A friend told me about a book he once owned: one-page summaries of different jobs, including three intelligent questions you could ask someone in that line of work. The questions are surprisingly useful, he said, especially in small-talk situations. No bluffing required, no need to draw tenuous connections to your own experience. Just a bit of informed curiosity to set a good conversation in motion.

One question you could ask any working musician is “Do you prefer working in the studio or playing live?” I think all musicians have a preference when it comes to studio vs. live, even if they enjoy both, and will be happy to share their reasons. It goes to the heart of why they play music, the aspects of the art they’re drawn to, their particular identity as a creative person.

For me…I am, at heart, in the studio camp. There’s something thrilling about the process; it’s a kind of hunt, a patient stalking of elusive quarry. You lay out the most enticing environment possible, then wait for the Form of the song to come wandering through. It’s a deliberate, painstaking process, with none of the immediacy of live performance. But the ego tends to disappear more easily too. There’s a purity to nailing a take and having the engineers nod assent: all you get is the taciturn “I think that was it—one more for safety,” instead of the rush of applause and autograph lines. You know you’re doing it for the music and not to impress anybody. You just want the music to be right.

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In keeping with the pattern of the last few posts, lyrics: this song is that great rarity for me, the successful collaboration. Alex and I have tried to write together before, without much luck (both times in family homes over the holidays—we blamed the parental paparazzi). Ironic, maybe, that the one we finally finished is a song about limitations, living with a mere shadow of what used to or might have been.

It was not an easy song to write, nor to record. Alex must have spent four solid days composing the string arrangement; we stayed up all night beforehand double-checking it. “It’s like Sudoku or something,” he would say, eyes bleary from LCD light. “There’s pretty much one correct solution, and each choice affects all choice going forward…” But I think we got it in the end. Nice puzzle-solving, Wong.

Photos from the string sessions are on Eric Cheng’s site. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen: not only does he swim with sharks, he still rocks the cello. Thanks for joining us, Eric!)

Antebellum

In the fall,
we circle through the leaves
and talk about the little ones.
And we smile, but never say too much.
The moment always vanishing.
One by one the neighbors’ lights come on.
Our October day is almost gone.

I know the border lines we drew between us
keep the weapons down,
keep the wounded safe;
I know our antebellum innocence
was never meant to see the light of our armistice day.

In the spring,
we climbed the rolling hills
and talked about our budding plans.
And we smiled,
our faces like a mirror
showing us our secret sides.
But then the fights:
the sharp words splintering the night,
how I couldn’t be what you’d need…
but oh how I could make you bleed—

I know the border lines we drew between us
keep the weapons down,
keep the wounded safe;
I know our antebellum innocence
was never meant to see the light of our armistice.
But how much would I give to have it back again?
How much did we lose
to live this way?

You’ll go home—I’ll stay here—
seasons keep on marching—
I’ll stay here—you’ll go home
with only strangers watching—

No, I can count; yes, it has been over a month since we started. It’s a fits-and-starts recording process. Lots of location scouting, practicing, phone calls and emails in between. Not to mention trips to the bank and crossing fingers that my deposits clear in time.

It’s been a fantastic week: keyboards and one glorious day with a chamber string orchestra, which was preceded by several all-nighters of composing (Alex) and transcribing/editing (me). More thoughts on this whole delirious process when I’m not falling asleep in middle-airplane-seat position.

Here’s lyrics for an album song not yet played live. Haven’t figured out how to make a performance capture the sense of scale required.

Watershed

while you were building your empires
I was still sleeping
I was still sleeping
while you were setting your woods afire
I was still dreaming
I was still dreaming

now I will unsettle the ground beneath you
send my waters ashore
creep into your bed
find you in every corner

while you argue it over
I am not waiting
I am not waiting
while you retreat to your comforts
I am not fading
I am not fading

I’ve done this many times before you
old Shanghai
New Orleans
Amsterdam and Mumbai
strange new creatures
to scavenge your pores
oh I’ve done this many times before you
ashen sky
lightning storms
deltas to desert plains
wartime on every border

I’ve done this many times before you
watched the pattern take form
children your time is done
if you say it’s done together

Greetings from a business park in San Clemente, one of the unlikelier places to find a recording studio. I’ve been getting my tacos de pescado fix every time we break for a meal. There are two small windows in the live room; from the piano bench I can see blue sky, edges of palm fronds, rays of endless sun.

