So… go to the Come To My Town page or Contact Me to sign up now!

Anyhoo, we’re in biz. Six concerts.

• 06/28 Long Island, NY
• 07/13 Mobile, AL
• 07/19 Baltimore, MD
• 08/02 Madison, WI
• 08/10 Santa Fe, NM
• 08/17 Vancouver, BC

Each venue has a limited amount of space. I’m not offering more tickets for a couple of weeks to see how many more people we can fit in. When I know what we’ve got to work with, I’ll activate the Buy Tickets button with more specifics.

Like I’ve been saying, we’ll see how these go and if we’re all happy with the results, we’ll do something more suuuubstantial in the autumn.

For now, I wanna thank en masse everyone I’m trying to thank privately: you guys rock. I look forward to seeing you all again.

Soon.

The words ‘When Donny was in his prime…’ was the very first germ of the idea. Everything sprang from that. The singer is Eddie Powell, a black man from rural South Carolina. I actually have a vivid memory of Eddie as a child as in real life he was both grandparents’ and my parents’ handyman. I always got the impression that he was always quietly observing everything with a laugh. I don’t recall his voice, so much as his look and manner. He had a face as black as the first Africans and as deeply lined as an old baseball glove. So when he laughed, the bright light from his teeth on a summer’s day was a fascinating contrast. I was not consciously emulating anything. But when I cam up with that line, that was the voice I heard—and it was Eddie singing.

I now have the notion that on some subconscious level it was probably me channeling Robert Plant channeling Sonny Boy Williamson. Which is a hard thing to admit, but as a six year old, that’s my cartoonish memory of the only black American I’d yet encountered.

I Am So Mean To You Guys

I throw stuff up here. I do things to the code without checking whether they work in IE. Because I hate Internet Explorer. Even though something like half of all computers still use IE. And then I wonder why I’m not reaching more new people. I’ll try to do better. Really.

I gotta say I started tearing up a bit when I open up the site and looked at the responses Sunday morning. Wow. A real Sally Field moment. Then I realised my chronic eye infection’s back.

OK, so far, it looks like we’ve easily got enough interest for half a dozen shows. I don’t wanna push it so I may not get to every city requested, even though there seems to be more than enough demand. What seems to make sense is to determine what routes can reach the most people with the least amount of travel.

How You Can Stack The Deck

One factor is that some venues simply have more space. One thing you can do to put your thumb firmly on the scales of justice would be to help me find a larger place to play! (And if you have a place with a modest little 1,000 square foot great room, you’re probably gonna get priority. )

Next Steps

E-mail ticket forms will go out next week. Please get your reservations back as soon as possible. I’ll have a final schedule in place by St. Pat’s.

Thank You!

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but ironically, I’ve been too busy. As many of you know, I’ve been having quite a time getting my strength back after the last illness. But I now think I have the stamina to take the show back on the road. Or at least, a different kind of show, which I hope you will find equally entertaining.

To get to the point: Please click here if this is of interest so I can get an idea of how to schedule about a dozen shows starting in June 2013. (If you’re unfamiliar with the program—and since it’s been almost five years since I’ve done serious touring that wouldn’t surprise me, let me summarise. Traditionally, I poll interested parties before scheduling a tour and use the responses to plan an itinerary. This is more important now than ever since this is a test of my current energy.)

Some Background

As many of you know, when I first started back in 2000, I had a gig before I had a show. I had never played a solo show in me life. I intentionally played bass throughout university just to get out of being so exposed. So I spent six months that year just learning how to sing and play at the same time. And then how to sing and play at the same time for two hours. Honestly, I’ve never worked that physically hard before. Flash forward to last summer. In quite a chickenshit manner, I began doing ‘anonymous’ shows at a few local clubs which have been gracious enough to give me the time to try, fail and try again. Gradually, I’ve been adding material and seeing what I can manage energy-wise. This is sort of how comedians ‘build an act’ except for the odd (and freeing) fact that I just don’t care what the audience thinks at these little test drives. And that’s a good thing because they’re expecting ‘light jazz’ or ‘singer-songwriter Americana’ and all of a sudden a Mellotron roars to life. If I had tried out in front of people I care about, dear readers, I would’ve been far too fraught what with all the technical issues.

Can An Irish Boy Learn To Play With Himself

The new show is my first acceptance of automation. But frankly, I still don’t have the vim to sing and flail away for two hours. (I used to lose a couple of pounds of sweat during every show. Perhaps that’s why I never got too many aftershow invites.)

