i feel like a dot. a very small dot in an infinite space. A very, very small point encircled by thousands of arrows. all of them sharp. all of them pointing at me. and they all have the look of inevitability about them. shot from thousands of bows. a bow marked 'landlord', a bow marked 'cable bill'. a bow marked 'seasonal flu', a bow marked 'swine flu'. a bow marked 'war', a bow marked 'money'. a bow marked 'infection', a bow marked 'christmas'. a bow marked 'facebook', a bow marked 'myspace'.

and BAM I am in London. Early dawn car service (complete with air freshener that chokes like lungs dipped in vanilla cotton) out to Newark. Airport breakfast and the Daily News. Security confiscates my water and on to the plane. I shift seats to a middle row al to myself and proceed to sleep to England. Deplane and into the rental VW Golf and back on the highways of London. Arrive at G's place, watch a few British sitcoms and sleep on the pull-out sofa.
Next day is all about sauna and jacuzzi that G's apartment complex provides. Livin' large!
Stop by Gibson to pick up a loaner guitr for the night and a Ben Sherman event is under way so I glom the goody bag and score some mod sunglasses and a cologne called "London's Calling", geez.
Gig at 12 Bar was a smash. I opened with Drinking Beers With Mom telling the crowd that I'd better do the last song first just in case jet-lag kicks in. Some other songs I played were She's Brave Now (slated for the next album), Gone, Gone, Gone, Smoking Again, Kiss Loves You, Staying Sober Tonight in North Beach and requested tunes such as George at Coney, Ungrateful and I Want To Be With You. Also did an interview with Gena Dry of London Second Life and the show was video taped to place on their site in the future.
Now I'm up the next day and preparing for the drive to the gig tonight in Bristol. It feels good to be back in UK playing shows, feels natural.

4000 friends. 4000! How are all of you doing. My good, good Myspace friends. We share so many wonderful memories of Google ads and Melrose Place trailers. Remember that time you sent me an event invite for your gig and it turned out I already was playing a gig that night? Oh, how we laughed! Or when the new Avril Lavigne video debuted! Good times, goodtimes....sigh. I'm so glad we are friends, don't ever change.

Home from the UK Box of Lyrics tour and it's all a blur. Musty smells of dressing rooms, bars and microphones. Blended visions of green trees, roadside meadows dotted with sheep and cows. Fleshy smeared thumb-like faces smeared like fresh paint, a circle of backstage hands holding me, hugging me. Cobblestoned streets and castle walls sticky with beer, echoing football chants and desperate cries for love. Newspaper skin tattooed with scandal and calls for false revolution and strident, self-righteous pride. And every 23 hours a new stage, a new audience and the loyal pull of song, the gentle rise of music's tide, the gravitational rhythm of art splashing on fevered brow. Surfing upon waves of words, the salt of sweat stinging my eyes, the melody of life whooshing past my ears making the moment particular, singular, infinite.
It was a delicious ride, over for now, already calling me back. But now is now and I am home like a big, sleepy cat back from the day's hunt. Curled in the arms of my town lazily watching the stars come out, the buildings light up.
Was it all a dream?

it's hitting. hard. that drip, drip of adreneline as the UK tour approaches. not sure how much i'll blog from the road. i tend to go into "tour mode" which is like an astronaut's tunnel-vision. focus on the mission, man! not sure if any of my blog subscribers are in the UK but if you got friends there, hey, let 'em know the tour dates, here they are:

Lach's Box of Lyrics Tour UK Tour May 2009:
18th at Monto Water Rats - London
19th at The Music Bar - Brighton
20th at O2 Academy 3 - Birmingham -(with Neil Halstead of Slowdive and Mojave 3)
21st at O2 Academy 2 - Oxford -(with Neil Halstead of Slowdive and Mojave 3)
22nd live on BBC-2 Radio Scotland at 8pm
23rd at Bowery Bar - Edinburgh
24th at The Duchess - York-(with Neil Halstead of Slowdive and Mojave 3)
25th at O2 Academy 2 - Liverpool-(with Neil Halstead of Slowdive and Mojave 3)
26th at O2 Academy 2 -Newcastle-(with Neil Halstead of Slowdive and Mojave 3)
27th at The Captain's Rest - Glasgow-(with Neil Halstead of Slowdive and Mojave 3)
28th at Nation of Shopkeepers - Leeds-(with Neil Halstead of Slowdive and Mojave 3)
30th at Bivouac@Miller's Arms - Lincoln

