Notebook
Three Ring Bender: The HOOT Setlist!
Ok, good people, get your singing voices warmed up, tuned up, liquored up, whatever it takes, as we are having us a SING at this month’s Three Ring Bender. The Hoot will be in residence. And here’s a wobbly approximation, at best, of what might be sung, so that you may all come ready to join the chorus. Please suggest edits! Additions! These all link to youtube vids, so go learn some songs if you like. In no particular order:
I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore
Hard Times (the Gillian one)
Man of Constant Sorrow (ours I don’t think is the melody you know…)
Life after NYC? I didn’t have to look too far.
I’ve lived in apartments Brooklyn for the last 20 years. For 16 of those, I was childless. Since then, I’ve had two children and my love affair with where I live waxes and wanes, as does everybody’s with whom I’ve ever had a conversation here.
In the spaces between working, caring for my kids, and playing music, I am often, somewhere on the sidelines of my brain, wondering about a place we might move to that won’t be as “difficult”. It will be naturally lush and wild, yet I won’t feel isolated. The winters won’t be unbearably long and gray, and I will not have to drive my car everywhere. This wonderland will be endowed with excellent public schools and rich in diverse, thoughtful, artistic, non-pretentious and funny people. It sure would be refreshing if it wasn’t full of only the privileged, too. Oh, and please let’s make it within two hours of the very city from which I wish to flee.
Though I ruminate on friends’ recommendations and pore over real estate sections and websites, I can’t seem to come up with any real life places that I have been convinced by or compelled to move to. As a matter of fact, the only places that meet my criteria – where I feel THAT FEELING – are in my children’s books.
I want to live in the places depicted in, yes, storybooks. And that said, the following are my top choices:
All the World (Liz Garton Scanlon and Marla Frazee)
I owe this to Marla Frazee’s fantastic illustrations of nature and community. I belong in this landscape (is it Hawaii?) and in this community of (make believe) families, complete with bounteous gardens, raw and undeveloped oceanside, a beautiful farmer’s market. I can smell the soup and fresh baked rolls in the town’s restaurant and I long to look out at the sea from their pier at night. I hear myself playing my guitar in their music-making gatherings. I admit I have a crush on one of the dads in the book, and I even like his wife okay. She seems nice, though I’m not sure we’d connect. But I’m married anyway, plus I’m no home-wrecker.
The Napping House (Audrey and Don Wood)
I cannot stop staring at the first page, the house in the rain. It reminds me of somewhere I’ve been, though I can’t seem to place it in any hard memory of my own. A quiet and almost – but not quite – melancholic feeling of wonder washes over me whenever I look at this picture, the spell that’s cast by arresting rain.
Before You Came (Written by Patricia MacLachlan and Emily MacLachlan Charest, Illustrated by David Diaz)
When I’m in the mood for a little psychedelia, I choose this one. The people are oddly a tad creepy, like those in a wax museum, but they’re colorful and the environment can’t be beat. Flowers, rivers and canoes, a sort of bitchy cat but a fantastic dog, and a guitar-playing father. They even have a hammock complete with sparkling lights where one can “read all day and sometimes into the night.” I must admit my mind immediately went to the mosquitos, but I figure when I start my new life I’ll get over that; after all, I’m currently still a city-slicker.
Spring is Here (Taro Gomi)
It’s the grass. It looks so lush. It’s the same landscape depicted throughout the seasons, and I definitely am most taken by “The quiet harvest arrives.” Heck, the girl is playing a recorder in that wheat field – we don’t do that in the city! (Nor would I ever in the country but that’s beside the point.) Gomi has another book, My Friends, in which a girl learns all kinds of emotional and physical life skills from a handful of wild and dangerous animals. Unlikely, yes – and definitely cool.
Pancakes For Breakfast (Tomie DePaola)
From this woman’s hairstyle to her lifestyle, I want it all. We wake up with her on a sunshiny winter day in what I think of as Vermont. No dialogue, but captivating illustrations of this happy widow’s simple desire to make a delicious breakfast. Her companions include her dog and cat, and in an effort to avoid being a spoiler, I’ll say the “action” of this wordless story takes her on all kinds of resourceful adventures just yards from her adorable, snow laden home. In this moment, I’ll say I could get used to her butter-churning, cow-milking way of life.