So I thought I could do a show around a keyboard. Sit down. Take it easy. And the portable way to do so was to bring a laptop to the club. And then I set up little buttons to change sounds between songs. And then during songs. And then… well, that started me down the slippery slope towards ‘sequencing.’

It’s taken me a long time to figure out how to arrange the material so that I can ‘play’ the songs and not just ‘hit play.’ So as with my earlier solo guitar shows, the songs you hear will be almost new.

I can only tell you the level of rationalisation and hypocrisy that I have decided I can live with. I’ve re-arranged the songs I will be doing in the following way: No backing audio or solos. I can’t stomach hearing backing voices or screaming guitars coming from nowhere. And no intros or outros from nowhere either. I have this recurring nightmare of watching a hapless keyboardist at the Ramada Airport Inn. As each song begins and ends, the start/stop foot pedal for the drum machine malfunctions. Hilarity ensues. So whatever backing sounds are there begin and end with me playing and singing. One hopes the net effect of all this will be somewhat like that world famous Shiny Penny Trick.

Looking forward to seeing you again, friends both old and new.

New Song—A bit of Irish rock guitar.

March To War—A brass fanfare sure to get your attention.

And I just wanted to remind everyone that iPhone versions of all the ringtones are available there as well (no more hassle going through iTunes.)

This is from Act II. The son has returned from WW II and is obviously depressed. Father meets him at a local bar and encourages him to snap out of his depression. Thinking to commiserate, he recounts his own suffering upon first coming to America. He then reveals that he has a ready-made business opportunity to share with him. Instead of being excited, the son explodes with anger. Father is clueless and turns away in horror. He now realizes just how truly damaged his son really is.

A bit of history., The Golden Age Of Radio of course had the most amazingly creative people. But they were somewhat held back by the limited bandwidth of AM radio and ‘mono’ recordings.

I credit two people in the late 1950′s for making Radiolab possible.

Ken Nordine was a voice you’ve undoubtedly heard hundreds of times. Even after his passing, his voice is so iconic you’ll come across it quite often. He was the voice of hundreds of commercials from Levi’s to.

Pianist Glenn Gould was the first well-known artist to experiment with what we would now call ‘stereo sound design’. He started hearing ‘music’ in the conversations and sounds all around him—the natural ambience of background chat. He began to think that music could be composed from such soundscapes. His recordings The Idea Of North are the wellspring for everyone from Brian Eno on forward.

(Interesting side note: Both Gould and Miles Davis were recording at the same studios for CBS in the early 1960′s. Davis was well-known as the first major jazz musician to incorporate edited ‘tracks’ into his recordings. It would be fascinating to learn how much Davis was influenced by Gould’s techniques.)

Radiolab is hosted by Macarthur Award Winner and producer Jad Ablumrod and NPR science mainstay Robert Krulwich. Each week they follow a ‘theme’ idea of some ‘sciency’ topic. The conceit is that they appear to be chatting and telling each some interesting tidbit to explain an idea. They cross fade into interviews with various experts.

What makes the show ‘special’ is that they use many more simultaneous tracks than is normal for radio. Instead of conversation or sound clips with perhaps a single bed of music or FX, a Radiolab moment may have a dozen bits of sounds playing at the same time; moving left and right, front and back, the same way a movie director moves the camera and changes shots during a scene. Sometimes they zoom in and then sometimes they’ll zoom out.

And because of this, Radiolab just wouldn’t work in mono. And it wouldn’t work with a more conventional format. In other words, it is idiomatic, not a gimmick, to paraphrase McLuhan, the medium is the message. Since there is no video, they perform an admirable jujitsu: you focus on far more complex layers of sound because you’re not distracted by visuals.

In short, these two have figured out a way to use radio to its full extent, to deliver ‘content’ that is completely fresh and compelling.

I salute Radiolab especially because they found a way to take radio to a genuinely new place (building on their forebears of course) in a time when all things seem to have gone ‘video’ and ‘shortform’. In a world where everyone is now expected to have a short attention span, Radiolab keeps listeners of all ages engaged for a full hour; not with tricks or shock, but with really entertaining descriptions of questions we all think about.

In writing music, I have always been fascinated by the ‘conversations’ that occur between the various instruments and parts in a good piece of music. Glenn Gould and Ken Nordine were the first to explore the literally relationships between ‘music’ and ‘conversation’ (the musical quality of conversation or the conversational quality of music?)

Radiolab, with innovative sound design which is an integral part of its structure takes this idea to the next level. And in so doing, makes a basically ‘info-tainment’ show not only more informative but more entertaining. It’s a real synergy where the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.