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Here, Doggie Doggie

September 29, 2021

A therapist friend was making a point about the ability of pets to sense the emotional stance of their human partners and provide support … and it struck me that this is probably the least surprising thing about dogs and cats. I commented on Facebook:

Pets, dogs especially, from an evolutionary perspective, owe their existence to their ability to read us better than we can read ourselves. If only dogs could talk (and we listened), it might be a very different world. Not sure what it says about me that I’m not a pet person.

Ever since that moment 20,000 years ago, when dogs threw their lot in with a shaggy hominid, it’s been the two of us against the world. And it’s worked out great — for dogs. How else would these little mongrels live high on the hog, ensconced in fine digs and women’s purses, at the right hip of the planet’s preeminent species, with none of the emotional and intellectual baggage of having to solve the ecological and existential conundrums that haunt humans? They filled the psychosocial/evolutionary niche of therapist before people knew it existed, and generally at a steep discount to their human counterparts.

Well played, dog.

Credit: Photo by Catalin Pop on Unsplash
‘People die, but love doesn’t’

August 18, 2021

Those are the words of my minister that are consoling me this week. Mia’s godmother Caitlin Yakscoe died Sunday morning at the precious age of 30. She has been seriously ill since we’ve known her and I haven’t seen her since Mia’s baptism more than three years ago.

As I get older, I am increasingly confronted by pain, suffering and death. And honestly, I don’t know how we, as people, do it. How do we get through even a day of pain and suffering when we know where it’s headed? And yet we do. Because we are not just these magnificent, beautiful, flawed and ultimately unreliable bodies. We are will. We are spirit. We are despair. We are denial. We are grief. We are hope. We are love.

If you loved Katy and you showed her that, even knowing she would die someday soon, it mattered. She lived years with her life’s conclusion hanging low upon her. It is a miracle of sorts.

If you loved Katy, but didn’t want to get too close, because you feared the sadness or dying or didn’t think it would matter, I think I understand, and the good news is, it’s OK. Others did, too. The truth is, you’ll have another chance. It’s the nature of living and dying.

A fear many of us share is that loving a losing cause will break us.

And we’re right. It will.

But the only chance we stand in this world that, left to its own logic, will ultimately let us down is to believe in the breaking open. Open to God. To our better selves. To each other. To the universe. To something more than this game of decline and decay.

Katy persevered in painful, difficult times. She did her best, and her time of carrying this burden has ended. Amen. Her goddaughter happily carries her name into the future. I know this because Sunday morning, as Katy was breathing her final breaths in this world, Mia was in my house and I was teasing her, calling her “cheese fry” or another of my names, and she said, “Grandguy, you’re so silly. I’m Mia Caitlin.” She said it twice. That stuck with me when I heard the news about Caitlin.

We live in those who remember us, and those who love Caitlin carry her forward. As long as she is remembered, she lives. This life within others when we are no longer physically present is one I place my confidence in. There are a lot of stories about our selves and what comes next. I don’t trust those. I trust people and their memories.

Rest in peace, Caitlin Yakscoe. You are a child of god and mystery and love.
Down-and-Outers, Global Edition

August 15, 2021

There’s a lot going on in the world and it has me wanting to get back to writing for other people.

So let’s start with the thing I didn’t expect to resonate with me this week: Nanci Griffith.

Griffith, a Texas singer-songwriter who enjoyed her greatest success in the late ‘80s/early ’90s, passed away Friday at age 68. I haven’t listened much lately, but she was an absolute staple as my tastes grew twangier in the years after leaving school. (She and John Hiatt were staples on the Portland, Maine radio station I listened to while working up there.) She has this high, delicate voice and is a very powerful poet — think Tift Merritt, crossed with a Texas bar room. Her albums, especially Late Night Grande Hotel and Other Voices, Other Rooms (which was all covers delivered through her musical prism) opened up a whole world of music to me.