I am a Bunny (Ole Risom and Richard Scarry)
It begins, “I am a bunny. My name is Nicholas. I live in a hollow tree.” This book, I’ve decided, most evokes my current existence; the hollow tree is not unlike the one bedroom apartment I share with my husband, two children and cat. Nicholas has more space actually, due to his solitary lifestyle, and of course a way better landscape with larger-than-life butterflies, dandelion seeds, gently floating leaves and fluffed-out snowflakes. Needless to say, I spend inordinate amounts of time with each page of this book, and I do believe I would make the lateral move to that tree for the view alone.
Of course, I want the Goodnight Moon room. Who doesn’t? It has occurred to me that this COULD POSSIBLY BE an apartment, since you never see anything but sky out that window. But let’s face it – it’s probably not, right?
The Getaway
We try not to get too thick on the website here with details of our lives, per se. We’ve all got details, and lots of ’em. But there are two particular life-details which this post needs in order to mean anything: (1) our two and half year old daughter Hazel, who’s pretty amazing if you ask us, but who, like all kids who don’t have their driver’s license yet, is pretty much always around either one or the other of us, and (2) our dumb cellphones and computers, which for reasons that are harder to explain, are pretty much always around both of us.
We have a bunch of writing we’ve been wanting to do for a Little Silver recording this winter, and have been struggling to find the time. Right or wrong, we attribute this in no small way to Hazel, cellphones, and computers, though maybe not in that order. So this last weekend we made arrangements with Hazel’s kind grandparents, and with the kind cellphone-impervious mountains of Virginia, for a getaway from those things that largely order our normal lives.
I’d put preachy revelations about “self-actualization” in the same gooey category as overly personal blogging, and really, who needs either of them… But I will say this: the weekend, the rest, the writing, were all pretty great. I seriously don’t know what took us so long.
Here are some photos. We look forward to you hearing the songs soon!
Little Silver is staying in Brooklyn
You know how sometimes no news is good news? That’s tonight.
Steve and I had a two week flirtation with moving to our namesake town, Little Silver. (Actually, we’re the namesake, aren’t we?) We got wind of a house that we fell in love with, with a greenhouse attached. And we thought, shit, we’re going, we’re leaving Brooklyn. We may even have to change the name of our band, or – a close second – forever lie about where we live. But kick back with a beer and breathe a sigh of relief. We are still Little Silver, and we are still in Brooklyn.
It was not an obvious decision to stay, but we feel sure of it. We live in a pricey place (NY) with a child, in a one-bedroom apt. (This is not a plea to buy our records, though, heck – if you’re inspired, who am I to stand in your way?) We love the land over the water there, the house, the small monthly payment we’d pay to live in a four bedroom house with a music room. In the words of The Streets, “It was supposed to be so eeeeeeeaaaasy…” BUT, Hazel is asleep, Steve is out and I am currently on our fire escape watching a purple and orange sun that sets over NJ. (Sunsets are the one and only reason that New Yorkers look at NJ – or just above it – once a day, and that’s only if they’re not too busy.)
Truth be told, I am very happy to be right here.
We are playing two shows next week, opening for Hem in Philly and DC, and we are SO excited. You might think that because Steve is a member of Hem, this is a shoe-in, but it is not, so please join us for these super special shows… info here. We’d love to see you.
Public Apology
Steve and I have been crappy about posting, it’s true. We seemed to hibernate this winter, if that means writing, playing a couple of shows, taking care of family, and for Steve, releasing an album with Hem for the first time in 6 years. But it’s been blog-quiet.
Among that quiet, I read a friend of mine’s memoir through letters: Public Apology, In Which A Man Grapples with a Lifetime of Regret, Once Incident at a Time. Dave Bry and I went to high school together, in Little Silver, NJ. He was a year ahead of me, so I didn’t really know him until we sat next to each other in Physics class my junior year. We spent it just getting by, grade-wise, and writing each other vulgar notes. I don’t remember what we said, but it was an ongoing contest based on out-doing the last response. I remember feeling uber-clever, and I’m now quite confident that this too is worthy of regret. But thank god the evidence is missing.