We tracked drums, bass and keys for three songs today, and we’re now totally exhausted. These are not easy songs to play. Sometimes it’s obvious from the start that something’s going to be tricky (e.g. “Stray Italian Greyhound”—why oh why did I write so many sixteenth notes in there?). Other times it catches us by surprise, and we spend hours zeroing in on exactly the right flourishes, finding the pocket of the groove, then letting go of all that thinking and giving a performance that simply feels right…there’s a reason why top session musicians are paid so well. Relaxed concentration is a precious resource.

But oh, it is nice when things finally fall into place. One song, “Augustine,” spent three years in purgatory before finally clawing its way out in March, then jostled onto the recording schedule despite my misgivings. Hearing it in the studio today, I think it may have a chance of going on the album. Scrappy little fighter, that one.

oh my god
what have I done
chasing some mirage in my Mojave sun
don’t say every chance is lost
please don’t say anything at all

lead me now
I understand
faith is both the prison and the open hand
bells on low on high
will you ring for Augustine tonight

Backstage in Montclair, New Jersey. Stephanie White is rehearsing with Robbie LaFalce in the other room—what a voice.

I took the train this afternoon: the J out of Brooklyn, then the F up to 34th Street, walked one block west to Penn Station, then hopped on NJ Transit’s Montclair-Boonton Line. From Walnut Street station it was a little less than a mile to the Unitarian church here, past lawns and rows of trees in bloom, through the wide-sidewalked downtown, my suitcase wheels playing a drumbeat across the tiled brick. It’s probably all the glimpse I’ll get of Montclair this time around, but it’s a glimpse at a good pace, one that allows for noticing details, watching scenes unfold. I like East Coast transit systems for this reason: the reminder of how constraint begets new possibility. You inhabit the world differently when you can’t move around in a bubble.

My choice of transportation today was a practical decision; getting out of New York by car on a warm Friday afternoon is madness (we once sat in five hours of traffic to get to Newark for India.Arie). But this plan only worked because Outpost in the Burbs had a piano waiting for me, it was a solo show, and I had a ride back home if I missed the last train. When Alex and I rode the subway to Central Park for the Green Apple Festival, lugging his percussion gear up and down endless flights of stairs and across several blocks on the Upper East Side, that was…well, a symbolic gesture. It just seemed wrong to take a car service to an Earth Day event, that’s all.

So what’s a real long-term solution? We’re not going to make a habit of taking public transportation to duo or band performances; it simply isn’t practical (or even possible, if I have my keyboard). Doing the right thing when it’s massively less convenient will only go so far. There’s only a certain segment of the population willing to make that kind of trade-off on a regular basis, and eco-conscious behavior needs to be society’s default for it to be effective on the required scale.

It seems like a lot of this does come down to advocacy and policy, in the end: higher fuel efficiency standards, better funding for public transportation in all cities, recycling programs that accept compostables and a wide range of plastics, and so on. Meanwhile, I keep adding items to my personal list of “stuff that isn’t hard to do, so I might as well.” Though you’d be surprised how much you have to fight sometimes to deploy a reusable shopping bag.

Here are two links to studies I’ve discovered recently—one heartening, one disheartening (at least for me, lover of BBQ and a good cheeseburger):

Nudge, by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein: “Thoughtful ‘choice architecture’ can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice”

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2006 Report: “Rearing cattle produces more greenhouse gases than driving cars”

Things are brewing nicely around here. The leaves of album #4 have dropped into the water. It’s ambitious, this record, on pretty much every front; at times I already feel I’m in over my head but in that exhilarating way, like falling in love with someone way out of your league.

