Why I Won’t be Reading “Go Set a Watchman”
I love Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and have for some decades now, ever since I first read it. What I also love is that Harper Lee knew when to call it a day. Ralph Ellison also wrote one brilliant, landmark novel, Invisible Man, but spent sixty years and the rest of his life generating thousands of […]
Here’s to the State of South Carolina
I have too many thoughts about the white supremacist terror attack at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, to get them down in any coherent way, and besides, Jon Stewart said it right, anyway. He also said that he knows the country well enough to know it’s not going to actually do anything […]
Why Folk Pop Made Me Sad
I think the strange folk pop revival we recently experienced, with its attendant explosion of bowler hats and banjos, is finally a cloud of dust on the far horizon. Mumford and Sons has gone away, the Lumineers still just have the one record (which they apparently have re-released a couple times), Edward Sharpe and the […]
“Margaret” by Jason Webley
There aren’t a ton of artists I’d do this for, but I wanted to take a minute to direct you to Jason Webley’s Kickstarter project for a collaborative project called Margaret. He’s already blown past his funding goal, so this is really just a recommendation that you pitch in now in order to pre-order the album. […]
Nobody Cares What We Think
Yesterday, NPR ran a story that utterly blew my mind. It’s not that the news was bad, or unexpected, but in how cavalierly its contents just pissed all over what most people think it means to be a democracy. The story was about the 1 million+ comments the FCC received concerning the proposed dismantling of […]
Always Look on the Bright Side of Life
The news is bad this week. Very bad and depressing. So I figured we could all use this: “Some things in life are bad They can really make you mad Other things just make you swear and curse When you’re chewing on life’s gristle Don’t grumble, give a whistle And this’ll help things turn out […]
Election Night Sounds Like America
On Election Night, I was asked to go sing some songs down at the M Bar in Hollywood. For some reason, as the day got closer, I started thinking I wanted to play a lot of cover songs. I don’t usually. But as I rehearsed, I kept coming back to the idea that there probably […]
Voting the NPR All-Morning Edition Ticket
As I mentioned in my last post about our new song “Just to Win the Fight,” I’m a news junkie, but don’t care much for politics, so that has made this election year a difficult one for me. I made the comment to my wife, half-jokingly, that I wished Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne from NPR […]
“This Machine Kills Fascists”
As I’m slowly writing songs for a new album, other outlets seem to be popping up, like the Walk a Mile campaign back in July we were asked to participate in. And last week I recorded a new song, called “Just to Win the Fight,” that I felt would be better off heading out into […]
40 Years of Fear and Loathing
Forty years ago this election cycle, Hunter S. Thompson was embedded with the George McGovern campaign, reporting for Rolling Stone on McGovern’s effort to unseat the incumbent Richard Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. Thompson’s writings on the campaign and its aftermath were compiled into the book Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72. […]