I re-connected with him through an old high school friend, so we’d seen each other sporadically over the past 4 years. Then I got word that he was doing a few readings from his new book. So of course, I went.
I can’t really think of a better book premise – you mine everything you’ve ever regretted from your life, and then write an apology to the main co-star of each story. And I’ve never understood those who say ‘life’s too short to regret’ or something along those lines, when I am FULL of regret over ways I hurt others over some silly spur-of-the-moment comment or action. Or the worse stuff, those digs that I actually intended. I mean, what are people actually DOING while they’re busy not regretting? I need a tutor. But that’s an aside.
There are hilarious entries, including a letter to Jon Bon Jovi apologizing for tossing beer cans into his yard, while simultaneously demanding an acknowledgement of the weak-as-all-get-out lyrics to “Wanted Dead or Alive”. You can hear Dave’s building hysteria throughout the letter, simply in the punctuation. Brilliant. There are deep, cringing tales, like ruining a Bob Mould concert and getting publically told off by Bob himself before the encore. There are of course the cruel love apologies. There are the letters that open wide Dave’s teen-aged periods of self destruction and drug use, a result in some ways of the anxiety that accompanies the tragic desire to be accepted (as we all want in high school – hell, maybe forever -), and a diversion to avoid coping with his father’s terminal cancer.
I told Steve I couldn’t read Dave’s book before bed, as I’m vulnerable to stories of violence and the horrific things people seem to do to one another with regularity. I am basically a weakling. So I rationed myself to daytime subway rides. When I’d crack it open at night, Steve would gently ask me, “Do you really want to read that now? I mean, you said…” Right.
Would this book would punch the average reader in the gut the way it did me? I think so indeed. Dave writes with such honesty that you feel all the complications and messiness of being alive – how life is chopped up and uneven and there are some things you really never resolve. You just keep going. And maybe purge it all in a memoir. Then read it to everyone you know on your book tour, egad! Oh, and if I haven’t said as much, buy this book. Not because he’s my friend, though that does count. But because it holds the promise of side-splitting laughter. And it’s got its share of the dark side, as any self-respecting read should. I mean, I might have been able to write something like it. Except I’m pretty sure my letters would have closed with something like this:
So I’m sorry.
But you have to admit you were a total dick, too.
Love, Erika
My Guitar Rental
Steve and I trundled off the plane in Austin two days ago with a few suitcases full of clothes, pedals, cords and merch, our computers, a toddler and one guitar. Yes, only one guitar. I made the executive decision that I would rent an electric guitar down here from a local store because we had so much to bring with us, what with the kid and all. So last night my brother in law, Bruce, drove me across town to make my selection. I walked in, and a guy at the front desk asked what he could help me with. I told him that I was here to rent a guitar for the week. Here’s how that conversation went:
Me: I’m here to rent an electric guitar for the week.
Him: Ok, sure. For you?
Me: Yes.
Him: (Looking over my shoulder) Ok. (Pause.) Not for the guy in the Jeep?
Me: (I look over my shoulder to see Bruce reading The Onion in the front seat, his door open, one leg casually hanging out on the car’s edge. Longer Pause.) Uh, no. Still for me.
Him: Ok. How about you go pick one out?
He points to wall of guitars, so I proceed over there for a few minutes and choose a Fender Mustang. Mostly because Liz Phair plays one and secondly because it’s a gorgeous baby blue, and I haven’t played this color of guitar before. I’m excited. I return with it, they put it in a case, etc. and meanwhile, I’m asked to fill out their rental agreement. Name, address, band name, email, etc. Then… three personal references. Bruce is one of them, our friend Elizabeth, and I leave the third one blank since I don’t know anyone else who lives here. I mean, I know Patty Griffin lives here, but will she vouch for me if they call her? That’s the big question.
Him: Ok, we need three references, and one of them needs to be a relative. (By now Bruce has come in to hang out.)
Bruce: I’m a relative, her brother-in-law.
Him: (Ignoring Bruce, who, by the way is 6’8″ so it takes a practiced and professional eye to ignore him.) How about you put your mom down there?
Me: My mom? But she doesn’t live here.
Him: That’s okay. Put your mom down. That’ll be fine.
