Shitbag

I am beginning to understand why gardening is popular with older people. Nutz-deep in the planning process for what will be our new front yard, it seems obvious to me that the amount of patience and foresight required does not cater to the young and their need for immediate gratification. Working from bed with colored pencils, paper and a perennials catalog, I am taking a painter’s approach, organizing color, height, sun/shade preferences, bloom cycles… and none of it may necessarily take. Things die, things refuse to grow in certain soil, drought happens, floods and hail come, etc. I should have a solid idea of what’s working by, say, 2015.

I fear Stan has succumbed to a Spring depression. He spends many hours of the day curled on the bath mat in front of the shower. I have no idea why. When I attempt to engage him in a conversation he gives me the ‘asshole’ look and waddles away to the bedroom rug. When I return to the bedroom to get back into bed, he gives me the ‘asshole’ look and goes back to the bathroom. He has always been a moody little fucker but this sort of behavior is wearing me down. It is true that my current condition has severely cut into his walking time; it is true that the carpenter bees, whom he fears terribly, have returned to the back deck, rendering the prospect of hitting the back yard for a leisurely deuce into a potentially traumatic experience. That said, I wonder when some of his old obstinacy might return. It pains me to see him this way.

I just strayed into the YouTube© to watch a gardening video. Big mistake: A series of crappy photos, featuring many of the plants that I have been considering for my yard, Ken Burns-ed over the most obnoxious Euro trash dance music, the kind of soundtrack you might expect to accompany the violation of Albanian minors. Goddamn it. I fear my arboreal aspirations have been forever smeared by some suburban hack’s lifestyle confusion. Like, seriously, what does this guy, this Manwininwrit, do every morning? Put on a spandex unitard, pop a Red Bull and head out back to urinate on the begonias? Get out of my head, shitbag.

Bi-Plane

Absolute supinity has driven me back to Facebook. Facebook is like the New York City of the Internet; who would believe it could be possible to be surrounded by so many people and feel so alone. I attempted to reverse the usual process today, making a concerted effort to look through photos and posts and think about the authors in a favorable light, sending good energy their way instead of wondering to myself what were they thinking. Instead, I asked myself, what are you thinking?

As of today I am decidedly post-Instagram. Yet again, I got suckered into another product that purported to confer cheap and easy coolness upon a life that, apparently, just wasn’t interesting enough. The upside is that, in the process, Instagram has deconstructed the essence of itself for us: It demands we confront the fact that we don’t like ourselves and our surroundings enough to examine and find pleasure in the real and actual detail they possess. Instagram suggests that if we augment what’s already there by filtering, saturating and weathering our every days into something that more resembles 32 years ago… it’s somehow better, cooler, more relevant. The fact that very few people have actually mastered it to the point of evolution only proves my point. Which brings us back to nostalgia and our goddamn weird fascination with it, our need to be validated by it. Truly, I cannot go on any more about this.

(That said, there is this one guy named Gerter who is really amazing with the Instagram. He uses is to create something new, new on a phone. Check him out.)

Either the New Yorker has made a conscious choice to go annoyingly global or I am becoming a goddamn stick in the mud. I just can’t seem to get through an entire article anymore. This week: Radical muslims in Alexandria (yawn), purported comedic piece on DPRK (20 words stroked into 600), investigative piece about raw dairy wars in California (enjoyable), ominous observation of Stanford U. connection to Silicon Valley (Internet wealth, Internet wealth… yawn) and what appears to be about 15,000 words devoted to a secret vault of riches underneath a temple in India (mmmmm… maybe Netlix is streaming  Indiana Jones) Come on man, what the fuck? I’m on muscle relaxers, I’m all the way over heah. Already.

Last night I watched a Robert Redford stunt pilot movie set in the 1920’s. Redford, now there’s a man of passions. My wife once met him when she was five years old. My wife has relatives that used to live in the apartment next to his. Liz n’ Red were introduced in the hall. He was very kind, she said.

