Weeknotes: May 13-17, 2024
Monday, May 13
In my dream I'm on stage with State Park. Matt grabs an oversized megaphone and takes it over to his mic where he uncharacteristically adds blaring vocals to our song "Witches," then misses his horn cue at the end. After it's over we calmly discuss it for a minute as the crowd grows restless. Sensing this, I get on the mic and try to recover with some stage banter: "We were just making some notes. You guys like notes? I write tons of notes every day…"
After work I drive to Lowe's to buy one more 2"x8"x8' for a pair of Leopold benches I'm building. "Measure twice, cut once" is the old adage, but I fucked up one of the larger pieces on my first bench and now I have to buy another eight feet of lumber to gain the 33 extra inches I need for the second one. My versatile little Hyundai has transported plenty of lumber, but today a freak shift causes the board to bounce up off the dashboard and crack my windshield. The cost of this second bench just went up by several hundred dollars. It's a setback that would have sunk my mood most days, but the weather has been so nice and I'm enjoying my spring projects. I shrug it off and go home to set up my tools. I’ll sort the windshield out later.
Tuesday, May 14
Today is the staff welcome event at our new office space near Briarwood Mall. Compared to the previous office, the new suite is quite snug and still feels a little "in progress," though it's apparent to me how much work they've already done to get us up and running here. I can't get the workstation monitor or keyboard to connect to my laptop, so I just open it up and work distractedly for a while over celebratory bagels and light socializing. The building’s atrium has a small decorative indoor garden and gives off the familiar odor of dentistry, though I don't see any dentists in the directory. My dad used to have an office below a dentist and I loved visiting him when I was younger. It was the first time I had access to a photocopier and I was mesmerized by it. I made my first tape cover mock-ups and gig posters on that machine. Despite all the oral traumas of adulthood, I still find "dentist office" to be a calming scent. The power of nostalgia.
My parents visit me in the late afternoon and my mom helps identify all the lovely perennials that have popped up around my old house. The gigantic pink beared irises were a nice surprise. They must have come up last spring, though I don’t remember them. I was busy launching my new album a year ago and pretty distracted. Maybe I didn’t make time for the irises.
My mom brings me a collection of tiny colored glass vases she's had since the '70s and my heart leaps. During this fading lilac season I've been wanting to find a set of these exact vases and suddenly here they are with a family history and a few slices of banana bread.
Wednesday, May 16
Another dream, this time about herding cats (it can be done). Along with my estranged feline sons Esteban and Briggs is a third cat I don't know in waking life, but am familiar with in this dream. I'm delighted that they have found their way to my house and relieved to get them safely inside. I line them up three-cats-thick and wrap my arms around the furry bundle in a warm embrace.
Later that morning I get a message from K that Esteban and Briggs, brothers for nine years, are in conflict. It's been an ongoing problem since Briggs was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism, though I thought it had mostly leveled itself out after we got him started on medication. I feel maudlin all day.
Thursday, May 16
I spend the morning writing about Erlend Øye's new La Comitiva record which is very tranquil and pleasing. I first heard his calming voice on Röyksopp's 2001 masterpiece Melody A.M. and mostly associated him with electronic music until I heard his indie pop band Kings of Convenience. On this record Øye (a Norwegian) sings in Italian and plays bossa nova-tinged chamber pop on ukulele. It's nice.
I feed Islay her dinner around 4PM and she immediately barfs it all up before I’m able to usher her out the back door. A lot of pet drama this week. I sit with her for an hour on the bed until she decides she wants to try again, this time with success. It's about an hour until band practice and I lay in my hammock, decompressing and reading from a book of Lydia Tomkiw poems. My friend Shep published a definitive anthology from this underrated Chicago poet in 2020, 13 years after her death. Tomkiw was the frontwoman for the post-punk band Algebra Suicide and her written work has an energizing snap to it. Her poems are playful, surreal, sexy, and full of noisy life. She plays with language in a way that never fails to delight me.
Friday, May 17
I practice standing up now. I never used to do that, but since I don’t sit at my gigs, why rehearse that way? I walk from room to room with my guitar, singing with the windows open, the ambivalent neighborhood my audience. I'm playing a rare daytime solo show tomorrow at a new art festival at my local brewery. It’s so close I could walk to the show and if I don’t bring too much gear, maybe I will. I expect it to be a fun, but low-stakes gig played mostly to passing browsers, so I'm experimenting by adding a lot of new material. Even though I still forget my lyrics all the time on stage, playing a new song at least once in a live setting usually cements it in my memory enough that it becomes easier to play after that. This show seems like a good way to workshop new songs and get them settled before singing them in a more intimate listening venue which I'll be doing over the summer.