October 15th, 2009 — John Plays Live!
We’re a week away from my first proper gig at the Neutral Ground Coffeehouse in New Orleans! I’ll be playing from 8 to 9 pm on Thursday the 22nd. No cover charge, so please bring your friends. The most important thing is for me to get Butts In Chairs that night so they’ll ask me back soon (preferably not on a Thursday next time).
If you stick around after I’m done playing, you’ll get to enjoy the rootsy Appalachian-style tunes of Natalie Palms, aka Natalie Mae, from 9 to 10!
October 5th, 2009 — General Junk
… to talk about apples. The fruit, not the computer or the record company (although, ain’t that Beatles Rock Band just awesome, now?)
See, when I was growing up in Southern Louisiana in the 70’s, you couldn’t get a decent apple for anything. Sure, a Winn-Dixie apple looked great, nice and red and shiny and all, but the taste was pretty much non-existent and the texture was torture. Mush and sand. So I just assumed I didn’t like raw apples very much.
Cooked, sure. I loved everything you could make with apples, and applesauce was one of the best things ever, but clearly, raw apples were unpleasant things. That whole “apple a day keeps the doctor away” business was just one of those sayings that became popular in the North but didn’t make a lot of sense in the South.
(In first grade or so, I was told that March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, and there’s nothing REMOTELY leonine about a Louisiana March. This is probably when I first started to distrust authority.)
So fast-forward to my 20’s, and I moved to Vermont for a few years. Suddenly I learned why people get excited about good apples and bad apples. It’s because good apples are REALLY good! While I was recording The Swing in the fall of 1995, there was an apple tree outside October Moon Studios (just outside of Rochester) with the freshest, crispest, tartest apples you could imagine. I could have lived off those things. I clearly liked apples just fine, it’s just that I hasn’t actually eaten a REAL one before.
Even in light of this culinary discovery, though, the fact is that New Englanders are not known for their food. Obviously, the apples are awesome, and the cheese is mighty nice and I’ve got great things to say about the local beers, but I found myself missing the robust spices of my home turf, and are you aware that it gets a bit chilly in Northeast? So I eventually packed up and returned to the South, more or less resigning myself to not having hardly any decent apples ever again.
Thankfully, I was flat wrong on that front. I’ve just had my first experience with the Honeycrisp apple, and it’s a thing of beauty, even purchased at a Gulfport Walmart. Crisp, tart, sweet, huge, beautiful. Just awesome. It’s apparently the state fruit of Minnesota, but I bought it because its coloration was so striking. And now it’s a good friend. Can’t wait to pair it with some sharp white cheddar.
So another thing that I was missing terribly from the North is now available in a more-than-passable form on the Gulf Coast. Maybe one day I’ll be able to say the same for Magic Hat beer.
September 30th, 2009 — 2 O's, 2 E's (2009), Cigarette Ash
Cigarette Ash is the Alice’s Restaurant of my musical history. It takes a long time to play, it’s a bit childish, it’s got an awful lot of talking … and people keep asking to hear it.
You can find the original version on Picture Perfect Fool (1992), and this take changes around some of the characters to be a tad more contemporary. I actually think it works a bit better this way, but you can be the judge.
(Lyrics not included … you’ll just have to listen.)
September 30th, 2009 — 2 O's, 2 E's (2009), Harder Way To Die
This little portrait of despair was originally released in 1992 on Picture Perfect Fool. The song wears its heart on its sleeve, and doesn’t really need a lot of extra explanation. The world is a hard, cold place and there’s a lot of people who are simply too vulnerable to navigate it well. Whatever sympathy you can muster would probably be appreciated.
September 30th, 2009 — 2 O's, 2 E's (2009), Vision
Like Justify, this was one of my early songs that never made it into an official album release before now. It is clearly part of my “sarcastic political” phase, but I wouldn’t take back a word of it now. Jack Abramoff, This Is Your Life!
Continue reading →
September 29th, 2009 — 2 O's, 2 E's (2009), Misfits of the World
This song originally appeared on Watercolor Monster in 1991, and it focuses on the fallibility of people of all creeds and political parties. Yes, the world is messed up now, but even if the fringiest fringers managed to seize power and they had the absolute best ideas about how to mold the world … it wouldn’t take long for everything to collapse into corruption and chaos again.