Liz and I also met Ethan Hawke last week. What a guy. We were at a party together. It must be a real trade-off, being that famous. He never seemed to get comfortable. But we played guitars with some other people in a circle and he sang a duet with his daughter, which was sweet. I told him that I enjoyed his second novel, which was mostly true. Liz said he was as nice as Redford. This may be true but I seriously doubt he can fly a bi-plane.

Vung Tau

I am not a big fan of pharmaceuticals, but I have made an exception on this occasion. Which alters the playing field a bit. I think it was the phrase ‘pinched nerve’ that sent me over the chemical precipice. And boredom. I have not intentionally ingested any intoxicating substances in over four years, simply because I constantly ask myself, “David- what about this situation makes you not want to be here?” And usually, by the time I get around to answering, I am not really interested in escaping it anymore. But lying in bed alone for most of the day presents a different version of that conundrum. I get tired of answering the question. Pain, blah blah blah. And whump, there it is, and here we are, writing paragraphs about nothing in particular, mostly just to enjoy the segmented pressures and rhythms of a computer keyboard on fingertips.

 It is a gorgeous day in Nashville. We have had a long run of gorgeous days. It is the best Spring I can remember, a Norman Rockwell Spring, a light and pleasurable thing full of sprites and nymphs and freshly cut pineapple juice dripping off nipples.

 Paul Deakin and I began building an awesome fence around my front yard last week. (A mishap with an 80 lb. bag of concrete had a lot to do with my current condition) Paul has soldiered on without me and is making fantastic progress. The fence will be 36 inches high with horizontal slats of 6, 4, and 2 inch widths, arranged in a pattern that implies modernity without looking too pretentious in front of an 80 year-old bungalow. Once the wood dries out I will stain it a dark chestnut. I am completely revamping the landscaping of the front yard, bringing the beds well out into the middle along a border curved like the Cumberland River. I think this will contrast the sharp angles of the fence nicely. The holly bushes I transplanted to the corner seem to have made it through the worst so I think I will counter them with a big winged burning bush in the opposite corner flanked by this particular sedum I found online a couple of months ago but have not been able to locate since. Stan will spend hours prowling the new beds, nose down, pausing occasionally to execute that particular hunch of his before fertilizing, mightily.

 Liz opened a window in the bedroom yesterday and it has made all the difference. I can hear the finches and the cardinals and the reassuring thump of pneumatic nail guns finding their purchase at the construction site a block away. Most of the slats on the blinds are still closed, filtering the Spring; Spring louvered, Spring geometrisized, le d’Angles of Spring. Even though, or perhaps because, the temperature is absolutely perfect, I indulge in hallucinations of hypothesizing in a sweat-soaked bed, perhaps in Marrakesh, or Ho Chi Minh City, the clatter of a town square just below a window ledge over which I can only see endless powdery blue. The ceiling fan spins and wobbles on its arm. A small child knocks tentatively at the door, then enters upon receiving a wary nod. Hesitant, he holds a folded piece of paper towards me. Read it, Harry, I wheeze. He unfolds the parchment. Monsieur Govou, he begins in a tiny voice, we have reason to believe that your true identity has been compromised. There is movement in the corner of my vision: a catch of heron rising against the blue outside the window, then flying off together in the direction of Vung Tau.

Toast

There are a bunch of old jokes that have something to do with being on your back. I think most of them relate to prostitutes. I, having spent all but a few of the past 96 hours on my back, can relate, and find these jokes very funny, although I cannot remember any of them at the moment.

 Dawg, let me tell you, watch out. Past the age of 35, a back injury is just waiting to happen. It’s like you get roughly half your life to enjoy the physical freedoms that you will spend the other half ruminating upon. I don’t believe this is actually a better:worse situation as much as an apple:orange conundrum or, perhaps, a Spike Lee Joint. Like Bruce Hornsby sang, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til you lose it all again, Listen to the mandolin rain, listen to the music aahhh-luh, listen to the tears roll down my face as she turns to go.