On Late Night Grande Hotel is a song, The Down-and-Outer, about a person who just can’t cross over to the American Dream. The second verse gets right to it:

I won’t hurt your family
I don’t want a house there on your street
And I know you think that I’m
As lazy as a hobo’s sigh
Now, you call me down ’n’ outer
If there’s a way out
I’ve not found ‘er
I only want to earn my piece of America

As lazy as a hobo’s sigh …

Like I said, the lady could write a line. And she gets at the essential truth. Nobody chooses to be down ’n’ out. Nobody chooses to be born in Port au Prince or Kabul or Shreveport … all people want is to be known and valued.

Anyway, I’ve been listening to Nanci Griffith this weekend when it seems like every down-and-out country (Haiti, Afghanistan) is buckling under bad fortune or worse intentions, mixed with a hefty dose of incompetence or inattention. Or all of the above. And there’s plenty going on here in America, with our own Down-and-Outers. It’s enough to make my eyes roll back in my head and my brain to beg, look away. Yet I keep remembering my experience in Haiti, which tells me, These are real people, with real lives. They laugh, they cry, they dream, they despair, they die, they hustle, they rest, they grieve, they remember. They persevere. And I wonder what can I do to honor and help these very real people from this position of privilege? (I ended up donating to the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, which has connections to groups on the ground in the country.)

No larger answers this weekend, but I’m thinking about what is not earned but owed to these people, and feeling sad that this world’s answer is awfully little. And about another song from Late Night, San Diego Serenade (written by Tom Waits), and the line that closes it’s chorus:

I never heard the melody till I needed the song

Desperately needing that melody about now.

If you want to dive into Nancy Griffith, Late Night Grande Hotel is a good start.

==

Some things to consider …

If you haven’t read George Packer’s Four America in The Atlantic, I heartily recommend you do. It won’t solve anything, but it allowed me to think about how I map against his four countries (Free, Smart, Real, Just) in one.

My favorite music act these days, Jason Isbell, is insisting that concert-goers provide proof vaccination or get tested before attending his concerts on the current tour. In fact, he canceled a show when the venue wouldn’t meet that test. Here he is explaining his stance. My favorite line:

I’m all for freedoms, but if you’re dead, you don’t have freedoms at all … It’s life and then it’s liberty, and then it’s the pursuit of happiness, those are in order of priority.

Apple has been making some very interesting decisions about how it will keep tabs on your iPhone, regarding child sexual abuse material (CSAM). While it currently concerns this most abhorrent of “content”, the ability to scan one’s phone opens up many possibilities. I recently returned to the iPhone for security, among a short list of reasons (iMessage, Photos, and the weather app Dark Sky were the others), and I’m now wondering if perhaps I overvalued Apple’s approach vs. Android. Also, my Pixel 4a simply worked better. My iPhone 12 is kinda dumb and clunky in comparison. This might be considered heresy, but there it is.
Sad News from Haiti

July 8, 2021

The people of Haiti have never deserved the hand they’ve been dealt, and that only got worse early this morning, when news broke that the president, Jovenel Moise, known as “the Banana Man,” was assassinated and his wife wounded when an as-yet unidentified team of commandos attacked his home near Port-au-Prince.

Moise is a complicated and corrupt guy in a complicated situation, which is basically the MO on everyone and everything in this island nation, which has paid for two-plus centuries now for having the temerity to throw off colonialist France (and defeat a Napoleonic army!) and become the White World’s worst fear—a nation formed from a slave uprising.

The guy to turn to to understand this is Jonathan Katz, who was a reporter on the scene when Haiti’s calamitous earthquake struck in 2010. He wrote this book about that time in the island’s history. Another good follow, on Twitter, is Michael Diebert, from Lancaster, Pa., of all places. He has spent a lot of time reporting on Haiti and places south of the United States. His feed has a lot of gunfire currently.