More on all that later. For now, if it would please you to check out the following:

Ari Hest’s 52. He’s recording and releasing one new song a week for all of 2008; you can subscribe to the series or get one song at a time. Ari could easily coast on the strength of his voice alone, but the man has a real songwriter’s knack for melody, and you’d be hard pressed to believe he’s producing these beautiful tracks alone in his living room. Did I mention that he doesn’t have any formal music training, and that he’s learning how to engineer and mix as he goes? The Ivy League’s got nothing on the community of overachievers I find myself in these days.

The New York Times has launched a group blog about the songwriting process. Current contributors include Suzanne Vega, Roseanne Cash and Andrew Bird—another one of those okay-either-I-quit-music-or-I-learn-how-to-be-like-THAT artists, for me.

…I’ve come to believe that recording and playing live are two completely different animals. Live shows are adrenaline-fueled and spontaneous: if you want to capture that then you should put out a live show recording. But the kind of record you want to listen to over and over again in your bedroom or car is something else—a carefully carved piece of sound…

The only thing that separates a mess of seemingly disparate observations and a song is a moment of excessive confidence. As time goes on words and ideas begin to catch and gather around the original suspiciously arbitrary seeds of inspiration.

- Andrew Bird, “Natural History”

Project Vote Smart shows the Congressional voting records of all U.S. presidential candidates.

Open Secrets chronicles their campaign financing.

Saw amazing live shows recently: Kaki King circled home on her world tour to play at Bowery Ballroom, her set veering from crackly (locomotive fingerpicking, German metal) to cloudy (looped lap steel) and back again with ease, her band somehow locked-in and loose at the same time. Noe Venable played a gorgeous CD release concert at the Zipper Factory, with almost of all the musicians on The Summer Storm Journals on stage together: trumpet, violin, contrabass, marimba. Noe feels like a songwriter of another age, whether past or future I can’t tell—her lyrics have the weight of myth, and the music sounds like folk songs from an undiscovered country.

I have worn steep heels
and a dress too tight
I have pressed my life
against sharpened things
and bled sentences
and shed innocence
like unwanted skin
in the woods part of when

- Noe Venable, “Woods Part of When”

Though at first I declared that it was about the silliest thing I’d ever seen, right up there with those SuperPoke! and Which Ninja Turtle Are You? apps on Facebook, I confess: I am now on Twitter. You can follow me if you like.

Finally, here’s the first seed of a new song. Well, “new” in the sense that I’ve never played it in public; this loop has been sitting on my computer since last June. It’s since grown into a five-minute dissertation, which will appear in all its overwrought glory on the next album.

no gringo (original loop)

Working on Sid Arthur this afternoon and getting stuck. Setting meditation sessions to music is tricky business. Rehearsals for a reading begin tomorrow, so I’m hoping this traffic jam clears up soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve stumbled upon this:

There are thousands of different definitions of religion. But I like to think of three main ways of understanding it. The first way—and I think almost all of us are religious in this sense—is to define religion as concern about something of ultimate importance. This was Tillich’s broad definition: Religion is ultimate concern. Even the atheist who says that science is the only reliable road to truth, and nature is all there is, is setting up something that’s ultimate. It’s like the top stone of a pyramid that conditions everything else in the pyramid. In our own lives, we all have something like a top stone.

- Theologian John Haught, in an interview with Salon.com

Last week in New York was a good one: two songs that’ve been stalled since last summer finally decided that they want to be finished. Or get to the 90% mark or so, at least; I think the remainder will fall into place when we start in on production. Four or five others are coming along as well, and hopefully will be presentable by March. They’re like fiercely independent preschoolers, these songs, you want so much to just tie their shoes and spoon-feed them their cereal and get them out the door already, but no, they have to do everything themselves, discover their own methods, stumble and backtrack and try again and get their fingers all grubby, and you know it’s better this way, they’ll be stronger for it in the end, but boy is it frustrating when you’re running late for work and one of them is still in his PJs with toothpaste all over his forehead…

Yes, it’s true—I’m finally going to have a video for an album track!

Fat Monster Films picked the song several months ago, developed the concept and shot half the footage before approaching me about being in it. A bit of a gamble, but it was a brilliant move; as soon as I saw their 30-second rough edit, I knew I had to be involved. They warned me that they were a small operation, so the shoot wouldn’t be a swanky affair, not much in the way of personal trailers or private hotel suites. Perfect, I said. Not-swanky is how I roll.

