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July 31, 2008

Why Randy Travis is still worth listening to

Memory is a funny thing. I have a memory of hearing Randy Travis sing on the radio in 1978, probably on the AM country station I occasionally listened to in my 1967 Camaro convertible, the one that had been left top down in the rain and run into two bridge abutments before I spent $500 on it, the car my brother showed me as a lesson in what not to buy.

It's a really strong memory, too, a song I heard him sing with the line "work your fingers to the bone/and what do you get?/bony fingers!" that I typed out at my typesetting terminal and printed out and waxed and pasted on the console of the Comp IV that my friend Betty worked on at SeaGraphics. I think her name was Betty. She was an older woman, a kind woman, a good typesetter, and the only person at that shop who took the time to teach me that setting type was more than simply typing the words right. And she had Sonics tickets, back when blue collar types could afford such things; one night she either gave me tickets or let me drive her to the game, I can't remember.

It was probably Hoyt Axton singing, now that I think about it, and I note with barely restrained anticipation that the fine folks at the Australian reissue label Raven are about to reissue Axton's Fearless on one of their splendid two-fer LP packages. I'm hoping I'm still on their mailing list, and, by way of further digression, was delighted to note that Darrell Scott pointed to that album in the liner notes of his new album of covers, which he calls Modern Hymns and which is being released by Appleseed. (Although I think Mr. Scott rushes his take of "The Devil" a bit, but it's a quibble.)

Randy Travis, of course, had his first #1 hit in May of 1986 with the masterful country song, "On The Other Hand," part of country's brief new traditionalist movement. (It went #1 almost in time for his 27th birthday; Randy Travis and I were born a few weeks apart in 1959, and on Tuesday Susan and I sat in church pews to say goodbye to a friend who was born those same few weeks, so I am keenly aware of that time just now.) By which point, the spring of 1986, SeaGraphic had long gone down the tubes and I'd started my own typesetting shop, and was already in the process of selling the equipment to an office partner. I listened to a lot of country music, on KMPS, back then, even took another office partner to see the Judds' final tour, with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, sat with her in the third level of the Paramount Theatre trying to remember why I liked live music and wondering why she kept dating some guy who wasn't me, even though I was hardly her type. (Nor she mine, to be fair.)

The point, I guess, is that it feels like Randy Travis's voice has been a part of my life forever. He's right in there with Hoyt Axton and Don Williams (and not so far from JJ Cale, though I've never bought one of his albums), one of those easy, calm, inescapably masculine voices that strokes the psyche and is carefully unafraid to betray emotion.

In the main, Travis has ended up being a mainstream country artists whose career is best summarized by greatest hits packages, and I can't remember the last time I played a new release of his and could hear more than a trace of the electricity and craft and beauty he can bring to a song. Even, oddly enough, in his gospel albums.

So I didn't have a lot of hope for this new one, Around The Bend. But I was doing some typing here and his is a comforting voice to work to, and it had come in the mail, and I was tired of all the stuff on the shelves that also came in the mail from people I've never heard of that none of the rest of y'all will ever hear of, but whose dreams will not easily be rebuked by the likes of me.

They'll call this one a return to form, I suppose. And I suppose it is, though I can't guess and no longer care whether country radio will notice. But in these friendly confines I'd like to encourage you all to notice, for he still has that great, deep, resonant, kindly voice. And, this time, he has some songs which deserve that voice: "You Didn't Have A Good Time," a tri-write from Kris Bergsnes, Jason Matthews, and Jim McCormick about the drunk we all used to hang out with (and some of us still do); "Every Head Bowed," a wry memory piece by Brent Baxter and Brandon Kinney; "Faith In You," an intriguing tri-write from Tom Douglas, Joe Henry, and Matt Rollings (the last of whom is best known as Lyle Lovett's keyboard player); and the spectacular "From Your Knees" from the pen of one of Nashville's two or three best country songwriters, Leslie Satcher (and I suppose she'll never get to make another album on her own; more's the pity).

There's some dross. He doesn't do much with Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," and the opening "Around The Bend" (from Tania Hancheroff, Marcus Hummon, and Tia Sillers) begins in wonderful voice, but settles into a hackneyed chorus, supported by a chorus of voices.

But it's a pretty good record. Hugh Prestwood's "Love Is A Gamble" is a sweet song, the kind of thing John Anderson could turn his voice around, too. "Everything That I Own (Has Got A Dent)" is the kind of loser's anthem that Jerry Reed made a nice and somewhat improbable living singing (this one's from Tony Martin and Mark Nesler).

It's a pretty good record, and sometimes that's a pretty good thing. That's what Travis makes, pretty good records. And every once in a while he nails a song. The thing I like about Around The Bend is that it's alive, again. That the three songs stickered on the cover as potential singles aren't the ones that I would pick, that the choices aren't obvious, that the filler is only barely filler, for the most part. That I'm pretty sure if I were to make a compilation that tried to justify my fondness for his voice, three or four of these tracks might make the cut. That's a significant accomplishment for a guy whose first country #1 was twenty years ago.