OK, I'm good to go. The UK Box of Lyrics tour is  just two weeks away and everything is all set. Plane tickets? Check. Car rented? Check. Songs from all five albums plus the next album plus a few surprise covers all memorized? Check!
Damn, it's good to have all the songs back in my head again. What a wonderful menagerie to have floating around my consciousness like dust upon one's eyes. Character's from the songs all gathered at the mind's all-night party. There's Junior and Steven on line to see the Blue Monk. Sally B handing out gig fylers to The Ghost and The Sixtie's Girl. Someone talking about his art to Johnny Cash and Jimmie Rogers. Oh look over there! I can see George Harrison cadging a smoke from The Human Torch. Well, there's the Teenage Alcoholic drinking beers with mom and Former President Bush! Speaking of politicians I can see John Glenn getting Edie's phone number as Hot Boy Red asks Wendy to dance. It's a complete Crazy House in here!
I'll be bringing this party on the road starting May 8th in Hamden CT and continuing on to the UK for a dozen or so shows, after that, I'm hoping another East Coast tour comes along to keep it rolling. Oh yeah, I'm doing seven shows in UK with Neil Halstead of Mojave 3 and Slowdive. Great writer and performer and I'm looking forward to his meeting everyone!

Just added Ungrateful and Ain't It The Most to the jukebox on my myspace page. Now that The Calm Before has been out for a year I no longer feel an obligation to predominantly perform songs from it during my set. Believe me, I dig all those tunes, but it's freeing not to be obliged. With the upcoming gigs in NYC and the UK tour looming ahead I'm taking out and polishing up my full catalog from my five releases as well as the tunes slated for the next one, about 75 songs altogether. It's nice to have that kind of stash to roll from!
I like to name my tours and so I'm thinking "Box Full of Lyrics" as the tour title (if ya got a better one lemme know quick!). It reflects the extent of songs I'll be chosing from and is also a line from my song Ain't It The Most.
Hmmmm, I guess I should post that tune up on the juke as well.
Always so much to do...

First off, quick note: I am hosting the Antihoot at Sidewalk tonight (4/6/09). C U there?

Okay, I just added my song 'George at Coney' from my latest album 'The Calm Before' to my myspace jukebox. (buy the album a t store near you, order it from lachtoday.com or download from iTunes). Anyway, below you will find an in-depth "director's commentary" on the song. Enjoy...

Somehow I had heard a story of George Harrison slipping out on the rest of the Beatles entourage during their first visit to New York City and making his way to Coney Island. The image of that was filled with so much romance, youthful energy, curiosity and humanity that I always wanted to write a song about it. I filed the idea in the song-idea nook of my unconsciousness to ferment.
On Monday nights, after everyone plays the Antihoot, I usually do a set around 2:30 am. As part of the set, once I get in the flow, I ask for song subjects from the remaining crew. I have no clear recollection but I'd bet someone either gave me "Coney Island", "George Harrison" or "The Beatles" as a subject and I spontaneously excavated George at Coney. Man, I wish I still remembered that version but I always forget the songs I write off-the cuff, almost as quickly as I perform them. It's sort of a deal I make with my brain. I exchange attachment and ego for beauty and inspiration. The upside is I get in-the-moment creative highs; the downside is I can't remember what happened. However, sometimes, enough of a skeleton remains that I can flesh it out into a proper song later on. The song, Ungrateful, off of my album, Blang!, would be an example of that. So, too, would be George at Coney.
Months later, I was in bed, getting ready to sleep and I felt like I wanted to write something first. I opened a notebook and said to myself "Might as well write that George Harrison tune" and out flowed the lyrics for the song. I got up, went into the other room, picked up my guitar and this version came out. It wasn't the music I always imagined for the song. I wanted a Harrisonish, minor key with a weirdness to it but this version kept insisting itself to me. I soon realized that it was based on the melody of the old Irish folk song Molly Malone. A song George would have been well aware of, a song about a ghost. I played George at Coney the other night at Sidewalk and someone came up to me and said they liked it because they always loved ghost stories. It actually hadn't occurred to me that it was a ghost story, though it's so obvious to me now. Perhaps I should give George a co-writer's credit?
OK, onto the footnotes:
Well, I wanted to have the lyrics make it obvious who this song was about once you knew who it was about. But, if you didn't know, perhaps you'd like it anyway as some song about a guy named George. I wanted a slow revelation to sneak up on you so you'd get a pleasant shudder once it came together and you realized it was about the quiet Beatle.
So the George clues slowly drift in (i.e. black boots, twelve strings, ciggies, jellybeans {George had been quoted as liking jellybeans and at early Beatles concerts they got bombarded with them!}). I wanted to capture the sense that in spite of being a new superstar he was basically a young English man in New York City for the first time…a wide-eyed tourist and so I added in: the F-train, Coca-Cola, French fries (instead of 'chips'), the Cyclone. I wanted the meditative silence he was seeking apart from Beatle mania so I put in: "dancin'" and "manager panic" morphing into picnic (please notice the similarity of the letters in dancing, panic and picnic) before returning him to the "froth and fray". Against that I contrast his letting go of Earthly attachments by saying "just" his guitar and repeating the image of "spent" his last dollar. Other fun stuff to look for: the play on "bored" and "board". The alternating of "black boots" and "barefeet" in the sand showing again the conflict between being a Beatle and just being George.

originally published in Urban Folk Magazine at the behest of Dave Cuomo