Sadly, this is only the latest hardship to visit itself upon the more than 11 million people who call Haiti home. I’m not the one to try to chronicle or make much sense of its past or present, but here’s a link with some thoughts from 2018 that includes links to some resources to better understand the place — some histories and a set of episodes on the Haitian revolution from podcaster Mike Duncan — as well as some posts and poems from my visit. I would like to go back some day, but that day isn’t looking like it’s coming soon.
The Great Shift

June 29, 2021
Virginia and I went on a Saturday night date (to the Mann Music Center to see Ballet X after a dinner out) for the first time in 16 months and then attended an outdoor church music event the next afternoon and it’s starting to feel like we’re increasingly out of the teeth of the pandemic. (I’ll worry about variants on another day.)

I am very, very curious what things are going to look like on the other side of this, if we ever truly get all the way to the other side (see variants), but for now I feel like alI I know is that there has been a Great Shift. I feel it as if we’re on a ship and some enormous load has moved in the hold. The deck isn’t quite level, but nobody has yet been down in the hold to see what happened. Will it re-settle and we’ll come back to level? Will it keep rolling and we’ll capsize? Or are we just gonna float, a little off-kilter and bobbing, till we all learn to walk on this tilted deck as if this is the way it’s always been? I’m an optimist, and yet. There is some anxiety here.

I’ve been trying to comprehend the Great Shift. It seems that the way people understood the world or behaved in it has changed. A year-plus of retreating into our homes and very limited social bubbles if you were privileged/lucky — or braving a deadly pandemic, if you weren’t — has provided some revelatory space. People have changed, I sense, but also that they don’t quite know how. I don’t either, but here are some lessons that, to me, people seem to have learned:
- The world can bend a lot when it has to. Things that were seemingly immutable (commutes, weddings, ballgames, live music, movie theaters, beers with the guys, book groups, dating, meeting other humans, monetary policy) either disappeared or were replaced by virtual doppelgängers that were more or less unsatisfactory. And those in-person things are coming back with a drip-drip-drippiness that’s much slower than the faucet-slammed-shut immediacy of March 2020.
- Or not. For a lot of people, the past year has created a distance that they welcome or prefer to the uncertainty of re-emerging. Either way, they’re satisfied with or resigned to the past year’s status quo.
- They have more say than they originally thought they had on some of these things and, this is important, that as they reconnect, they want things on their terms. Whether it’s no more supermarket trips or work commutes or going to church on Sunday mornings, if people don’t see value in their presence or attendance, they’ll insist on alternatives.
- The world is not unipolar. Hybrid might be 2021’s Word of the Year. This will be the year of yes/and, not either/or. Or maybe it will be the year of no/and, as in I won’t do that, but I would do this with some of that. One thing that I don’t think many businesses have reckoned with is that the past year was simple. Work went remote. Many employees haven’t seen an office in more than a year. As companies begin to navigate a world where people work at home AND in an office, it’s going to be a) complicated and b) expensive. You’re going to have to equip both workplaces or risk a productivity trough in one of them. Simply saying, if you don’t like it, come to the office, isn’t going to cut it.
- They can get away with no as an answer. Don’t like the conditions an employer places on a return to the office? Find a new job. Don’t like the idea of returning to work, period? Then don’t. Don’t like your partner? Well, people seem to have decided that can wait. People have embraced the ambiguities and figured out how to hold their breath. It might be a long time before some of them come up for air.
In short, people want what they want, it isn’t what they had before the pandemic, and they think they have the agency to make it happen, one way or another.

I expect this is going to manifest itself in the biggest mixed bag of a recovery we’ve seen in my lifetime. It’s going to lead to a tumultuous economic year, an explosion of cash being thrown around in pursuit of self-actualization and fulfillment of wishes and missions and delusions, and, sadly, an acceleration of some of the trends toward social isolation and bubble building. I think it’s going to be bad for political polarization, because as people rebuild their social graphs they are going to consider their choices through a partisan lens, which could exacerbate the kind of political sorting that has already become too much a factor in who hangs with whom. Emerging from this with political affiliation as a primary lens is one of the saddest fruits of the pandemic season. If a global pandemic, driven by a remorseless virus whose only affiliation is vulnerability isn’t enough to get us all pulling in one direction, I fear for the Commons. And the Commonwealth.

