Back in Montreal.

It's funny how your life overlaps, and youc an be in the same place in the same way at the same time, only time has gone on and things are different but somewhow very much unchanged.

Last July I was here with my band from Brooklyn, and we had just made a record and I was out of money and, thought I did not see it yet, nevertheless had become a person very, very changed.

The July before that, even, I had sold most of what I had and moved with a guitar and suitcase and very little cash from Denton, Texas, to the middle of New York simply because I felt if I did not, I might decay beyond the point of ever coming home. (Incidentally, while I have been in Montreal THIS year, a gang of young men firebombed the bar district in my old neighborhood, lest it be destroyed instead by impending contractors and good old American Progress.)

In the two years since, I have at various points spent three quarters of my monthly income simply making rent; moved in with a Moroccan couple and a violently intolerable parrot in an attempt to pare away at this percentage; gotten over my fear of my hands on my guitar; made three records as an unintended document of the way this fear diminished; fallen in and out of love more than I care to admit; developed and learned to laugh at the worst insomnia I can imagine; begun to drink too much and learned to laugh at that as well; played music in Brooklyn, New Mexico, Boston, Hawaii, Montreal... Found more music within myself than I thought possible. Found msyelf (at last!) inside the music I found at first inside of me. Become afraid of the self I found. Learned to laugh at that one, too. Got over being alone. Learned to carry around inside me, like all thse burning little notes I eventually set to page, a sense of being home.

Now I am two years older and three records later and I am here again, to play again, and finishing the polishing on the very first recording that I set out tow years ago to make and have in many ways already moved beyond.
When I return to New York in mid-July it will be as if these two years had not occurred at all. My rent will be what it was when I first encoutnered that huge and crazy city I have had to call home. I will have no money and no future really set in stone. I will be with the same people, see the same skyline, do the same things.
It is like starting over with the same hopelessly clean slate stretching far in front of me and in many ways I feel like I am overlapping myself, year after year, crossing time and again through the self-same plane.

If it weren`t for my brisk New York demeanor, my pierced and widened earlobes and short ciyt hair, my new home within my own 2-years-older skin... and these recordings--frozen moments in this unfolding, artifacts that tell us yes, you may be here again (and again, and again), but you are moving, and though it may not look like it, what with being in the same place and all, at last you have let yourself go and realized after two years have always been swerving into something new.

Also, these days I have better gigs. And my guitar, now well-traveled where last year it was more or less untamed, has worn these changes well.