I didn’t anticipate, however, that the weekend would turn out to be one of the best I’ve had in recent memory. And that’s saying a lot. The video shoot was a distillation of everything I’ve come to love about this life: the way music serves as a passport into worlds I’d never have access to otherwise, the warmth and communal spirit I encounter everywhere I go. From my Thursday night arrival on the island until I left for the ferry on Sunday, the whole thing felt like a celebration of all that’s good in human nature: creativity, generosity, assiduousness, wonder.

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Dean Petrich greeted our arrival with an hour-long tour of his entire home, complete with trapdoors and secret tunnels, rooftop ladders, hot tubs and grotto pools. Over the next few days we’d chuckle at his nonchalant delivery for outlandish stories: “I’ve had parties with a couple hundred people sleeping here…” “When I started riding unicycles…” “Oh, here’s where we had the naked pie fight on my birthday…” But Dean’s life is as much hard work as it is whimsy: between piano moving and tuning, professional clowning, and several businesses selling eco-friendly products, he’s constantly on the phone and hopping in the truck. “I work for myself, and it keeps me very busy,” he said, matter-of-fact as always. “My calendar has days that I’ve marked as days off, and on those days I play.” I stand in awe of his endless supply of energy, his determination to create a good life on his own terms.

The good men of Fat Monster Films, for their part, were the very epitome of teamwork and dedication. There was Scott Bullis, who wrangled heavy equipment and cooked scrumptious meals for twelve with equal aplomb; Steven Dempsey, the quiet artist behind the HD camera, beautifully fluent in lenses and lighting; Tim Hyten, the youngest of everyone and a preternaturally assured director, always ready to throw out storyboards in favor of happy accidents; actor Norm Sanders, a filmmaker himself, wisecracking between takes and subtly intense on camera; and Mark Johnson, the producer who coordinated the whole circus, and a former English major who quizzed me continuously on GRE words. (Now I know exactly what unctuous, sanguinary and truculence mean.)

Colette Francel, Sandra Thomas and Allison Lux of Studio A accepted their last-minute assignments with grace and good humor, proving that a salon in south Whidbey can rival the best of L.A. or New York when it comes to hair & makeup for video shoots. How they got me to look pretty much exactly the same three days in a row is beyond me. And chatting with Colette on Sunday morning (at 8 a.m. on her day off), when she told me stories from her childhood, I was reminded vividly of how little we know of each others’ lives, how much courage might be tucked beneath the surface of the people you meet.

Good souls kept appearing, almost by the hour. First there was Bob, the owner of the house at the end of the private road we needed, who not only gave us permission to come on his property but then lent power outlets, hex wrenches and photographic documentation besides. Dean’s friend Sharon appeared not long after and became the de facto P.A. for Friday afternoon, then cooked us all dinner after the shoot wrapped on Sunday. Tech nonprofit manager (and avid marathoner) Patrick Shaw, who replied to an email I sent to the Seattle list, showed up on Saturday and seemed quite happy fetching hair combs and windbreakers all day long.

Special thanks also to Stacey Rayburn, the L.A. wardrobe stylist/designer who rustled up the dress and made the gloves in five days without ever meeting me in person, working from a hastily procured set of measurements; Stephanie June Johnson, Norm’s makeup artist; Jesse Wendel of the Group News Blog, for photos and a nice big umbrella; and all the kids who hung out with us over the weekend, especially Helen and Fiona, who play a mean game of Sardines.

More coverage at the Fat Monster blog, Patrick’s blog and the DVX Forums.

one corner of Dean’s amazing house	the excellent Patrick Shaw, our volunteer PA for Saturday	Colette and Sandra work their magic
fortunately we met Bob, the very nice resident who let us drive in	not for the faint of heart (or muscle mass)	mud, sand and other daunting obstacles meet Fat Monster truculence
the work one avoids by being a lady in a poofy skirt…	…and the work one gets stuck with	function over fashion: Colette helps ward off the 40-degree chill
with producer, gofer and vocabulary whiz Mark Johnson	Norm emotes; Steven and Tim approve	Scott engages in some novel stress-relief methods

Photos by Scott Bullis, Bob Zawalich, Jesse Wendel, and yours truly.