Also in the sad category, I think education is going to remain a mess for the next year, as unvaccinated kids will remain the biggest pool of viral potential for coronavirus variants. I expect schools, kids, parents and teachers will continue to be stressed and whipsawed by that reality all the way into 2022. The degree to which this is true will depend a lot of your zip code. Vaccinated zip codes will suffer less, those with a lot of vaccine holdouts more.

In short, there’s a lot of tonnage moving around in the hold. We could re-settle into a Better Way, a more seaworthy existence. There are promising signs that people realize it’s time to value sustainability. But it could flip us. I’m an optimist, but I’m also a little worried about slipping off this listing ship. Or that the ship we’re on is about to be tossed by Climate Change in a way that could make all this epidemiological and sociological hullaboo seem like small potatoes—think the lords and ladies of Westeros scrambling for power until, in the penultimate episodes, they notice the unsettling, quiet guy with the blue eyes riding an ice dragon at the head of a zombie army in Game of Thrones. But that’s for another day, and another post.

Above all, I’m curious. And curious how you think it’ll sort itself out.
How Is Church Going to Change?

March 28, 2021
A year ago, the pandemic was upon us, states were declaring lockdowns and church services (along with most everything else) went online. It was a scary moment for anyone who loves their religious community, with lots of questions:
- Would people find online church services satisfying?
- Would they attend?
- Would they take part in church life beyond service?
- Would they support their religious community in a time of extreme dislocation?
The surprising thing is the answer has been more “yes” than “no” over the past year. As more religious communities move toward in-person gatherings (in Pennsylvania, such gatherings remains very limited, with communities either avoiding it wholly or severely limiting worshipers), my own sense is that the past year is going to usher in a very different world for religious communities in 2021 and beyond.

Here are the new ground rules that I see:
- Church is multiplatform. In my community, people from as far away as Arizona and Texas attend Sunday service. Our Wednesday mindfulness program includes a person from New York state who has never been part of a physical meeting of our community. These people are part of our community, we think there are more people who would benefit from our values and approach, and I expect we’ll continue to find ways to connect with them. When the time is right, I expect we’ll return to in-person services, but the schedule may be very different. Maybe we go from two Sunday services to one, to reduce resources needed and complexity for the physical event—but we add a livestream component that has a significant audience, both people who live at a distance and others who are physically near but decide it makes better sense for them to attend remotely.
- Church is a mix of live and produced events. This pandemic has questioned the need to meet physically, and I would not be surprised to see a move away from physical meetings every week and a hybrid approach that includes something like what church is right now for many people (a produced service pulled together ahead of time and made available on online platforms like Youtube and Vimeo) once a month. Maybe it’s the last Sunday of the month. Consider it the spiritual equivalent of work-from-home (which is another huge societal change due to covid).
- Church is asynchronous. Like Netflix, you can tune into church when it fits your schedule. Rather than choose between a morning hike and Sunday service on a gorgeous weekend morning, you can time-shift service to later that day, or Tuesday evening, or whenever. Church is no longer “appointment programming” in the way that it has been.
- Church remains about connection. The religious communities that survive and thrive in this environment will be able to meet people where they are AND provide a message and presentation that is valued and, to an extent, can outcompete the variety of experiences competing for attention. The message and execution need to be compelling and values-forward, in a way that makes spending the time either going to service or choosing it over other screen alternatives makes people feel good about their choice. There will be limited ability to guilt people into choosing religious community if it doesn’t impact their lives in some way.
In addition to screens, church will be especially challenged in the second half of the year, due to:
- pent up demand to travel
- pent up demand to see family and friends on weekends.
- people changing jobs
- people spending down money saved during the pandemic
It’s going to be a very distracted time, and religious communities that assume that as covid relents people will return to previous patterns are, I think, kidding themselves. The world has changed, and relevant religious communities will change with them.

