This is my third and last post about Montpelier’s flood, the first bonafide federal disaster I’ve ever lived in and witnessed first-hand. Seven weeks later, the flood doesn’t rate the national news anymore. The early, fun photos of drowned streets, the flashy videos on TV, the press clamoring at...
It’s been a month now, and we keep discovering new dimensions of the disaster. We know our flood is not Kyiv under Russian bombardment, nor the Maui fire – but it’s bad. Our hearts go out to the people there with greater understanding. But even as we come back,...
This is my second post about my friend George Winston, pianist, fan, and philanthropist, who died on June 4. Around the time I first met George – 1981 – my little finger was a mess, but I was trying hard to push my playing technique anyway. I wanted to...
I can’t resist writing about Bill Lederer as the first installment of my series on Meetings With Remarkable People. Around 1975, I was living in Plainfield, Vermont, and eking out a living by various means, including teaching classical guitar. It was my first full winter in Vermont — I...
I began this series almost ten years ago, and I have been meaning to update it since moving on to other things. In the intervening time, I have received many comments on various posts, despite the passage of years. Most of these I never got around to publishing, so...
One of the oddities of my life is the enduring interest people express in my long-ago musical career. I still get mail about my records, concerts, guitar pedal-capo, touring with Alex de Grassi and Michael Hedges, and so on. It’s odd because I haven’t recorded or performed in decades....
This is a quick follow-up on the six-foot-tall kite featured in the prior post. Several readers wanted to see the kite itself, but we didn’t take any photos of (as opposed to from) it. Today, however, I discovered that my son Liam had taken a 10-second video of it on his...
This is the fifth post in my creativity series and the last devoted to Dr. Stuart Brown’s ideas on the subject of play. This week, it’s a personal tale of play, with a video to illustrate it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te0kfivkFVY Like too many people my age, I forget to play. Certainly,...
This is my third post about the American finger-style guitarist John Fahey, one of a series I’ve titled Meetings With Remarkable People. After our show at the Great American Music Hall, Fahey was transcendentally drunk, but he managed to make it to the party at my brother Nick’s place...
Every young person needs a madman, a Loki, a Coyote, a misfit to look up to, and John Fahey filled that role for me. Long before I met him and performed with him, I knew from his writings and recordings that he must be a remarkable person. But he was one...