 I took up the mandolin when I was 12 or 13, I think. I got into it because of Johnny Marr’s exquisite usage on The Smith’s “Please, Please, Please Let Me, Let Me, Let Me Get What I Want.” It was a real slog at first; the pairs of strings were very close together, pulled to a very high degree of tension. I found the picking style to be next to impossible; in spite of having spent a fair amount of time in my room with a weathered Victoria’s Secret catalogue, I seemed to lack the dexterity in my wrist required to flutter a plectrum across a pair of strings at high speed. Inevitably, REM released their break-through… you know, the one with “Losing My Religion”… which was full of Peter Buck’s rather pedestrian, although highly-effective, mandolineering. Suddenly everybody had a mandolin and was playing it badly, almost as bad as me. What was the point? I went to the pawn shop and traded mine in for a flanger pedal and a weed eater.

 The good thing about back trauma is that it makes you very thankful for the good times: retrieving a magazine from the floor, turning on the water faucet to wet your toothbrush, sitting down on a toilet seat all by yourself. A big part of living life is appreciating life. Sometimes in the morning I remember to do a quick meditation on ten things I am grateful for. This sets my day off in a good direction. Then I go downstairs and make toast.

Diary Of A Song: "Happy Birthday, Marty Ryan"

Diary Of A Song: "Guy On Guy"

Diary Of A Song: "Tell Me What I Gotta Do"

Can We Kick Out The Jam?

Last night I watched Cameron Crowe’s recent biopic Pearl Jam Twenty. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Like many confused young men who came of age in the early nineties, I once endured a phase involving very loud music, marijuana, piercings, cut-off trousers and embarrassingly long, unwashed hair. I had worn out cassettes of Ten, Pearl Jam’s debut, along with Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual De Habitual and Alice in Chains Dirt while delivering boxed lunches in my Honda Civic to the bemused office workers of Nashville. I envied the way Eddie Vedder’s unkempt good looks and soft, stuttering interview style contrasted the spastic maniac he turned into onstage. I could often be found standing on the precipice of something, smoking cigarettes and staring long and hard into the distance between Nashville and the Pacific Northwest.

In 1995, just after the release of Pearl Jam’s third studio album, Vitalogy, I joined a classic pop band that preferred the internal combustion of tight 60’s office wear to the undefined freedom of flannel and cargo pants. I lost interest in Pearl Jam. So did a lot of other people, but Pearl Jam, apparently, didn’t notice.

The single-most remarkable aspect of Twenty is how it illuminates this period of the band’s history. While the film does a fine job of documenting the tragedy of Pearl Jam’s beginnings and the glory of its meteoric rise to the top of the Grunge heap, it really comes alive as the band enters into the wandering years following the end of the Seattle mania. Finding themselves on the long path down from of selling millions upon millions of albums, conquering the largest venues in the world and having an unfathomable amount of money to show for it, the band ran up against the eternal question that eventually plagues all of us: What’s the point?

Most of us feel like we never get the recognition we deserve for the work that we do. Whether we are mechanics, stay-at-home mothers, accountants or singer/songwriters, we often find that our work goes relatively unnoticed, seems to be taken for granted and never really brings the approval or acclaim we are hoping it will. This frustration blurs our focus and, occasionally, makes us wonder why we even bother.

Pearl Jam, in spite of garnering more accolades, adoration and rewards than most of us could ever imagine, faced a similar crisis of motivation, albeit for slightly different reasons: The amount of praise they had received was so great that none of it felt very real. It didn’t even seem related to the work they were doing anymore. Think about it from Eddie Vedder’s perspective: When you perform in a coffee house, you can see the crow’s feet around the eyes of the women in the back row; in a stadium, you need glasses to read the signs held by the kids in the first row behind the crowd barricades.

