Years ago I was playing one of my all-time favorite albums, Ry Cooder’s Chicken Skin Music, when my wife said, “That sounds like a bunch of guys playing in the living room.” Of course, Janet was fortunate enough to know what a bunch of guys playing in the living room sounded like, and these weren’t just the guys from down the street but Ry Cooder, Gabby Pahinui and Flaco Jimenez playing in the living room. But she did put her finger on a quality I’d always loved about that record.

Delta Moon was born in the living room. In those days Mark and I lived a few blocks from each other in Inman Park, and we’d get together once or twice a week to bounce some songs around. On the Clear Blue Flame CD we included a late-night living room recording of Fred McDowell’s “You Done Told Everybody”.

The other day, when I should have been working on more practical things, I wrote a song for New Year’s Eve. Well, what are you going to do with a song like that? By the time we could work it up with the band it’s not New Year’s Eve anymore, and then we could only play the song once a year anyway. So I set a camera on top of a cardboard box on the dining room table, sat down on the piano bench with a guitar, sang the song and posted the video on YouTube.

When I posted a link on Facebook, I was surprised by the comments. I was hoping people would like the song, but they were actually thanking me as if for a gift. And of course in a way it was. Up to this point, a song like that would have come to me, been played a few times and then been forgotten — a gift only to me. Now with only a few minutes work it’s easy to share a song with everybody. No recording, mixing and mastering in the studio, no loading gear in the van, no driving hundreds of miles — just press a button and let things happen.

Welcome to my living room. I’m excited to have you.

Every show in Scandinavia was a delight. We had a great time and made lots of new friends.

But the 10-hour flight from Copenhagen back to Atlanta turned out to be hell for Tom Gray. Nauseated, unable to eat, and wracked with pain, he finally staggered through customs and made it to a hospital. Tom underwent abdominal surgery last Tuesday. He’s still in the hospital today.

The prognosis is good, and Tom is recovering well. We’ve cancelled a few weeks of shows and are taking this one day at a time.

If you’d like to send Tom a get-well wish, please e-mail him at tom@deltamoon.com.

Delta Moon has signed an album deal with Red Parlor Records. The new CD, Hellbound Train, will be released in the USA, Canada and Japan after the first of the year on the Red Parlor label. It’s already out now, in a slightly different form, in Europe on the Blues Boulevard label.

The picture above shows Mark and me signing the Red Parlor contract. It’s Delta Moon’s policy to have our picture taken with a bottle of tequila whenever we sign anything, in case we later need to claim we were out of our minds.

We had a great time playing the Bull Durham Blues Festival in Durham, NC, last Saturday.

After our mid-afternoon show, we didn’t have anything else to do except go home on Sunday. So instead of packing up and hitting the road right away, we were able to enjoy the festival, hang with some friends and make a few new ones. Here’s some of what we saw and heard:

The crowd loved the Homemade Jamz Blues Band, a group of young siblings from Tupelo, MS. Their drummer, Taya Perry, was only ten years old. Darren liked her playing so much he had his picture taken with her and set it as the background on his cellphone.

After them came the Lee Boys, a Sacred Steel group we’ve worked with before. I watched from behind the stage as they whipped up the crowd with praise music. After the set I asked Roosevelt Collier, the steel guitarist, if he knew Dante Harmon, who plays steel guitar in a church near my home in Georgia. “Dante Harmon?” Roosevelt said. “He’s standing right behind you.” From where I’d been standing behind the stage I’d seen only the back of the drummer’s head, and I hadn’t recognized Dante sitting there. All the Sacred Steel musicians start on drums. So everybody had a good laugh on me. Dante and I promised to get together in the next week or so and record a little steel guitar jam.

The surprise treat of the day was Trombone Shorty, a young horn band from New Orleans. The oldest guy in the group was 26. Their band put on a powerful show. When the drummer first sat down we heard this “Boom! Pock!” I said to Mark, “Are those the same drums people have been playing all day? They haven’t sounded like that before.” “Yeah,” said Mark, “I think they are.” Then Darren came rushing over saying, “That’s the same kit! It’s the same kit!”

Some guys just have their own way of hitting a drum. I’ve heard of people checking out John Bonham’s kit and saying, “They’re nothing special, just drums.” When Bernard Purdie sits down to someone else’s set, you know from the first whack that somebody’s come to town. Then when another drummer tries to follow that with a lot of fancy licks, you realize it’s not about the licks. Louis Armstrong said, “Some guys have to play a hundred notes because they don’t know how to play the one right note.” A lot of that one right note is the tone and the spirit behind it, and my one right note might not be the same as yours. That’s a big part of what makes watching other bands so much fun.

Last Thursday we went back into the studio with the album we thought we’d finished, and - well, it’s finished now that Francine Reed has added backing vocals on four songs. I can’t say enough good things about her soulful singing and easy, pleasant way in the studio. We laughed and danced around and the work was done before we knew it. Francine rocks.

