Dances, Losses, and Moral Ambitions

So! Migrating to substack— I’ve avoided it because it might piss off a few people, something I categorically dislike. But mailchimp sucks, and them’s the breaks: I gotta go where the people are and use the platforms that actually keep me in touch.

To say it’s been a helluva year is an understatement. I haven’t played a ton of shows, but that changes little. Alaska, England, Ireland, the Nordics, Germany, the Netherlands…and of course, the big one in my heart, Arkansas. Here’s a square dance I got to call:

On a personal note, it’s breakup times on the homefront! Alas, I miss the dog and the human alike. I keep my love-life private (and always will, probably), but will appeal to what we all know of breakups: they are like living death. Who and how you love suddenly changes. The extraordinariness of having a best friend just…ends. I have no regrets or animosity, but will stay sad for a long time.

So, you lean in elsewhere. Gratefully, I have a few places to lean. I know this looks like my family, but it isn’t, it’s Jim from my tiny and excellent label, “Signature Sounds.” It’s also Jim’s family, and we’re out singing at a No Kings protest. It was cold, it was fun. Jim and my guys are cooking up the longest record I’ve ever made— I’ll tell you about it next week.

This is how folksinging shows up for me as I show up for it: friends, family, loved ones are scattered across the world like stars across the night sky. No matter where I am, I can look up. When things are darkest, I can look up. In the bright lights of the concert hall, in the dim dive bar, in the bookstore and on the street, I see you, friend. I like us best when we’re singing together, burning out together.

There’s much on the horizon in the next week, but I’ll leave you with this: nothing has prepared me for the moral challenges that modest success has given me, and there is no roadmap to a good or moral life in show-business. We have a lot more bad role models than good ones. I remain determined.

I recently saw how Kaitlin Butts, a great songwriter and performer, has a real-life “bucket list” of career accomplishments, and she’s crossing ‘em off with alacrity: playing stadiums, selling out places. I’m inspired! I used to have one of those lists, when I was in my early 20’s. Problem is, I crossed everything off. All but “be cast and perform as Henry V or King Lear.” The rest of them have all come true. Make a few records. Write some poems. I’ve been working to make a new bucket list.

Something with moral ambition. Real question: who is your good role model in all this? Who can we look up to? I’ve got Utah Phillips and Pete Seeger and Hedy West and all these great folksingers on it. I admire Carsie Blanton, Nathan Evans Fox, and a few other contemporaries hugely. And James Baldwin and Walt Whitman. Nobody’s perfect, but who rode astride their contradictions with verve and kindness?

Thanks for staying with me, pals. My hope is that this will look like the old newsletters, but pieced together slowly. I’ll probably post some older bits here too. God knows I have a lot of writing in the backlog.