Two summers ago, my community had a practice run on this unsettled time. We were displaced from our physical location and could not worship at our usual location for the summer. It felt like an existential threat. We went “on the road” and spent a lot of good time, thought and effort on our community’s place in the world. I can speak only for myself, but it made me feel vulnerable for our community.

A year later, poof!, that physical site again went away. It was unavailable to us and, even more unimaginably, there’s noplace else to go. So we re-formed community on the fly, missing zero services in the switch from live to virtual services. We did it for a full year, with the sense that we can do this till we do what comes next.

I dearly look forward to “next”, but I also feel less threatened about living in this liminal, “between” time. I’m confident in our resilience and ability to work skillfully with the facts on the ground to create the next “next”. My prayer is that everyone is thinking about how to connect in a world where many people will not be comfortable gathering even after the epidemiological “alls-clear” is given, because there is a lot of healing that needs to occur before everyone is ready to gather in one indoors, physical space again.
How Do We Catch Kids Up in a Post-COVID World?

March 24, 2021

As we catch a glimmer of the world that will be after COVID-19 goes away or becomes endemic or just stops stopping the world from happening, I’m curious about what might happen in that world. Here is the first in a couple pieces on what I imagine comes next. (Disclaimer: I am not an expert on health, vaccines, education, real estate or consumer trends. Just curious.)

We need to make up a year, but how?

Listen, everybody has had a shitty past year, but people with children, young and older, have had an especially shitty time. Families have spent a year in very close quarters, with work and schooling occurring in the most difficult way possible.

Even worse, the disruption to learning means that many, many young people are now basically at an educational deficit. I have heard innumerable stories of talented young learners who were disabled or disengaged by the pandemic. A colleague said that a business contact was saying that at some point employers are going to identify a cohort of young people as unhireable because they simply missed too much learning at a particularly vulnerable time. I think that’s unlikely, but I do know that kids are behind and something needs to be decided about how to act (or not) to address it.

So how to catch them up? One obvious way would be to put kids in class through the summer, to essentially make up the lost days and lost lessons. One summer likely won’t do it; this could be a three-summer project. It would require a rewrite of curricula to acknowledge an 11-month learning year, but it’s possible. Much of the world already does it. And it would probably require an influx of teachers to create a sustainable model. Heck, it could also serve as a part of an argument for raising teacher pay.

Once you’ve lived in this post-COVID response for 3 years, I can imagine that a diminished summer vacation—say, between July 4 and the second week in August—could become a new normal. We’ve been saying since the end of World War II that the summer break is an anachronism, maybe COVID is the thing that ends it.

Along the same lines we might see a re-working of summer camps. Maybe the experientially wide-ranging camps that exist for people with financial means trade away some canoe and craft time for science, foreign languages, algebra 2 and trig. For those who don’t go to sleep-away outside their community, some version of day camp/summer school that is more mandate than option would be possible. Would parents welcome the extra structure after more than a year of going it largely alone? A definite maybe.

All of this would cost money, but these are unique circumstances and money is apparently not a constraint on anything right now (which is not a critique, but an observation). Maybe the Feds simply pick up the tab as a strategic intervention to protect a generation from underachievement and diminished prospects.

Whatever the response, it seems that summer is at least part of the solution and I imagine this is a multiyear, moonshot-type effort to get an entire generation of kids back on level. That would be better than a universal hold-back, right?

(Photo by Anna Earl on Unsplash)

I’m curious what you think. Please comment below.
Songs to Get Through a Pandemic, the Closer

March 16, 2021
I missed a day for the first time in two weeks on this, so I’m going to accept that I’ve got some blockers the rest of this week and close out my commentary on my pandemic anniversary playlist.