I write to you, way past my bedtime, from here.

It’s truly amazing—chaotic yet orderly, functionally frivolous. The man who created it gave us a comprehensive tour of the interior when we arrived, and promises an odyssey into the several acres of outdoor marvels when it’s light out.

More about what on earth I’m doing here later. Wake-up call is in five hours.

Hello from Northern California, where I’ve been camped since mid-December or so. I swear I didn’t orchestrate this as an escape from the East Coast winter; at any rate, the house here has its thermostat set to 58 degrees Fahrenheit, which gets my teeth chattering rather effectively. Late last night the power went out in the midst of a rainstorm, while doors kept shutting at random and the patio furniture set about rearranging itself. If New York has fewer ghosts than this place, I’ll be glad to see snow again.

I’m here for the beginning stages of a musical theater project I was invited to compose music for: the new brainchild of playwright Tanya Shaffer, tentatively called Sid Arthur. We jump-started the collaboration at TheatreWorks’ annual writer’s retreat, where we hunkered down in a rehearsal space alongside three other writing teams (including the genre-bending band GrooveLily) and a roving posse of Broadway-caliber actors for a week. By the time Sunday’s “strictly optional” presentation to TheatreWorks donors rolled around, we had three songs and another two in progress, which was dizzying for me, given my usual output rate. I’m still not entirely convinced that I have the first clue about how to do this, but Tanya is pleased with what we’ve got so far, as seemed the audience that afternoon.

I wish the retreat had gone on longer; I was thoroughly enjoying the Brill-Building experience, commuting to a job writing music, walking down the hall to eavesdrop on snippets of other people’s brilliance. And after leaving the office, as it were, ideas for my own material kept coming. Some of them became lyrics, or that long-missing chorus melody, or the first inklings of an arrangement. It’s heartening to find that creative flow is not a zero-sum phenomenon.

More discoveries in the maybe-I-should-quit-music-because-I-can’t-do-that category: debut albums from Jesca Hoop (Kismet), The Bird and The Bee and Mute Math. When those are a little too outgoing for my mood, there’s always refuge in Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, or Aqualung’s Memory Man. Track 4 of the latter, in particular, a song called “Glimmer,” is stuck on repeat these past few days. Those effortless key changes, that voice, unearthing the epic from the intimate in the space of four minutes…it’s good to be reminded of what’s possible, pop songcraft-wise. And of course there’s Radiohead. For better or worse, In Rainbows will be inextricably woven with memories of this winter, I’ve worn that playlist out so.

What else…here are lyrics to a song that I’ve been trying out at shows lately. It sounds much more interesting in my head than played live, so there’s some work to be done yet.

Stray Italian Greyhound

oh no not now
please not now
I just settled into the glass half empty
made myself at home
and so why now
please not now
I just stopped believing in happy endings
harbors of my own

but you had to come along didn’t you
break down the doors, throw open windows
oh if you knew just what a fool you have made me

so what do I do with this?

this stray Italian greyhound
these inconvenient fireworks
this ice-cream-covered screaming hyperactive thought
god I just want to lay down
these colors make my eyes hurt
this feeling calls for everything that I am
not

I’m not that kind
I’m so good at shooting down any notion
this tired world could change
it’s all been bought
or at least that was my line
no use in spending all that emotion
when there’s someone else to blame

but you had to come along didn’t you
rev up the crowd, rewrite the rule book
where do I go when every ‘no’ turns into ‘maybe’

so what do I do with this?

this sudden burst of sunlight
and me with my umbrella
cross-indexing every weatherman’s report
I was ready for the downslide
but not for spring to well up
this feeling calls for everything I can’t afford
to know
is possible now

what do I do
with a love that won’t sit still
won’t do what it’s told
what do I do
with a love that won’t sit still

Life finally slowed down enough for me in September to sort through the mound of receipts, reports, bank statements and envelopes that comprise the Green Caravan tour paperwork. I have such a highly organized, scientifically engineered system of accounting, it’d make any CPA proud. Really. That’s why it took me three months to gather the courage to look at it. Then another two to make sense of its numbers.

