Are You Lonely Tonight, Mrs. Claus? - new song

Happy holidays! I've made a new recording of a new song, "Are You Lonely Tonight, Mrs. Claus?" I used my rapidograph pen to make some illustrations and write out some of the lyrics, thus this Youtube video. I hope you all have a happy holiday season and a beautiful 2011. If you like this, please send a link to your friends.



See you in the new year with new songs and more shows!

Peace
Dan

Trampolining

Scene on trampoline: Dad, highly cautious, aware of risk, bouncing while attempting to encourage/manage fun of: physically disabled 13-year-old, highly cautious, somewhat wobbly, tentatively having fun whilst hyper-aware of: jumping-bean-like 3-year-old careening wildly beneath & among knees of the first two. Yes, pigpile ensues, some tears, full recovery.

The Numbers Don't Make Sense

The numbers don't make sense. That's one reason life seems so frightening in a media-drenched world. We see a clip on Youtube reflecting one crazy incident and because none of us can really understand the concept of "one in 250 million" we naturally think that this disturbing stuff is happening all the time everywhere. Fear and anxiety are viral. Evolution has gifted us with a vigilant nature always on the jumpy lookout for sabre-tooth tigers. Thus the ease with which the media corporations keep us jumping.

Please continue working on ways to make peace and love more viral. :)

Lately

I've been posting a lot on Facebook and Twitter lately (for 6 months) because my website is in the middle of a redesign. Well, if it's a middle, it's a long middle. The new website is a kind of blog design but I had a "big idea" for how to make it an interesting and simple site, and of course this big idea has caused the process to go long. I'm hoping it serves me and everyone else well!

But meanwhile, I keep thinking, "Oh, I'll get back onto my blog when my new website is finally up." Thus the long delay between recent posts.

I call this "standing in my own way," and I do it once in a while. I experienced it profoundly a few years ago when my "Free Life" album was done and ready to be released and then got delayed over and over by the business machinations which moved my label from one parent company (Universal) to another (Warner Bros) to another (Sony.) During that time, I stopped writing new songs for myself to sing for about a year and a half, somehow thinking that the about-to-be-released "Free Life" needed to come out before I resumed my songwriting. It was as though "Free Life" was in front of me in line at the airport and kept needing to send its bags and clothes through the metal detector, and I waited politely rather than realizing I could just walk past.

Anyway, despite my non-blogging, I have dropped that bad habit for now in my songwriting, and am in a great flow of ideas and melodies for my second solo jam. Many tracks are recorded. I'm using a crazy-making method of playing all the instruments myself, and having all the band discussions and arguments alone. I'll put some of the songs up when they're ready, I'd like to share them in advance of the record's eventual release. And by the way, the new website looks good and when the design issues are 90% fixed, we'll put it up.

The recent Semisonic shows in Minneapolis and Denver were really inspiring and fun. I hope we get together again soon.

Storyhill Album "Shade of the Trees"

Okay, I am going to semi-toot my own horn briefly and say I love listening to the recently-released Storyhill album I produced, "Shade of the Trees," as much as anything I've ever worked on. Maybe because it gives the impression of "just happening," and not being worked on at all. Maybe it's got my fingerprints all over it, but if so, I don't see them. The guys in the band, John Hermanson and Chris Cunningham, challenged me to help them make the most stripped-down and intimate document of their music yet, and the plan we came up with was utterly minimal - just the two of them, live in studio, no overdubs, both voices singing together with two guitars and sometimes one. My plea to add pump organ was ruthlessly quashed by Johnny. Wisely so.

(So I bought a $50 pump organ and am adding it to all the songs for my new album instead. But that's another story.)

My mental image for the album was to make a super-detailed and painfully intimate record which almost sounds like they opened their laptop, pressed "record" on GarageBand and just started singing. But then secretly if you listened on a real stereo you'd hear the guitars vibrating in the air, you'd hear every bit of drama in the performances, you'd hear what The Postal Service jokingly called "the shrillest highs and lowest lows" in their song "Such Great Heights." Turns out, making a great sounding recording of two guys in a room is not as simple as it sounded. Whew. But we did it, with some serious help from engineer Brad Bivens during the tracking and mastering engineer Richard Dodd. My method in mixing the album: distortion, just beneath the threshold of hearing, applied liberally and with variety.

Okay, here's a link to a performance from the record (yes, we used the performance from this clip on the album, and you can hear filmmaker Tommy Stone's feet creaking on the floorboards more than once,) called "Dangerous Weapon." Eyes closed, inside the song, two voices sounding like one. I love these guys.

Happy Valentines Day and a New Song

Hi All,

Happy Valentines Day!

I've spent most of the winter in Minneapolis, snowed in and writing songs for myself. It had been a hectic and fun two years of touring and collaborating with various brilliant musicians, but the time had come for me to get into my own head, alone, and see what music was there.

I wasn't sure what would happen, but a lot of songs came out.

The recordings I've made so far of these new songs are very simple, usually just voice and guitar, maybe an extra piano or pump organ here and there. Sometimes not. I've done mostly brand new songs and a few from the past year and a half or so.

Here's a clip of one of those songs, "Everything Green." Tommy Stone, a filmmaker from Minneapolis, came to the studio where I work and filmed me recording it. Then he made this.


(Click the image to see the "Everything Green" clip)

I am sending this song to you all as a Valentine's greeting. Maybe you'll want to forward the link to someone you love, someone for whom you wish all good things. I would like it if you did. Please pass it on.