But Pearl Jam didn’t quit; they tightened their focus. They dove into their work and the community that had built up around it, releasing a series of albums that struggled commercially but let their fans know that they weren’t going anywhere, that they were trying to make sense of everything, that they still wanted to produce something new and exciting. They began documenting all of their shows for their fans instead of releasing a single live album that might document them at their ‘best.’ Instead of kicking back and stroking each other’s egos, they turned all of their energy outward towards their fans. While remaining one of the biggest bands in the world, they somehow managed to create a real intimacy between themselves and the people who loved their music. They recognized that the band was not the point; the process was the point. Everything became about the experience of experiencing Pearl Jam. Everything became about the present moment.

I still don’t really care for much of Pearl Jam’s music. But I am very inspired by and slightly in awe of the way they have gone about making it. With the exception of U2, I can’t really think of a band that has been around for over two decades without graduating into the goofy realm of nostalgia acts. It’s easy to ruminate on the glory days, but life is about what we are doing now, what we are creating in this moment. Our bodies will eventually wear out, but we will never get old if we can just stay focused on today.

Oh, Oooooh, I’m still alive. Yay-yay-yay-yay-yeah.

Diary Of A Song: "King Of The Crosswords"

Diary Of A Song: "I Can't Wait"

0 Days to Dudes: Le Dudes Est Arrivé!

Yesterday I returned from an 11-day jaunt through Europe as the support act for Fountains of Wayne. I played eight shows in six countries in four different linguistic regions (well, six if you throw Gaelic and Glaswegian English into the mix). The tour came about very suddenly, a by-product of having been provided a plane ticket (courtesy of Kickstarter patron David Morrison, for whom I played a house concert in Glasgow Nov. 12) and being tipped off by another Kickstarter friend (Ken Simpson) that my old buddies FOW just happened to be touring Europe around the same time. The entire thing fell together in such a serendipitous way that, in spite of occurring over the final weeks leading up to the US release of Dudes, I had to do it.

I normally spend the final weeks leading up to an album release buzzing around my house like a ferret with a big smear of peanut butter over its nose, so it was a little odd to be spending the release countdown thousands of miles away from the heart of the action. But the experience made me realize that the ‘heart of the action’ around Dudes is not, and has never been, in Nashville at all. From its inception, the energy around the album has been generated from enthusiasm and support that has come in from all over the world. From its financing to its recording to its current position at #9 on the ITunes singer/songwriter chart (Go team!!!), Dudes has grown because of the community around it, not me.

It is a supremely lucky thing to be able to have anyone actually hear and react to the music you make. There are many people in the world far more talented than I who never get this opportunity. I used to think that I and the music were the determining factors in this equation, but I have finally learned otherwise: The music is important, but your experience with the music is what really determines its value. My experience with the songs on Dudes has already changed dramatically; for example, it’s funny how different ‘Bocce Ball’ feels when performed in Madrid as opposed to Dublin. I expect these metamorphoses will continue to occur for me and hope that they will for you. The best I can hope for is that your experiences with Dudes are simply real.

Thank you all very much for participating in the process up to this point. The proverbial cat is now out of the bag. Who knows what happens from here? Thankfully, the fate of Dudes is in your hands now: Every five-star review, radio broadcast and late-night television performance in the world will never rival the importance of one friend simply telling another that a piece of music really meant something to them. If Dudes serves no other purpose than to initiate a bunch of good conversations between people who care about each other, then it has been successful. As my new friends in Belgium might say:

“Vous avez de DUDES!”

1 Day To Dudes: "Dudes"

About a year ago I started a weekly gathering called Dudes Coffee. I figured that my friends and I had attained the appropriate age to justify a weekly gathering dedicated to discussion, some catch-up and a little bit of grumbling. I set a time and place, wrote up an email and sent it out to all of my male friends.

The word on the street is that men, for the first time in a long time, are having it hard. Construction, manufacturing and high finance, the worst hit industries of the Recession, are decidedly male-dominated. These jobs probably won’t ever return in their pre-Recession numbers. This news comes along with the revelation that this year, for the first time ever, women hold the majority of American jobs. To add insult to injury, America is laughing about the whole situation: Just turn on your television and start counting the commercials featuring some sharp-as-a-tack wife besting a clueless, overweight husband in a decision regarding which product to buy next for the family.