I really don’t remember the last time I had to list my mom as a reference for anything, but I guess the rental guy figures if I don’t get a decent reference from my mom, it’s pretty bad. Now I’m imagining him calling her:
Riiiinnnnng Riiiinnnng…
Hello? Erika rented a what? Oh, I see. So why are you calling me? Mmm hmmm. Well, I’m sure she’s good for it. (Click.)
Or…
“Hello? What? Why are you calling me? AGAIN?!!? THAT LITTLE… you know, she’s been this way for years and at some point I just had to cut her off…. Yeah, good luck! She’s probably in Mexico by now… hey, throw her in jail for all I care! If you can catch her, that is. She has to learn but that’ll never happen if I keep bailing her out!! I’VE HAD IT!!!!! (click.)
Regardless, I put down my mother’s New Jersey address and phone number. As he’s running my card ($1100 deposit, $18.40 for the actual rental for 1 week) – he makes conversation:
Him: So, you here for the holidays and just want a guitar to kick around on at home for the week?
Me: Kind of. I’m here for the holidays and we have two shows this week in Austin and Johnson City.
Him: (Look of utter incredulity.) Oh! You have shows?
At this point I’m wondering if I look like an alien or a werewolf and nobody who loves me has had the heart to tell me. Though actually, aliens and werewolves are pretty rock-n-roll. Maybe I just look like a totally boring mom? Who rents guitars to play on the couch with her girlfriends? (Which sounds fun, by the way, and I’m not above it.) Is it so confounding to imagine that I might actually need a piece of musical equipment to play music, maybe even in public?
(Radio silence). Guy gets up, walks toward back of store, out of sight. New guy shows up, hands me the receipt and guitar. I thank him and leave.
A Coney Island Tale – Volunteering in Sandy’s Aftermath
Our friend, Julie – (and the partner of Little Silver’s bass and keyboard player, David), wrote a stark and beautiful depiction of her volunteer effort this weekend in Coney Island. It’s been living under my skin ever since I read it, so I’m linking it here.
Too Much Joy?
So I had that last night, too much joy. Steve and I went with our friends Sean and Eric to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at the Meadowlands (if that’s still what it’s called) last night. It was an emotional roller coaster of a show, and we rode it. Along with 60,000 others, I suppose.
A few things, quick-like. Yes, I’m from New Jersey. It wasn’t cool when I was growing up to like this man’s music. Or at least, boys I found very difficult to relate to in high school,who grunted out one-word sentences, etc., liked Bruce Springsteen’s music. Girls thought he was cute. It was all lost on me. Then I heard Nebraska as an early 20 something. I think this story is many people’s story. So it goes, I loved the man, the songwriting, the depth, all of it. I met him a few times, which solidified my love. Plus he’s gotten even better looking with age, which has solidified that further. We’re solid, me and Bruce.
Do I think it’s cheesy? Sure. Do I love it for its pure abandon? Indeed I do. Do I dance and scream? Guess. As he’s getting older, he’s diving deeper into the spiritual side of things, as if the man’s spirit throughout his career hasn’t been bigger than life, bigger than the man himself, all along. But it’s almost like feeling that much joy, for me… well, it hurts. I think it’s in the same family of love I feel for our daughter. Just so much love, it makes me ache. It’s not just pure joy, it’s knowing that pure joy is transient, I guess. I found myself wishing I knew them personally, the Springsteens, so I could have this feeling again and again (read = totally unrealistic, not to mention ridiculous to imagine that their everyday is like that show). Mostly my ache came from the fact that at some point, Bruce Springsteen will die and there will not be this opportunity to be part of his congregation anymore. Because there is nothing like it.
Today was grey and cloudy. I’m overtired from getting home at 2am and spending my day on a toddler’s schedule. I mean, overtired is a joke. I’m long-term sleep deprived and all I want is more, more … and more music.
Sounds of Summer: Imaginary Cuba
I’m going to posit here that there have to be at least two kinds of summertime music. There’s the kind that smells like Hawaiian Tropic and alcohol and feels like hot wind in a car window. It sounds loud and beautiful like youth, and is the perfect doppelganger to holiday music, that other music hanging around that other solstice six months prior. I bet it’s the first pop music many of us ever loved.