Starting Over, Chris Stapleton

Already a favorite. Stapleton starts off with this neo-country, “Tennessee Whiskey” persona and has proven himself to be one helluva songwriter. This song feels fresh and honest and I love that he partners with his partner, Morgane, as the backing singer. As we move closer to the re-start, this is my theme song.

All in It Together, Mavis Staples

Mavis is foundational music and the fact she just keeps doing it, and preaching it, and singing it, is inspiring. I love that she’s collaborated with Jeff Tweedy, it’s good for both of them, and I saw her at Shoalsfest two Octobers back, and it was apparent how much affection there was between her and Jason Isbell. They get it. We all get it. Mavis is a treasure.

Heat Lightning Rumbles in the Distance, Patterson Hood

The Drive-By Truckers frontman and co-founder brought together Southern rock and blues and punk with this reverence and reckoning of the South in a way that has been potent for two decades now. The Truckers’ 2017 album American Band was The Rising of the Trump era, a howl and a callout for everything going on that allowed it. This song is from a solo album, following his move from Alabama to Oregon, and I enjoy how grounded it is.

Keep On Smilin’, Wet Willie

Hood, Isbell and Mike Cooley do a great cover of this song to close out a reunion concert at the Shoals Theater in Florence, Ala., in 2016, so I went and found it afterward. I probably should have ended the playlist right here, with this chorus …

Keep on smilin’ through the rain, laughin’ at the pain
Rollin with the changes til the sun comes out again
Keep on smilin’ through the rain, laughin’ at the pain
Rollin with the changes, singin’ this refrain

But I didn’t.

Everybody Wants to Rule the World, Tears for Fears

I can’t really explain it. It seemed like a way to end. The huge rolling chorus sounds like an ending. So it is.
Songs to Get Through a Pandemic, #14, Ruby Falls

March 14, 2021

To be honest, I don’t know if this one gets you through, or if it pulls you down. It’s the remembrance of Katie Crutchfield, who records as Waxahatchee, of a friend who died of a heroin overdose. She calls this “my song for all people who struggle with that kind of thing.” It’s a beautiful song, and aren’t we all struggling with grief and loss this past year? If we’re lucky, it’s a wanting for purpose, the disconnection from those we love, the desire to make new connections, the realizations and the hopelessness. If we’re unlucky, it’s a person we’re missing. This song hits me right there, and deeper—and because it helps me to name this feeling and this time, it’s a blessing.

A friend posted a pandemic-themed playlist today titled To Make Some Sense of What You’ve Seen, we have a sizable shared space in the Venn diagram of our musical interests (though his is far larger) and the only song shared between his list and mine is this one. That seems unlikely and inevitable.

The gutting turn in Ruby Falls for me is when Crutchfield sings:

Real love don’t follow a straight line
It breaks your neck, it builds you a delicate shrine

Earlier this weekend a friend shared her reflections on everything that had happened in the past year—she lost her mom, she became a grandma, she read 60 books and watched Tiger King, turned 60 and headed into a fourth decade of marriage. At the end she said she drew strength from this from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

What lies before us and behind us is nothing compared to what lies within us.

I’m a Unitarian Universalist and Emerson is one of our north stars. And yet, I don’t think Emerson offers us much in this moment. (I’ve felt like this before.) I wrote back:

Not to argue with Emerson, but the most important thing for me is what lies BETWEEN us. It’s also the thing that has been hardest living in distanced times. Life doesn’t stop, just our ability to connect about it. It’s why it’s been worth it to me to take some modest risks to grab lunch with [her husband/my friend]. Hoping that as the days get longer, and the vaccine gets into more people’s arms, that we all start the Great Re-Connecting. I’m looking forward to it beyond words.

Because I don’t think we can survive this alone. We need each other. And I so appreciated my minister Rev. Lee Paczulla’s message this morning that as we begin to move beyond this awful moment, we forget it at our peril. If you have 20 minutes, scroll 17:30 into the recording of the service.