Maybe we had it coming. No one could argue that men, in spite of some pretty brilliant moments, haven’t made a lot of pretty dumb-ass moves in the past 100 years. Some serious gender equality was inevitable and should be welcomed. But men seem to be having a difficult time adjusting to their new status. Guys are great at popping beers and celebrating when things are going great; they’re even capable of some back slaps and words of encouragement when things go to hell. But, finding themselves stuck behind the proverbial eight ball, men seem to be faltering.

A lot of guys just don’t have enough back-up. Men are not nearly as talented at building the networks of friends that women seem to accumulate as easily as breathing. Women generally have little problem expressing their emotions; it bonds them on a level that most men never experience.

Now seems like a good time for men to drop the macho façades and start embracing reality. It is time for us to lose the egos and make an honest evaluation of our lives for each other. Our wives and girlfriends will only understand so much, and mama is not coming over to make it all better anytime soon. It takes a brave fellow to admit that he has no idea what the fuck he’s doing, but there is a lot of freedom in that admission. It’s a starting point.

Dudes Coffee has evolved into a small but battle-hardened group of guys ranging in age from 31 to 60. We have different jobs, different marital statuses and different sexual preferences. With some practice, we have reached a point of not being as concerned with the group opinion of our lives as much as the fact that there is a group of fellows who care enough to have an opinion at all. The gathering has had a profound effect on my life. As my buddy Marty Ryan once said, “You have guys in your life that are, like, friends. Then there are guys who are dudes.”
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2 Days To Dudes: "I Can't Wait"

When I was a kid, I loved reading the Choose Your Own Adventure books. They books were the literary equivalent of a maze, novels that let the reader decide what the main character’s next move would be and then provided multiple endings that corresponded to the reader’s choice. The books were (and probably still are) enormously popular with children, which is no surprise since children generally don’t feel like they have much control over their lives.

When we are young, we dream of the day when we’ll be old enough to determine our own fate, to make our own way in the world, to seize days, to move mountains. But as we get older we begin to realize that, whether we want to admit it or not, the Universe does not revolve around us and is infinitely larger than our wishes and desires for it. We suddenly get a very real sense of our own insignificance and mortality. We think about the idealism of our youth and see that it was usually more a badge of identity than an actual intention. We look forward to our old age and see nothing, nothing except the examples our elders have set for us.

There are two logical paths forward from this point: Suicide or Acceptance. The first is obviously a quick, simple and relatively boring solution. The second probably takes more than a lifetime to truly achieve.

I used to think acceptance was the same as ‘settling for,’ i.e. giving up. But acceptance is simply acknowledging that you have very little control over things. You can plan, create, make goals, network, achieve, etc. as much as you want, but you will never really know what the outcome of any of these activities is going to be. You’ll never know what they mean to you until they mean something to you. It’s all up for grabs.

I once attempted to control my world through a lot of different means: creativity, exercise, eating, planning, drinking… let’s take drinking, for example. When I started drinking in my late teens, I thought I was expanding the boundaries of my mind, breaking down inhibitions, opening myself up to new possibilities. And I probably was, at first. But when I found myself still abusing alcohol in my mid-thirties, it finally occurred to me that there was no more mind expansion going on, that, in fact, I was merely repeating a behavior because it was familiar and it gave me a sense of control over my environment. Getting loaded was as sensible for me as creating a revenue report would be for an accountant. I drank because I couldn’t accept that I ultimately had no control over my life.

I used to wake up and be immediately gripped with worry and fear about how I was going to control the day, which was quickly followed by shame and guilt about the fact that I would, most likely, fuck it up. I am done with that shit. The idea of not having control is frightening, but it is where the real adventure begins. “I Can’t Wait” was meant to be an acknowledgement of the fact that every day is a story, one that we are not writing. In real life, you don’t have to choose your own adventure; just jump headfirst into the one you get handed every morning.

