Grave won't carry me yet.
So now always feels like the future, and that I'm behind.
For the cults, there's still two years until the Mayan new jerusalem. So now I need to either get on that bandwagon, or quit talking about it at parties when I'm stoned.
Recently I've been playing a lot of shows. Shows I've been asked to play. It's the first time this has ever happened regularly, so for that, I'm grateful. Shows are something I nearly always do when someone asks. It's usually what keeps me on track.
Also, I'm working on demos that I plan to use for a recording project with The Great White Jenkins, whom I consider my friends, and all around best band. They'd make a great best man at a wedding. My wedding of bands. I'm going to Richmond for a long week at the end of February. There I hope to accomplish at least the bones of a record.
My van was broken but now it's fixed. The days are getting longer. There's more time to play. Mama's home from trucking, and she's gonna clean good. Papa's cooking breakfast for the whole family. He's smiling again, we're in love again. We're gonna be alright.
here's a song my friend Harry wrote when a girl painted his Ukulele.
It's the only song I've ever heard him write.
I've just returned from China after three weeks of jumping around with Kai Welch and Abigail Washburn. I saw many old friends, and made many new ones. Filled the batteries on Chinese, so to speak.
Well, After all this time learning to love impatience and things that were incomplete, I now need to get used to my life all over again.
Yep. I finished my E.P. One and a half years in the making.
I moved to Nashville almost two years ago with an non-acute music condition. I think it was a common one.
But after deciding that the anxiety of growing old and not being appreciated was actually a sick hamster in my bowels that only scurries once you're near enough to Davidson County, I, just like Billy Joel, drank just enough furniture polish to kill it off.
I think John Hartford put it well once time, but I can't find the quote anywhere.
I think it was something about the good thing that happens to you in music city after you either quit playing the game, or after it beats you. You realize, well damn. There's a lot of good musicians in this town. A lot of nice, talented people. So, go out there and enjoy their company, their ideas, and their music.
John probably said that in about ten words.
I'm not yet humble, though. I'd just rather be. The thing is, learning to quit worrying and love the bomb is a full time job.
Back on track. This E.P.
It started in May 2007 as a three song demo for a band I'd put together called "Elephant Gun" to get shows around town. Miles Price, Dabney, and I tracked them in the living room of 1116 Sigler St. Some songs I'd written while in China. Miles and I kept adding overdubs and overdubs until the songs were a thick, gooey paste of Folky Noise.
The songs got thicker, and time stretched into months, just as everyone's dedication to "Elephant Gun" wiggled loose.
Then my friend Kevin Dailey intervened one Sunday afternoon in October after I'd talked him into tracking an acoustic song in the studio where he worked.
His opinion on that tune led him to offer his time to re-mix those demos on the nice, analog, studio board.
Another month went by. Then half of one. When we went finally went in one evening to mix, we were killed by technical difficulties. Two weeks later, another fluke evening of bad technology. On our third evening, with the songs successfully on the board at appropriate levels, Kevin still shook his head.
"You need to retrack these," he said.
By then, I was having convulsions thinking about the project. Like a doctor telling you that your lover, who you thought just needed a few more weeks of Chemo, is unfortunately dead, but if you get him a good photo, he be happy to build you a new one.
"It will be so much better," he said.
I was holding on a bit selfishly, as if this project were the reason my twenties were slipping away, and told him I'd think about it, not realizing what he'd just offered me.
Two days later, he invited me to the studio and another good friend of mine, Paul Padgett was there. I don't remember the specific conversations that went on between the three of us, but nothing went on that was unlike handbook AA intervention.
In the end, with their assurance, we trashed two of the three songs and decided to add at least two more to the roster, including one song I'd recorded in an abandoned trailer, secretly, while at work. We presumed at most, we were only adding a couple more months onto the project.
That was in mid November, 2007. On Wednesday Nov. 12th 2008, Kevin and I enjoyed a glass of wine while burning a copy of the final Mastered tracks. Not a second sooner than it should have been.
So here we are. I learned the value of patience. I finished a record.
Finished on my own terms, but with the tireless help of a list of people so long, I'm not yet ready to jump into. So it's not my album. It's me, and a whole bunch of people that I guess saw something in my large eyes when I asked them to help, because they helped with the pure, clear intentions found in the cold, driven snow. That and countless cigarettes and whiskeys on ice. Still.
In this case, this, it, and we shall be called:
James Wallace and the Naked Light .
