Thanksgiving

Well, I suppose the holiday season has now officially begun. I spent Thanksgiving in sunny Los Angeles with my dad and company which was really great. It was warm and sunny and we wrote things in the sand at the beach before going home to eat too much good food.

We also went sailing. Here is Harry the dog smiling on the sailboat:



This year I am thankful for a lot of things but one of the things I am the most thankful for this year is the way in which my new job as a touring musician has allowed me to visit all sorts of family and friends that I usually don't get to see. I have been all over the place in the last few months and I have really been struck by al of the wonderful people I know all around this country. I am lucky when it comes to people. I've got a lot of great ones in my life. Now I just have to spend a little time home in NYC so that I can spend some time with my hometown friends who I haven't seen much at all lately.

I am currently writing to you from Ann Arbor , Michigan which is a city that I really like. Tomorrow I am driving to Kent, OH where I have been several times before and then onto Dayton and Pittsburgh, two cities I have never visited. I like this part of the country. The sky is very nice here.

Before Thanksgiving I did some shows on the west coast in Seattle, Portland and then a couple in California. I was opening for the Roches for those shows and we had fun traveling around together. Here are my aunts Maggie and Terre outside of one of the venues:


You might be wondering " What are those lovely multi-colored bags?"


These are our "Nocturnal Bags". The phrase "Nocturnal Bag" was coined by a great person from Manchester, England and it originally refered to a bag that my mother had that only came out at night when we were going to do a show. The Nocturnal Bag has been such a great tool that now we all have one. In addition to being very useful, the bags make us one of the most colorful bands (luggage-wise) in the buisness.

After the shows with the Roches, I flew to San Fransisco on a propeller plane:

My mom and aunts did a show there with my dad and I sold the cds...

and then, the next day, I drove to LA to give thanks!

Pornographers and Halloween

Since I had a few nights off before my next show, I stayed in Atlanta on Tuesday and went to see the New Pornographers. They were really awesome and I had a great time watching them play and I've now decided that I really want to learn to play the tambourine. It looks like so much fun but so far (I've been practicing) it doesn't come naturally to me. Oh well.

The next morning it was Halloween and got up at 6am and started to drive while it was still dark...

and I drove...



and drove...


and drove...


and drove...



and drove...


and stopped at Chick-Fil-A for the first time ever...


and drove...

and drove...

and drove...


and drove...

and drove...

and drove...


and drove...



until I finally saw my home town...





Atlanta, GA- NYC ! I passed through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and NY. It only took me 17 hrs!

Next Best Western-Atlanta, GA

Yesterday I drove from Mt. Pleasant, SC to Atlanta. I'm actually done with my shows for a few days but I wanted to visit some friends of mine who are also on tour and who had a day off in GA. Anyway, I checked into a Best Western which was a bit of a thrill for me since I've been covering the Richard Shindell song "Next Best Western" since last March and I love the song more and more everday. Anyway, I checked into my room and decided to watch some crappy TV before meeting my friend for dinner. I sat down on the bed and pulled one of the pillows out from under the covers to lean on and I noticed that there was something in the bed that wasn't supposed to be there. I pulled back the sheets a little bit and there in the bed were three peanuts in their shells.



It was weird... but a little bit charming.

>

Headed South

After having a ball in West Virginia, I drove to Nashville to spend a few days with my friend Frally. It was so great to see her and her kids and we had a great visit even though it seemed short I met Frally in the summer of 2005 when I was touring with Rufus and meeting her helped me get my music going again. Frally's beautiful new cd is available here. You should definately download it and start listening.



Next stop was Atlanta where I was going to do my first show with Mary Gauthier. I had never met her before and we bonded immediately over the fact that the only food backstage was an enormous hunk of cheddar cheese in saran wrap. There were no utensils in sight and we were hungry. I had the great pleasure of doing 6 shows with Mary over the next 7 days. She is an amazing performer and an amazing human and I loved working with her. We played Atlanta, Charlotte, NC, Carborro, NC, Charlottesville, VA and our last show together was in Annapolis, MD. Below is the lovely sky in Annapolis on the stormy day we were there:


My show with Mary at the Ram's Head in Annapolis was my second show there in October and there were some people at the second show who had been there at the first one. They were really gracious and sweet and I really appreciated them coming back to say hello! Every single audience on this trip has been kind and attentive and it means so much to me that people will listen to the opening act with an open mind.