4 Days To Dudes: "Twenty Girls Ago"

I spent a lot of 2007 on the road, playing keyboard in my friend Emerson Hart’s band. One day we pulled into Albany for a radio show at the Palace Theatre. Upon arriving for sound check, we met our opening act, an up-and-coming singer/songwriter named Ingrid Michaelson. Ingrid and I struck up a quick friendship that would blossom through the Autumn months, mostly via late night instant messaging sessions from hotel rooms in disparate locales all over the country. The nights were always bad for me, blurry drunk anonymous hours that felt lost forever until Ingrid would pop up on the computer screen with some smart-ass remark. She got me laughing at my sorry predicament, made me laugh about feeling so sorry for myself. She made me want to hit back, to start moving forward. She was the funniest girl I had ever met.

Ingrid invited me to her family’s Christmas Eve party on Staten Island that year. I baked an apple cake, fired up the Honda and set out towards the Verrazano Bridge. Her family’s three-story Victorian was wrapped in blinking lights and pine boughs. A Christmas tree glowed in the bay window and revelers overflowed onto the front porch. Inside, the house was crowded with family and friends in various combinations of brightly-colored sweaters. The whole place smelled of apples and mulled wine. One man wore a reindeer hat.

Later in the evening, Ingrid’s father began playing carols at the piano. A group of sweaters gathered around and began singing along. They were really enjoying themselves. Ingrid beckoned me to join them, but I couldn’t. It was all like a Norman Rockwell cartoon. Or a scene in a snow globe, one that I happened to be outside of.

Over the next few months, Ingrid and I lost touch. I moved back to Nashville and she got very busy. I haven’t spoken to her in years, but I sometimes I think about her Christmas party, the sentimental swirl of holiday music, the warmth of family and how wonderful and frightening it all was. It was, and it mattered. I have since learned to never miss an opportunity to lock arms with people, to sing around a piano, to be in the cartoon.

To wear the reindeer hat.

There was a sparkle and lightness to Ingrid; she was the kind of girl who knew how to throw a Christmas party.
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5 Days To Dudes: "Last Train Home"

Bill and I wrote “Last Train Home” after he returned from a visit to his parents’ house in New Jersey. He showed me the first verse of the lyric at his piano one day and I got the basic layout of the music pretty quickly. It was good. I assumed the lyric was a nice reminiscence about two lovers spending a day in the city but, as we began honing the individual lines, Bill sheepishly confessed that the song was actually about being on the train back from Manhattan with his mother. During the ride she had fallen asleep against the window. The fluorescent lighting cast a certain pallor on her face, and Bill was hit with the realization that, someday in the not-too-distant future, she would be gone.

I love it when a song begins to feel like it matters, like there is no longer an option to not write it. After Bill revealed the true intention behind his lyric, we couldn’t just make it another cute nostalgic ditty about young love. It had to be more immediate, more relevant. Approaching “Last Train Home” as a history of a mother and son’s relationship moved the song out of the past and into the present tense. Everyone’s parents die. I had barely processed my own feelings about it; suddenly I needed to write the song as much as Bill did.

This all had a huge effect on how I would later approach writing the songs for Dudes. It showed me that, by getting more detailed and specific about an experience, it was possible to actually expand the possibilities for emotions a listener might experience with the song. If “Last Train Home” had been written as a simple love song, it would have only resonated on one level. But because it stayed true to the specifics of Bill’s experience, it became a love song, a memoir, a tribute and a rather comforting dirge, among other things. To wit: ABC eventually used the song in one of its programs, specifically in a sequence featuring people arguing and then ending up in bed together. Go figure.

I don’t claim to understand how all of these interpretations connect. I don’t really want to understand it; as a songwriter, it’s not my job. If I put something into the world that is honest, it will most likely attract honest responses. This is all I can hope for. This is success.