Also, the chorus contains a sly reference to “Shoplifters Of The World” by The Smiths. What more could you ask for?
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September 28th, 2009 — General Junk
Alright, enough dead air. I’m back on board. Sorry for the delay.
Things are a little different around the site today. I’m converting my music distribution to the excellent Bandcamp model. All my stuff is available for download and sale now, and the audiophiles will be quite pleased to see the formats that are now available. You can still pick your own price, too!
Also please note that I actually have a performance scheduled for October 22 at the Neutral Ground Coffeehouse in New Orleans. But I’ll be returning to my previously announced plan of blogging all the tracks in my latest release, 2 O’s, 2 E’s now.
May 24th, 2009 — General Junk, Latest Hits
Well, it’s officially Day 4 of the Kerrville Folk Fest, and I’m out of there already. I was originally planning to stay through tomorrow, but chose instead to retreat to a hotel in San Antonio, then head back to Gulfport. This was a tough decision to make.
I was really getting into a groove with the music circle at Camp Stupid. I have never been in the company of so many fantastically talented musicians as I was over those few days. But I was physically and emotionally unable to continue. The late, late nights with the circle combined cruelly with my profound camping inexperience (and my borrowed tent that I barely knew how to assemble) to give me a crippling case of sleep deprivation. I was getting VERY depressed, and I am not a depressive person. Moreover, there was simply no way for me to just go crash somewhere, as I have sleep apnea and need to use my CPAP machine to successfully sleep at all. So I had to split without making many goodbyes at all, and that saddens me too. Sigh. Ya can’t win.
Huge thanks to Ken and Charles who got me to take this great leap into the larger folk sea. My mind is officially blown, and I will try and collect the pieces here in some kind of coherent fashion over the next I-really-don’t-know-how-long. Right now I’m going to hit the road and return to my beloved family, who I missed tremendously! I still plan to bring them to the Fest in some future year (hopefully soon), and now I’ve got some serious area knowledge to make that possible.
May 6th, 2009 — 2 O's, 2 E's (2009), Bitter By And By
This is another one that was first recorded back in 1991 for Watercolor Monster. As tempting as it is to try and tease some meaning out of these lyrics, the simple fact is that it’s not intended to actually mean anything at all.
Is it possible that my subconscious mind has actually pieced together something very profound without my conscious knowledge? Sure. Why not? In fact, I’ve done that to myself on more than a few occasions. I’ll write a song, not think much about it, and then fifteen years later I’ll look back and say “HEY! So THAT’S what I meant by that!”
But that’s not very likely in this case. So go ahead and come up with your own theories and let me know what they are. Perhaps you will enlighten me further. In the meantime, I can at least help you with a little vocabulary.
Busking is playing music in the street for money. I did a lot of busking at Church Street Marketplace in Burlington, VT in the mid- to late-1990’s, but I hadn’t done that yet when I wrote this song. Guess I just liked the sound of the word.
Feta is a brined sheep’s milk cheese that originate in Greece. Stinky and wonderful crumbled in salads.
Natchitoches (pronounced NACK-uh-tish) is a town in Central Louisiana. It is home to the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts and Northwestern State University, and I’ve spent a total of 8 years doing various educational things at those fine institutions. Natchitoches was also the hometown of Robert Harling when he wrote Steel Magnolias, and they filmed the movie there too. The Christmas Festival depicted in the film is a real, annual event, but they faked it for the movie and restaged it in the middle of the summer of 1986, if memory serves.
I also recall that the release of Steel Magnolias was on or around the day that the Berlin Wall fell. These two events do not actually have a lot to do with each other, but they are connected in my head because that’s when Dolly Parton came to town.
May 6th, 2009 — General Junk
This year will mark my first experience at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas. No, I won’t be taking the stage at any point, but if I understand things correctly, there will be X number of campfires going at any given time with Y number of people with guitars and stuff, and you just kind of plonk yourself down and wait your turn. That sounds pretty awesome, actually.
I’ll be there from Thursday, May 21 to Monday the 25, and that seems like a long time until you realize that the Fest goes on for 18 days!!! I couldn’t manage to swing that with the day job and all, but Memorial Day will let me get an extra day in there and my Prius will greatly lessen the cost of a ten-hour drive.
Have any of you ever been? Are you also going this year? Drop me a comment and maybe I can crash your campfire or something.