And if you don't love that voice when it's rippling through the speakers...I can't help you.

I started to title this little digression, "Why Randy Travis still matters." But I'm not sure he ever mattered, not the way George Jones or Billy Joe Shaver or Loretta Lynn matter. Mattering isn't what it's all about, not all the time. Sometimes it's just nice to hear a friendly voice offering a few well-chosen words.

Posted by Grant at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 27, 2008

A short essay on the making of things in the knowledge economy

Note: An earlier draft of this piece was posted a few days ago on dailykos.com, a liberal online community. I have taken many -- most -- of my political musings there, where they sink like a stone, rather than burdening y'all with them. I realized, later, that this wasn't really about politics, and so have taken the opportunity of a quiet morning to revisit and repurpose the words.

It is, I would add, an interesting thing to compose words anonymously in the dailykos world. I have come to take for granted the premise that most of my readers in the ND community either know me or have a working familiarity with my writing persona. As a confessional writer, I find anonymity a curiously limiting construct. But a useful learning tool, as it were.

In 1942, as part of the war effort, John Steinbeck wrote a book called Bombs Away: The Story Of A Bomber Team, reprinted in 1990 and picked up off the remainder table in a weak moment because for some unknown reason I had gone on a mild Steinbeck binge. And because it was cheap. An extension of my "rescue good literature from the thrift shop" school of acquisition.

(And I note, in passing, that Steinbeck was part of a war effort, that there was a war effort embraced by artists and artisans and even most partisans; and that there is not now, has not been for decades.)

The premise of Bombs Away, in any event, was that American men entering the military in 1942 would find that their natural-born civilian skill-sets translated nicely into the component parts of a bomber team; and that not everybody should want only to be a pilot, that there was honor in each job on the plane.

I was struck, reading the book so many years after the last good war, that much had changed. That I had none of those skills -- not the hunting and shooting, nor the repairing and welding of things, nor even the physical fitness that comes with labor -- for they were no longer a part of the life of the typical American suburban kid.

Much has changed since 1942, and much since Steinbeck's book was reprinted in 1990.

But I was reminded of it a few weeks back when my wife broke up a long car trip by reading to me an essay she had found on the back page of the summer edition of Spin-Off magazine. The author's name is Abby Franquemont, and the headline reads: "What Are You Doing? And Why?", not coincidentally the same question my wife would ask were she to walk into my home office just now and find me writing for free again, but no matter. Ms. Franquemont was explaining why she likes to spin her own yarn, and snapped:

"Look," I said, "do you want to live in a cave, wearing skins, without fire, knapping flint to enable you to hunt and gather, and be dead by age twenty-five? Because this -- this right here in my hands -- this is why you don't. Without this, that is all you can do. Without this, there is no civilization, no technology, no history, no agriculture, no animal husbandry, no permanent settlements, and the whole of human history just did not happen. Without what I'm doing right now, making yarn, there is no life as we know it."

Textiles are at the root of many essential advances in civilization, both in terms of the textiles themselves and the technologies needed to create them. Cultures lacking in textile production capability don't generally advance beyond hunting and gathering. Which is fine, but given a choice, few of us today would opt to live such a life.

The full substance of her argument is well beyond my competence, and it is not clear to me whether textiles are an indicator of the possibility of civilization, or a prerequisite to its development. Nor, for my purposes today, does it matter.

Fourteen years ago I left Seattle for a job at RayGun Publishing in Los Angeles. I brought with me my books and my records and my CDs and my power tools -- not so many tools, then, just a drill and a saw, really -- and not much else except the cabinetry to hold all that stuff. And though I was theoretically a member of the senior staff -- indeed, though I had broken a finger playing basketball (again) -- when we added staff and needed new office furniture assembled, it fell to me to do the job. Because I could read directions, because I had tools and knew how to use them. (I also cooked. I was a freak. I didn't mind being a freak, that part came naturally. LA, on the other hand...)

Today, we are well down the road to losing most of the hand skills necessary to function in the world we have built. Or paid others to build on our behalf. Children aren't taught to drive a nail, or change a toilet, or even to change the oil in their car (which I did all of once, and stripped the bolt). We're not taught how to make things, how to cook food from fresh ingredients, how to sew. Which is, to a degree, fine. Some people shouldn't drive cars, either.

Two problems, though: First, we -- as a culture -- devalue those people who do know how to fix and make things. (Unless and until we need them; and then they are talked down to, and about, and we don't understand what they're doing, why it works and fails, nor even how to communicate clearly and honestly with them.) In passing, this has made it easier to undercut the union movement. And we have whole-heartedly embraced the exportation of those jobs abroad, ensuring -- much like the capital flow T. Boone Pickens laments on television each night -- that the skills necessary to build and operate and staff a modern manufacturing enterprise are no longer native to our shores.

