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Awesome Women, Birthdays, Christine Ohlman - "The Deep End", Concerts 2014, Crescent Ballroom - Dr. Dog, Great Concert Venues, Joan Osborne, John Prine, Memoir, MIM, Red Rocks Amphitheater, Rodney Crowell, Ryan Adams and Jenny Lewis, Steve Earle and Shawn Colvin, Steve Winwood, Stevie Wonder, The Crescent Ballroom, The Hold Steady, The Rhythm Room, The War on Drugs, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
cutting my own groove: distract, deny, and dance away
Life isn’t some vertical or horizontal line — you have your own interior world, and it’s not neat. ~ Patti Smith How do I begin to pack the stuff of the past twelve months in a box and tie it up with a big red bow? Just begin. Pluck out a memory and wrap it up. Move on to the next – in my own time. Shortly after Ken died, I discovered on Christine Ohlman’s beautiful record, “The Deep End,” a song that was then too much for me to listen to, too beautiful, too true – “The Gone of You.” I had forgotten about it until it showed up on my playlist this weekend…
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Aging, Art, Bob Dylan, Daniel Kramer, Dispatch from the Diaspora, It's Not Dark Yet, Michael Gray, Photography, Positively 4th Street, Street Legal, Tangled up in Blue, Where Are You Tonight? Subterranean Homesick Blues
Things aren’t what they were … Happy Birthday Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan has always been almost as old as my parents. He has also always been forever young, staring up at me from the yellowing cover of the book that has graced my coffee table for decades. When was it that a Bob Dylan song first mattered to me? I cant remember. Nor can I remember a time when it didn’t, a time when I wasn’t tangled up in blue. Maybe it was in the Spring of 1979, when my high school English teacher let me borrow his Street Legal LP, an album that was crucified by a handful of critics considered more qualified than the rest of us to measure the success of…
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At home in a song
Over our first few years of singing together, it became our song, a staple in a repertoire of songs into which listeners will stitch their own meaning too.
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put the kettle on: happy mother’s day
One afternoon in the household appliances section of a store in Guadalajara, I paused by an impressive selection of irons before placing one in my grocery cart. Atonement, I suppose for that time in Phoenix when, in an act of mild rebellion, I donated my ironing board to Goodwill. If you’re from a certain time and place in Northern Ireland, you’ll understand this was no small act. I was raised by a mother who ironed everything, including handkerchiefs, socks, and dishcloths. My mother is far away in Castledawson, the village that made her, and it is Mother’s Day there. With all good intentions, I had marked the day on the…