This little blog is about a different kind of summertime music. It feels like a fever and sounds like a hallucination, and it’s the perfect compliment to the way this overheated apartment feels right now. We’re on the top floor of our building, face south, can’t fire-escape-fire-code-blah-blah put AC in half our apartment, and we’re pretty much melting. (And not just us: we, like idiots, went to do some baking for a friend the other week, and this is what we saw when we opened a bag of chocolate chips.) So, like I said, it’s hot.
Bill Laswell’s Imaginary Cuba is most definitely not the sound of surfer girls and Tastee Freez. It’s maybe more like a malarial episode, except that it’s absolutely awesome, and I understand that malaria is not. The record is a mashup of all sorts of music and sound, flowing oddly and effortlessly from Cuban son and Santeria, to recordings of street noise or café clamor, to heavy dub drum and bass, back to some folk song, and all the while tripping along ambient beds of sound, echo, heat…. It’s a true feverdream, a record that drips down the walls and pools on the floor, and it’s one of the most evocative, transporting things I’ve ever heard.
If you’re lying down as I was earlier, semi-conscious and watching the ceiling fan turn, find this album (a couple sample tracks appear below) — stream it, buy it, put it on. You may wake on soaked sheets, with the sound of the ocean, or the street below, or the neighbor’s music, floating in past the curtain in the window. You might then just pour yourself a glass of cold water, turn on the radio, and cross your fingers for some Beach Boys or Rihanna.
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Doc Watson
Doc Watson passed away last month, and this piece is now pretty embarrassingly late in coming. We were traveling for a couple of weeks, playing shows up the west coast, and busy with all the full-day activities that that entails – the long walks with old friends, the gas station mealtime deliberations – and we’ve been trying to make sense of re-entry in the few days we’ve been back in Brooklyn. But the fact is that the musician who I really think has meant more to me than any other is now done making music for us, and I hope that’s as good reason as one needs to crank back up a long-silent blogophone.
I was probably 15 when my aunt and uncle gave me a dubbed cassette of Doc Watson’s Home Again. It came with the disclaimer that it “may take some getting used to”, but having heard similar warnings before for such curiosities as lobsters and Bob Dylan, I only took that as an invitation – or dare – to really dig in. And I did. I’m not sure how to break down what I heard, or if that would even be interesting or relevant to a eulogy of sorts, but the music absolutely took hold of me. The gothic ballads, the old American hymns, the straight nonsense children’s songs were all sung in clear strains that, after many repeated listenings, felt nearly familial to my ears. And the quick, strong flatpicking guitar for which he was famous (hell, which he’s been credited for basically founding in country and folk music) even fit comfortably, though oddly, next to the likes of Jimmy Page, or Randy Rhoads, or any number of other guitarists whose speedy playing was the object of my early teen idolatry.
But the main thing I found in this music was something that is much harder to identify or break down – it became “mine” in that way that any semi-conscious teenager is looking for things to hold on to, things by which to mark themselves. I was certainly not fresh on Doc’s trail, with twenty five years of Americana superstardom separating Doc’s first recordings and my discovery of them, but no-one in my high school had ever heard of him that I could tell, and this was worth a lot. Doc’s delivery was earnest, but it was unflinchingly matter-of-fact, a heaven-sent antidote to the 60’s and 70’s folk-revival sweetness that formed the bulk of most campfire guitarists’ diet. This directness was what made the music important to me, what held me to him, and made him someone worth fighting that “no, you really should check this out” fight with my metal, punk, or folky comrades.
So a kid, like piles of kids before him, found this music groundbreaking or original or curious enough to bring to show-and-tell. That’s a real mark of distinction, knowing how seriously kids take these things. More important to me now, though, is the groove that has been worn in my adult self by the number of times this music has played over the years. It feels like home, however trite that sounds. Doc Watson’s North Carolina via Greenwich Village America became the America that I hear in song, and his singing and guitar playing absolutely set the foundation for my approach to the same. He’s really just a lot of what I know.
Here’s a song, from Home Again, that I used to sing to Hazel every single night before bed, until she got old and squirmy enough that she’d protest its length. Now we sneak in a stanza or two of “Down in the valley to pray”, off the same album, before we shut the door on our way out.
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