Peace
Dan

Carnegie Hall

Last night played a gig at Carnegie Hall in New York. Zankel Hall is their 600-seat theater and, oh, it sure is pretty. In typical Minnesotan fashion, I did not tell my relatives and friends that I was playing Carnegie Hall, and when some of them learned about the show and mentioned it to me, I made sure to clarify that I wasn't playing in the main hall with the New York Philharmonic, but in Carnegie's smaller performance space.

"What are you talking about? It's Carnegie Hall!" was their response every time. Maybe I can learn someday to drop that habit of backpedaling - why not just allow my friends and relatives to enjoy the moment?

Anyway, when I saw my poster there on the side of the building, underneath the Tiffany-style colored-glass logos, it was my turn to enjoy the moment.

The Carnegie show felt like an extension of the Hometown Tour I did here in Minneapolis a few weeks ago: easy-flowing, open, free-associative. That tour put a whole new batch of my older songs and also a couple of new ones at my fingertips: "Act Naturally," "FNT," "Something I Don't Know" among them. So I had lots of music to choose from last night, and I took advantage of that. Playing the amazing piano there also made me want to do more shows playing piano. I'm not sure how that would go but I think it would be interesting and I could improvise a lot more.

Brad Gordon, a multi-instrumentalist friend of mine, flew in from Los Angeles to play piano with me during the songs on which I played guitar. (And Brad played the clarinet on "Baby Doll.") I met Brad in 2008 on the Hotel Cafe tour, one of the more formative experiences I've had in a while, and by the end of that tour he and I had pretty much established a very nice blood-brother type of e.s.p. when we jammed together. Brad just plain plays the piano like a more skilled version of me. So of course I like performing with him.

At Zankel Hall last night, I shared the bill with Cory Chisel, who is a gravelly-voiced singer/songwriter from Appleton, Wisconsin, and with whom I had written a couple of songs maybe a year ago. He's an amazing singer, able to channel the spirits of Otis Redding, Bob Dylan or Ray Charles. We wrote together in Graham Nash's house, which could only have been more surreal and glorious if Graham Nash were home. As it was, he was not, but it was still a memorable time. At one point, Cory initiated me into his theory of Bob Dylan's vocal phrasing and how it changes from one period to another in Dylan's career. I wish I had recorded Cory's holding-forth - he can switch back from one era of Dylan to another, freestyling lyrics in the voice of each era. I laughed a lot. Inspired by Cory's outpouring of mojo, we wrote a bluesy and Dylanesque song called "Never Meant to Love You," which I adore.

At the end of my set, Cory and his singing partner, Adriel Harris, joined me onstage and we performed "Never Meant to Love You" and, if my experience is any indication (doubtful but possible), it was beautiful.

On my way out the door of the venue, one of the staffers considerately handed me the "three sheet" poster for the show. These are the giant posters, about 40" by 80", that they put up on the side of the building or on the wooden walls of construction sites and abandoned lots. After a brief moment of excitement, I immediately began fretting about how impossible it was going to be to get the poster onto my Northwest Airlines flight the next morning.

Then my friends Craig Wright, Jacob Slichter, Gillian Ryan, Steve Schiltz, and Jim Grant, along with Brad Gordon and Cory Chisel and his band and a lot of the audience from Zankel Hall, all went to a way-too-loud bar down the street and had a lot of whiskey.

Even later, Craig and I spent about two hours wandering around Midtown trying to find a sandwich. This kind of late-night search is a common-enough occurence on tour, when it can be very hard to find the one joint in Topeka or Toledo or Tuscaloosa or Toulouse that stays open late. But New York City! What has become of our nation's cultural capitol? Every hotel restaurant and bar seemed to have closed at midnight - the City may never sleep, but they don't stay open that late either. In fact, I'm sure they were wide awake behind their closed doors, eating the sandwiches my friend and I were seeking. In a typical bout of late-night urban aimlessness we took a taxi down to around 52nd and then wandered back uptown from closed cafe to closed restaurant to closed "all-night" diner, until we finally ended up at the Carnegie Deli, ludicrously near where we began.

But when our blintzes and a gigantic American-Tourist-Sized Corned Beef Sandwich arrived at the table, all was forgiven, and we loved New York once again.

Following this mini-adventure and my very short night of sleep (bedeviled as it was by Carnegie-Deli-Corned-Beef-inspired nightmares), I found myself zooming in a taxi through traffickless Queens, enjoying the scenery and wondering who exactly lives on Astoria Blvd., a pre-sprouted gentrification zone if I've ever seen one.

In the trunk, the giant poster; ahead of me, certain confrontation with the employees of Northwest Airlines. They were sure to see this huge roll of paper as a security threat, or worse, the sign of a Minnesotan pumped up with pride, and I could only imagine how crumpled or folded it would be by the time I brought it home. Or perhaps I would be forced to discard it along with the plastic water bottles and hand lotion containers of greater-than-3-ounce capacity which one can often see forlornly piled in the TSA Forbidden Container bin at the airport security checkpoint.

But no! my fears were unfounded. Instead of the old Northwest Airlines "we hate our jobs and so we hate you too" approach, I was treated to the now-famiiar new post-Delta-merger niceness: the crew found a spot in some special secret closet for my poster, and now it's home with me.

But where exactly does a Minnesotan put a gigantic poster advertising his own show at Carnegie Hall?