The great audiences continued when I did two shows with Lucy Kaplansky this past weekend. Lucy is another great musician and I've known her for many years. It was the first time I'd ever done a show with her and it was great. We played in Decatur, GA at the fabulous "Eddie's Attic" and then the next night we played in South Carolina where one of the women in the audience gave me a kiss on the cheek after the show and said, "You were VERY good...for a Yankee..."

Mountain Stage

On October 14th I was luck enough to be a part of Mountain Stage. I shared the evening with my dad, Fionn Regan,
Martha Scanlon and Josh Ritter. It should be broadcast around Nov. 9th. You can check it out at :
http://www.mountainstage.org/

Not only was Mountain Stage awesome, but while I was in Charleston, WV I spotted this:



I love West Virginia

Back in Time

I am SO behind in updating this blog. It's terrible. The weeks have flown by while I've been on the road. I'm going to try to catch up with myself by speeding through the events of the last month in the next couple of posts and then hopefully I will be back on top of things.


In late September I hit the road and drove to Chicago where I met up with my dad to play two shows at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Wow. What a great way to kick off my tour. We did two shows in one night and had two amazing audiences. It was so much fun and some of my favorite new friends and some of my favorite old friends all came to the show.



From there we drove through Wisconsin on our way to Minneapolis. Below is a picture of my dad pretending to bite and enormous hunk of plastic cheese. This was immediately after eating at Perkins which may have had something to do with this crazy behavior.

Dad and I had another great show in Minneapolis and we also went to see the movie "2 Days in Paris" which made us laugh. To top it all off we were staying in a hotel where they had a TV on the wall above the bathtub which was a first for me.
After our Minneapolis show we went out separate ways and I drove from MN to Ohio and saw a lot of this along the way:


In Ohio I had the great pleasure of attending another Wellington Dukes game...


and I got to see my friend Jake play the snare drum...


The next night I got to play at the Cat in the Cream. The Cat is a coffeehouse on the Oberlin College campus and when I went to school there I was also on the Cat staff. This show turned out to be another highlight. I wasn't sure if anyone would come and to my great surprise the Cat was full of people and we had a great time. At one point during the show we had a trivia question session where the audience asked me questions like, "What dorm did you live in?" and "Who was your favorite professor?" When I sang "Saddest Sound" that night, the audience sang along! How cool. It insprired me to use that song as a sing along on the rest of my tour. Thanks Oberlinites!

After the show, a great student called Laurel (she is a singer and a songwriter as well!) took me back to my freshman dorm and we knocked on the door of my old dormroom. I think the girls living in there were a little confused but it was fun to be back in that room after all of this time.

From Oberlin I went on to St. Bonaventure, NY, Northampton, MA, Philly, Sellarsville, PA, Annapolis, MD and Richmond, VA and then back to NYC for a day off and a chance to sing on my friend Kami's record which was really fun. Then a show at The Living Room on October 12th. My lovely band, AKA "The Adorables", played at this show and one of my former students had her 11th Bday party at the show which was very special and made for a memorable night in New York.

South of the City

This past Thursday I had some adventures south of Manhattan. I went to Princeton, NJ and then to Phoenixville, PA and then back to Princeton in one action-packed day. The first time I went to Princeton it was to drop someone off there who was going to be classifying 5 tons of rocks for the Geology dept there. He is going to be there for a long time I think. After the drop off I drove to Phoenixville, PA to open another show for Dar Williams at the Colonial Theater. As you can see from the picture above, the Colonial is a pretty cool place and it has an awesomely colored marquee. The show in Phoenixville was really fun although I was somewhat distracted during my set because during my soundcheck someone had informed me that the Colonial Theater was the theater where they filmed an instrumental scene in the movie "The Blob". Apparently the Blob (which, according to the movie trailer posted below not only creeps and crawls, but also eats you alive) was a creature local to Phoenixville because in the film it attacks people in the Colonial Theater while they are happily watching a movie. You can see for yourself here-- note the Colonial marquee:



Anyway, during my set I couldn't stop thinking about the Blob oozing towards the stage.

After getting very lost on my way out of Phoenixville I went back to Princeton where I met up with my friends Dave and Tig who had performed at the University earlier that evening. I wasn't planning on making another stop at Princeton but Dave called me and told me that I had to come because they were going to be staying in a house that seemed like it was out of the board game "Clue". I was sold. Here is the place:



We spent the night there. It was strange for several reasons that you can ask me about at a later date. Miss Scarlet did it in the library with the rope.

In the morning, Dave and I were walking around and he remarked at how lucky we are to get to visit random places because of our jobs. Even though I got almost no sleep and had delirious visions of the Blob all night, I guess he's right. I'm lucky.