Friday night we had the honor to open the show at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens for one of our favorite bands, Los Lobos. The weather cleared for a beautiful evening at a fantastic outdoor venue. Here’s the audience:

And here’s 14-year-old aspiring lefthanded guitarist James Gray with his new hero, Cesar Rosas:

Saturday we played another wonderful venue, the Mable House Barnes Amphitheater in Mableton, GA. And what a great crowd! It was getting a little dark for an audience shot, but I pulled out the iPhone and tried one anyway. You can just make out the people sitting on blankets on the hillside behind (maybe it’s time to get a real camera) :

When we stopped by the rehearsal studio yesterday I noticed a strange round hole in the ceiling. I thought I saw something move inside it. Half a minute later something moved again. I looked up close, and a little face poked out of the hole and looked back. We’ve got kittens in the ceiling! This afternoon I’ll put on the coveralls and start dealing with that.

Sunday we got up early. It was going to be a long day - just how long we didn’t suspect. We had to drive east to west across Germany and return the amps and drums to one town, the van to another, and ourselves to the Dusseldorf airport in time for a 7:00 am Monday flight to Atlanta. Until now the tour had gone smoothly. At the breakfast table I knocked wood. For once could we make it all the way home without mishap?

No, of course not. That wouldn’t be the Delta Moon way.

We’d been on the road a few hours when Mark said, “We’re losing power.” We coasted down a ramp and into a gas station at the Weimar exit. The van was dead.

If this had happened in the west we might have stood a fighting chance. But this was east Germany, where no one spoke English or any other language we halfway knew, and at 2:00 in the afternoon the restaurants were already closed. Darren got out his German-English phrase book and walked around telling everyone, “Mein auto ist kaput.” People shrugged or fled at his approach.

After several phone calls, Olly at Rebelvans told me to wait for a towtruck that would take us and van across Germany to a Ford dealership in Dierdorf. So that was how we traveled across the Hessian countryside, with Euro-pop disco playing softly and ancient castle ruins staring down at us from every other hilltop. Large trucks have a speed limit of 80 km/hr (about 50 mph), and the driver sat on that number with Germanic precision. It was almost dark by the time we met Olly at the Ford dealership.

Olly wasn’t happy, and I couldn’t blame him. Nobody was happy except probably the towtruck driver, who was already paid in cash. We moved all the gear to a different van, a Mercedes Sprinter. It was nearly midnight when we reached Wetter, but Gunter was waiting up for us. After loading the gear into Earth Music we had coffee in the office upstairs. Gunter got on his computer to find us a hotel within taxi range of the airport. But I figured we wouldn’t get to bed until 2:00, and we had to be at the airport by 5:00. Everybody was starved. I called off the search and asked Olly to take us straight to the airport.

Dusseldorf airport at 1:30 in the morning was like an empty cathedral. Our footsteps echoed off the high ceiling. The one bar open had six people in it. Four of them were us.

After beer and sandwiches we felt a little better. Mark and I each selected a row of four seats in the waiting area. I hooked one arm through the straps of my suitcase, briefcase and guitar case, put on a sleep mask and was out like a light. Darren and Franher stayed up drinking beer until they were surrounded by coffee drinkers. They said Mark and I looked like a homeless camp among the prim 5:00 am businesspeople.

I actually felt pretty good. We were in the chute home.

On the road out of Prague we hit a detour through the rolling Czech countryside and tiny villages where eight-year-old kids smoked cigarettes. Then we hit the highway again, and — bang — we were back in Germany, with its yellow biodiesel fields, giant windmills and no-speed-limit autobahn.

Friday’s gig was at the Kesselhaus in Singwitz, near Bautzen, east of Dresden. When we first drove up we wondered if we were in the right place - an old brick industrial building out in the woods by the River Spree. But the owner, Andreas, greeted us and pulled up the garage door of a loading dock that opened straight onto the stage. He told us that the building was a 100-year-old gunpowder factory. (Kesselhaus means “boiler house.”) Andreas, a psychologist during the week, runs the club on weekends with the help of his wife and son. A family working together not for profit but for the love of music was a pattern we saw over and over again in Germany, but one we see only rarely in the States. How could anyone not love people with so much heart? This was a fun gig.

At the Kesselhaus we discovered Jever (pronounced “Yay-ver”), a north German pilsner with a unique bite. I wonder if we can swing an American endorsement?

Saturday we drove north of Dresden to Lauchhammer and a club called Real Music. The building started in 1905 as a tavern and dance hall, then served half a century as a Catholic church until Ralf and Iris found it in 2005 and restored it to its original purpose.

Ralf works during the week as a commercial artist. He offered to take us out and show us the large posters for our show that he’d made and put up all over town. Then he said, “Oh, but, no, we took them all down.”

“Why?” we asked.

“Well,” Ralf said, “the truth is there is a Nazi rally in town here today. I don’t know why they come here. No one wants them here. They go around to different towns and have these rallies - maybe 50 Nazis surrounded by several hundred people with cameras. We do not want any trouble here at the club tonight, so we went around yesterday and took all the posters down. We hope they won’t find out about the show. We’ve hired extra security.”

That explained a poster I’d seen on the street: Lauchhammer gegen [against] Nazis. The word “Lauchhammer” was pasted over another town name.

This was our last show in Germany, and it was a good one to go out on. Everyone had a lot of fun — even, apparently, the Nazis. Mark’s mom, Katie, was dancing in the crowd when a guy bumped her gently and started dancing with her. When the song ended he offered to buy her a beer. Then Katie saw the swastika on his shirt.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I’m too old to have another beer.”