listen to that interview (the 10/27 episode) for at least the next week at the above link. You can read about that trek in an earlier newsletter: One Month in the Arctic.

This newsletter makes me look a lot busier than I am. Who’s got a project?