2019 was our 30th anniversary as a band even though, because things have been on hiatus for most of the decade, there wasn’t much to-do about it at this end (like say, a series of shows at a now-gone Maxwell’s, (also my favorite thing I’ve written on here) for ex.). You can read a more about those medieval beginnings here where typically late to my/our own party, I'll be posting a few things about music’s least-impressive 30-year run over the next week or so (that’s, um, January 2020).
For me at least though, the last ten years have been a funny almost holding-pattern, at least as far as music goes. Or maybe how time passed was just way different this last decade than it had been, partly due the never-ending album chore but also partly due the weird things raising children does to one’s perception of time. And from me, re: time, that’s really saying something.
So looking back over the last ten years, I sorta think of three main things, again just for me..
First, there was some bad, mostly health stuff, that’s ended good, or maybe it was good that came in dressed to the party as bad:
a sort of anaesthesia-induced imagined near-death experience while I was hilariously unknowingly near actual death, which sounds over-dramatic, I know, but it’s almost weirder it happened. But that was skirted, along with numerous other pneumonias, but they all got better. Myeloma, but it’s at bay right now.
And then focal dystonia (I’ll leave it to googling), the weird one I day-to-day think about more, funny enough, but talk about less. Partially ‘cause, well, how much can one really talk about one's boring infirmities plus I’ve been so lucky with the other things. Partially ‘cause it’s driven me more bonkers since I self-identify (wrongly) as a guitar player. And partially ‘cause it makes me sound even more like I’m falling apart faster than a pro-Trump argument. But here too, I’ve almost totally figured a work-around for it - I now play with my fingers extended & flat across the strings, with a roll of tape on my 3rd finger to short-circuit the brain feedback loop (crazy, non? that took more than the last decade to come up with). So yeah, in part, all part of life in one’s fifties but so...good.
Then there was the bad that made no bones about being bad, depressingly bad (literally), and that was the almost exactly ten-year ironic Odyssey of this:
…the glorious maaaaagic of working this next album in the room off the kitchen as world’s oldest dabbler. If working on this record had been an Eastwood western it would’ve been the Bad, the Bad and the Badly. Or maybe a Fistful of Bad.
But that’s also at its end. So…also now good, along with the bad&ugly.
And last, while often difficult/maddening/confounding etc., the straight-up good has been raising the three youngsters, esp. as the at-home parent, with Rachel.
With this new decade...maybe it’s ‘cause they’re all in school full days now (for the last two years) and the record’s done (ten years work but also mostly all done/re-changed/finshed & finalized in those same last two, precisely “because” the kids were in full school days [cue: Stanley Clarke]), but it feels like I’m moving into some new phase, which for me have often fit neatly into my own decades (my 20’s, my 30’s etc.), this time seeming to fit neatly into the calendar’s. We’ll see.
How about you, how was yours? That you’re here to even answer that 1.7 decades after the last album is pretty crazy and always, always appreciated.