I finally entered all our donations to Habitat For Humanity local affiliates into Network For Good’s excellently designed site, as well as contributions to Tzu Chi, Earth Pledge and Environmental Defense. All in all it’s about three thousand dollars, not shabby for the first try with an operation of our size. Every one of you who bought merch on the spring tour, this is your money going out. Thanks so much!

We also offset the 24 tons of carbon emitted by our van, flights and taxis on the tour through Native Energy. It’s a surprisingly affordable thing to do, and Native Energy is one of the pricier options, too. It helped that we only flew a few times, as one flight can emit more than a year’s worth of driving. Not getting the biodiesel-capable van this time was disappointing, but next time it makes sense to rent a Dodge Sprinter, I’m reserving it well, well in advance.

Lately I’ve been reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, articles on green building and alternative fuel, and a great deal of literature about the carbon credit/offset market—all of which underscores the big lesson of our tour experiment this spring: doing the right thing is damn complicated. First there’s the matter of identifying what the right thing is, a whole endeavor unto itself; then there’s the calculation of how to accomplish it in a way that’s financially and psychologically feasible. Thorough planning is essential; so are a lot of knowledgeable people helping out. Otherwise a lot of the well-intentioned stuff ends up falling by the wayside. When you’re running late for soundcheck and no one’s looked up where the nearest co-op grocery is, all you’ve got is fifteen minutes at the gas station Kwiki-Mart. Which, as one would expect, doesn’t have recycle bins. So: no more band tours without a road manager. I have fired myself from that job.

Pollan’s book devotes a chapter to the phenomenon of “industrial organic”: purveyors of products that meet organic certifications, but still use conventional production and distribution methods. (Whole Foods, for example, ships produce in from all over the world, consuming a lot of petrodiesel and jet fuel to do so. As for its suppliers, some of its organic lettuce is grown in fields right alongside fields of pesticide-sprayed lettuce, and some of its “free-range” chickens didn’t even know there was a yard outside their coops.*) He poses the question, reasonably enough, of whether partial solutions to environmental problems are really solutions at all, especially when consumers are led to believe that the issue is solved. It’s a tough question, especially for a touring artist. If reducing our environmental impact were paramount, I wouldn’t tour at all. I wouldn’t sell products that needed to be manufactured and shipped. But this is paralysis, and unacceptable; so I settle for partial answers, actions that fall within my bounds of practicality, and hope that someday the world will be structured in such a way that doing the right thing will also be the practical thing to do.

Buying carbon offsets and industrial organic food is a halfway point—demonstrably better than doing nothing, but nowhere near a long-term solution, and dangerous if you decide to congratulate yourself and stop there. Fortunately we seem to be in the midst of a genuine shift in mainstream thinking. Here’s hoping that this Green Caravan idea, this modest but continuing experiment, is one symptom of wider change.

* If you’re interested, here’s a fascinating webcast featuring Michael Pollan and Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who’s taking steps to address Pollan’s critique of industrial organic.

This tour was an experience like no other. So much work, so much fun. Learned a lot about the bigger world out there, both musically and environmentally/socially. Met some remarkable people, reconnected with others, played for some really outstanding audiences.

I think I am also done with not having a tour manager. Marika, Dina and Alex were saintly in their patience and willingness to help, but the logistics have gotten entirely too complex for four musicians to handle and play shows. And, er, then get up at 7:30 a.m. to help build houses.

