Coming soon to a life near you… October! I used to feel that fall was the end, now I feel it's a new beginning. It’s around this time of year, ironically, I miss where I didn’t like the fall the most, the northeast. I want to smell it in the air, feel those brisk mornings, and see the foliage. I’d love a drive up to Vermont for pumpkins and a bottle of local syrup and a few pieces of maple sugar candy. I live now in the deepest south where there is no fall; it cools off a bit, and I’m enjoying the start of that over this past month. I’m ready for my favorite flannel shirts – the red one I walk through the woods in, the brown one I keep in the housetruck Moondancer – because cooler weather is the best for road trips. But it’s a long way to where there’s fall, because it was a long way from it. And I’ve been down here, out in these woods, for a long time. Visiting and adventure is one thing, but life stays much simpler if you live where you feel you belong. Sanity isn’t so much whether you’re the fruitarian or the cannibal so much as being where it’s the norm. Because going to the other place and getting bent over the plate of food you’re handed… now you’re a piece of performance art. Now you draw fire. I belong out here in the woods carving little pieces of wood to fit together until they sing. Sane? Well here yes. In a world with no music? Probably not. Much of the time being able to grow gardens with your gifts means not just cultivating “where you’re at” but where you ARE. It’s good being home.
So much has happened in this world (as I know it) in the past few weeks… but I live in the now and look a few steps forward. So all the words and then-current thoughts dissipate back into their oceans to reform as others. Little drops of my heart go with some of them, but it’s fall – there’s no time to linger in sorrow. There are kittens on the porch, there is wood in the workshop, and that cooler air on my skin at dawn reminds me I am still here and there is good work to do. One of the things I’ve been doing is dragging out all of my instruments and amps and recalculating where my personal tone is. Playing has been on such a back burner for so long – the dream takes you in strange ways and forms a magical life, but one very different than imagined. And it’s time to make music again. What are my flavors going to be moving forward? My voices? My colors on the palette? The bass tone is set – has been for years. The “Birdsong thing” through an amp set flat with a 15” speaker. That’s not specific, but it’s the yard I want to play in. Woody, warm, definitely not just rumble and clank – in fact a little rumble and no clank, with a nice smooth midrange hump and a little clarity up top. It’s my happy place and I’m lucky – any Birdsong bass with a pickup by the neck gets me there. In this case, that’s why any Birdsong bass with a pickup by the neck sounds like it does, because the first time I heard that chocolately goodness come out of the first prototype in the ’90s, that was it for me. Not what every bass should sound like just because I liked it, but definitely what mine should, and what those I bring to life should if I’m being true to my muse.
Guitars, not so easily within the grasp. That has been more evolution through chapters than sudden epiphany. And I play a handful of distinct styles, some both acoustic and electric – so that’s a few, fingers and pick, involving five different tunings and instruments set up totally differently. And I compose music I can’t physically play yet – but I should have that voice before I get there. It actually helps to hear it in that voice a little more by the day in fact! I remember what it was like to have one guitar, but I also remember all my licks and sonic world and creativity could fit into one guitar too. And, when it becomes your life and your mind is blown by its infinite expressive possibilities, it’s no longer just thumping out “Heart of Gold” or jamming “Voodoo Child” – it gets complicated. It grows vast. I have multiple musical personalities and in each style I’ve been chasing something tonally for years, and I think I just found them ALL over the past 2 weeks. Right down to the picks! You won’t think it makes a tonal difference, and maybe with EMGs through a cranked-up Marshall with all the mids sucked out it doesn’t. But that’s your world. In mine of ’77 Howard Roberts with .013 flats tuned a step and a half down through a Polytone, the difference is profound. I played the same brand of picks since the ‘80s – purple then, yellow since. But times of change bring change. The “It’s all in the hands” guys may puff up and thump at the thought, but it’s the tools as well. It’s the hands and the tools interacting together to transcend either. Otherwise great finish carpenters could do their best work with framing hammers and master marathon runners could win in military field boots. They don’t. Past a point of the tool that works is one that helps the job happen its best; then of those, which inspires; then refine from there to what fits YOUR hand the best. Now, it IS up to your touch and taste and talent, honed over time, to bring the best out of anything you touch – that’s in your hands. But the way this particular brush and that different shade of blue may subtly do it for you, you sit back and think, “That’s it. That’s my sky. That’s my horizon for what’s painted from here.”
In the workshop, good progress. There’s a pair of Fusions that have made it to assembly, one requested dark and being trimmed in ebony and black hardware; the other simple but elegant, and its golden brown goodness is being trimmed out with rosewood. Joining them is a walnut Cortobass with a bloodwood stringer. And of course the wild six string Bliss, getting wired up and trimmed out. Next for that one is a custom made ebony bridge I’ve started on. I’m super grateful I’ve never had to rush this one, I can just focus on what’s next with it. I usually do that, that’s the pace this whole thing rolls best, but this is a big mountain of a build with waaaay more steps than usual. It’s 20 times the work being done in about five times the time. I’d say that’s great, and I’m always so grateful for the patience of every one of my clients - but to those who allow me miles of creativity and the budget to make it happen, a special bit of gratitude to you. Looking forward, there’s a cool six string guitar on the routing bench, and I’m getting ready to get some body blanks together for the next round of builds. I can imagine things still seem to move glacially on your side of the screen, focused on one build. In here, they move slowly but surely – a handful at a time. Every day’s list of what happens is different, but today will be the same as the others in that there will be windows and doors open, birds singing, rustlings in the trees, music playing, and the sounds of tools on wood, guided by hands. It’s all so familiar; it feels like home.
Peace & love to you, wherever you are.
Listening to: Bill Evans, Moon Beams; Bill Evans and Jim Hall, Intermodulation; Aerosmith, Rocks; The Black Crowes, Shake Your Money Maker; some live Grateful Dead, and Los Enanitos Verdes (“Vuela alto con los ángeles, Marciano”); Velvet Revolver’s 1st album; Roots of the Blues compilation from Vanguard Records, disc 1; and a great piano album by Newell Oler, Lingering Memories of The Masters.