The clear-eyed world we step into next. The aching friendship that Crutchfield writes about in Ruby Falls. The resilience of return. These are why I hope. These are why I persevere. May we turn toward this new life remembering the imprint of these past 12 months. May we once again reconnect with our loved ones and make new friends, who charm us, love us, and break our hearts.

Full lyrics
Songs to Get Through a Pandemic #13, I’d Die for You

March 13, 2021

Margo Price has the kind of voice and taste that gets you crowned as country music’s next big thing, so it’s a bit of a surprise to see her third album, That’s How Rumors Get Started, is a rock album (with Sturgill Simpson, of all people, as producer). And this is the snarliest song, and one of her best yet.

Here’s what Margo told The Ringer about the song when asked who it was for.

I’m singing it to my husband and my children. There’s just a whirlwind of chaos going on right now, and it feels apocalyptic at times, even before we entered the Upside-Down or whatever this bad episode of Black Mirror is. But it’s like us holding on to each other in a dystopian world that we’re living in. It’s absolutely crazy just to think about what’s changed since I wrote that song, yet everything was all still there with the corruption and the greed and the hate. All of that was still there, but now it just feels like everybody had a chance to pause and digest what was going on.

Full lyrics
Songs to Get Through a Pandemic #12, When I Get to Heaven

March 12, 2021

John Prine’s passing due to COVID-19 is one of the many tragedies of the past year, but Prine had the last laugh with this song, which as an artist was about as charming an F-you to the pandemic as one could imagine. And yet, at the same time, he talks to love and family and all the things that live on with us and beyond us. Here, he talks about what he’ll do in heaven.

And then I’m gonna go find my mom and dad
And good old brother Doug
Well I bet him and cousin Jackie are still cuttin’ up a rug
I wanna see all my mama’s sisters
’Cause that’s where all the love starts
I miss ’em all like crazy
Bless their little hearts

Prine has his limits. A lot of his songs sound a lot like his other songs and his voice is his voice, especially after throat cancer stole some range. (My wife has never been able to warm to him.) He wrings about all you can out of three chords. But my god, the guy could write a song and tell a story in a couple minutes (Lake Marie, anyone? Hello in There? ). And I’m glad that Brandi Carlile will honor him at Sunday’s Grammys. His last song, I Remember Everything, is about being the one still here and thinking that in real life, it went the other way, really makes you think. Rest in peace, John. Enjoy the cocktail and that cigarette.
Songs to Get Through a Pandemic #11, Tell Me When It’s Over

March 11, 2021

Back in October, 2019, which seems like a decade ago, Virginia and I went with our friends Majid and Mary to Nashville, then headed south to Florence, Ala., for Shoalsfest, a concert pulled together by Jason Isbell.

Even though it was October, it was 95 degrees and we watched Mavis Staples basically melt in the late afternoon sun. After 45 minutes, she sang herself off stage. As night came, Sheryl Crow took the stage — and she proceeded to remind us that Sheryl Crow is a huge f’ing deal. She blew through a killer set, with somewhere between 6and 10 songs that damn near everyone in the Western Hemisphere can identify immediately.

It’s a long way from 1993, when Virginia and I went to the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, N.J., to see John Hiatt, who was supporting Slow Turning, and the opening act was this funky act from California we’d never heard of, until six months later, when we started to recognize these songs on the radio from that night on the Jersey Shore. We’d seen Sheryl Crow before she was Sheryl Crow. She didn’t just blow up after that. For close to a decade, she was HUGE.

Which makes some of her recent decisions so interesting: after some fallow time, to go to Nashville, to do something more rootsy. She did an album, Threads, with lots of folks I like. This song, with Chris Stapleton, is one of my favorites from the album. And after a full year of COVID-19, I am literally ready for someone to tell me that it’s over. That, being this. Enjoy!

The full playlist