At some point we’ll consolidate footage from all four cameras and get a proper tour photo album together. In the meantime, here are a few from my collection:

Ryan Scott and Dina Cambridge, MA	Dina and Alex model the hoodies Charlotte, NC	sometimes we drank from reusable bottles… sometimes…
Marika documents her BBQ Nashville, TN	family portrait Lexington, KY	an amazingly lit fountain that Alex found Lexington, KY
cinematic one-stoplight town Moundridge, KS	Dina models her own knitwear Moundridge, KS	capoeirista Elastico Moundridge, KS
15 minutes before showtime Ann Arbor, MI	decompressing at the Blind Pig Ann Arbor, MI	family portrait (last night) Seattle, WA

Lexington KY, backstage at the woodsongs radio broadcast… met a lovely young lad named ben who sheepishly asked to play marika’s cello, saying, “yeah, i’ve studied a little”… turns out hes going on tour with some guy named bela fleck in his sparrow quartet later this month. besides that, he can play his ass off. here he and dina rip it up to gnarls barkley’s “crazy”.

a powerful, heart wrenching look into the darkest hours of the fried caravan tour. around the time this was filmed the band was seriously considering eating the opening act. sorry, jenny.

after weeks of fruitless experimentation, the band finally discovers the precise combination of three words that can break marika’s stoic exterior and send her into uncontrollable spasms of laughter on command: LET - HER - BE (said with generous carolina drawl). try it sometime.

after a fun show in moundridge KS, alex stumbled upon a crowd gathered around his cajon, examining it as if they had just found it at the bottom of a smoldering crater in a corn field. i think they were looking for the midgets inside making all that racket… shh, don’t scare them…

in a remote stretch of kansas, the crew attempts (foolishly) to find a taste of the bay area… or at the very least, a taste of vegetables.

hey guys,

sitting backstage at the ark, finally have a chance to post our first food blog entry…

we’ve managed to amass some culinary gems over the past week or two, as evidenced by these pics. the piece de resistance, of course, was our field trip to hooters (initiated by vienna and marika), where the girls all bought t shirts, and we had a salad with some bonus, um, protein. best fried pickles ever: raleigh, NC. best homemade artichoke dip: pensacola dinner party. best alligator (so far): birmingham AL.

enjoy…

the band

fried alligator	southern hospitality… alex would not let this dip out of his sight
fried pickles	vienna’s bonus surprise in her hooters salad

Been thoroughly enjoying the shows so far, the audiences have been kind, we even had a rock ‘n roll moment when a piano string snapped at Joe’s Pub and went flying over the heads of my bandmates, but forget all that. All hail Alex Wong, winner of Best Original Music in the L.A. Weekly Theater Awards!

The ongoing conundrum: the more there is to write about, the less time and energy there is at the end of the day to do the writing.

For now, suffice to say that in the past 48 hours, I/we have:

• Gotten a parking ticket (welcome to New York!)
• Discovered the lyrical inspiration that is the Coldwater Creek catalog
• Followed GPS to a hole-in-the-wall seafood place in Baltimore
• Fallen in love with the Barns of Wolf Trap all over again
• Sat in morning traffic on I-395 for an hour (welcome to DC!)
• Installed fireblocking in a Habitat house
• Discovered that the construction-work lexicon is full of suggestive phrases (nailing studs, anyone?)
• Sung harmony for David Berkeley, one of the great pleasures in life
• Fallen in love with the Barns’s grand piano all over again
• Taken lots of photos and video, which should hopefully get posted sometime soon

Each member of the band is giving up something for the Green Caravan tour, Lent-style; Marika started it by giving up cigarettes for good, which inspired the rest of us to do a little soul searching. I declared that I would go vegetarian, which probably astonishes anyone who’s watched me demolish a plate of BBQ ribs. Dina is giving up whining (trust us, this is a big thing). Of all of us, though, Alex might be struggling the most: whenever we stop to eat, he’s ordering first. Oh, the agony of the indie gourmand, forced to make split-second decisions about food. We’re sure he would appreciate your thoughts of support in this trying time.

This morning I am playing the carpool soccer mom: Dina’s in Park Slope, Alex in Williamsburg, Marika will be waiting at a subway station on Canal Street in Manhattan. The Green Caravan Tour begins in earnest.

I’ve finally put up the Q&A section of the Green Caravan Tour page, if you’re interested in reading the nitty-gritty details of how all this came about. Also, turns out we’re not traveling in a biodiesel-capable vehicle after all—car rental logistics thwarted us—but everything else is unfolding according to plan. A miracle, really. There are already some Habitat For Humanity volunteers on the guest list for Wolf Trap tonight. Great sign.

Wish us luck. Will try to take pictures and keep this journal going.