We're forgetting how to make things. On purpose. (Unless it's a hobby, or a quaint anachronism; or unless we're trying to get off the grid, still very much a minority position.)

What's been offered instead is an information economy, a service economy, a world -- ah, the pristine vision -- built around intellect.

An illusion, that.

My stepmother clipped a column from the July 7-14 Newsweek, written by a man named Sal Nunziato, who until recently owned a CD store in Brooklyn with which I am otherwise unfamiliar. He writes eloquently about knowing his customers, knowing their tastes and temperaments well enough to suggest music they might like, to order things specially for them, to nurture their community. And like many CD stores, he is out of business, his specific knowledge of that community -- and of the music in the marketplace -- lost to that corner of Brooklyn, lost forever.

Replaced, perhaps, by Rhapsody and Amazon, both anxious to use mathematical equations and the science of the computer to do the job of a smart and intuitive human. Of a man with taste.

Having labored as a music critic for 21 years, I feel Mr. Nunziato's pain.

Friends of ours own a bicycle shop. We live in a small town. They are the local experts in bicycles and canoes and climbing equipment. People come to their store and talk and talk and talk. And then they go online and distill that knowledge into a purchase that does nothing to support the local business.

Do we really value knowledge?

Surely the present administration did not value nuanced views of Iraq, does not value the science behind global warming, and a dozen other things we might profitably carp about another time. Indeed, Mr. Bush behaves like a mediocre student who is unable to make sense of competing and complex theories about a system he is studying, and so decides simply to go with the answer he wants to hear, seeing instead of the anarchy of the intellectual process the arrogance of a salesman.

Because it's all about the sale, isn't it, in America?

Here's the question, then: Who's going to fix it when it's broken? Who's going to build the new one?

This, in part, is why I now refer to myself as a semi-retired music critic, and an apprentice farmer. Which is not to say that I aspire ever to sell what we grow; but which is to say that I hope to learn enough to grow what we eat, should we wish to do so, and to share whatever bounty we may unexpectedly have with our neighbors. Which is not to say that I ever wish to work on my car, but which is to say that I have no objection to changing out the toilet should it need doing again.

Hand skills are not my gift. But I played basketball from the time I was seven or eight year old well into my 40s, and it wasn't until some point in my mid-30s that I finally figured out the mechanics of a jumpshot, the part where the jumping helps to propel the ball toward the hoop. I have put out publications of one kind or another since 1974 or 1975, and yet only in the last few years would I have suggested I was anything more than a hack designer, and I am barely better than that, even today. A certain tenacity is, apparently, my gift, and like every student I believe that if I apply myself I will acquire knowledge. Though, in fairness, that never worked in physics class. (Bad teacher, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

Posted by Grant at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

July 24, 2008

A bookazine debriefing

Well...whatever these bookazine things are, we just shipped the first one off to the University of Texas Press. Unlike the comparatively instant gratification of magazine production, we won't see the final result until some point in the fall (and be assured that we'll share news of that happy day when it arrives, complete with bells and whistles and some carefully chosen parties, if all goes well).

It has been a very different process, a very different thing, than producing the magazine. Easier, I think. Possibly.

We made it easier, that's part of it. And book pages don't all have to end neatly at the bottom when the story's done, as magazines do; and the columns are wider; and I choose to construct a fairly simple structure and restrictive rules around which to design the bookazine. That last is a reflection of the uncertainty that comes with doing something for the first time. Next issue, perhaps, I'll play faster and looser with the page structures. Or maybe I won't; maybe the simple elegance I was hoping for will actually come off. (Nah.)

But one of the things that I was acutely aware we no longer had to contend with were ads. Which is a funny thing. If you've not juggled file formats with frantic designers around the country (and occasionally around the world) on deadlines that they didn't know they had until somebody they work for or with told them at the last minute that something needed to be done yesterday...well, then you'll not understand some of it.

But having designed publications of one kind or another, going back to the Streaker's Digest at Thomas Hunt Morgan Junior High School (my first publishing venture, a typewritten two-page gossip sheet, modeled after the hip kids' Cliff Times -- they smoked at the Cliffs, see, and nobody knew what Cliff's Notes were, I guess...) since 1974 or some such foolishness...having designed publications for a long time, I like ads. They do nice things on the page, properly disciplined. They provide extra balance points; they allow text to sit simply without seeming unadorned, since there's that riot of color and/or type adjacent.

Working without them, for the first time in a long time, was...odd. Perhaps, next time, it will seem freeing. But just now it felt like a friend was missing from the room, expected at any moment, but never really going to show up.

(I used to have friends like that.)

So we'll see.

The other thing about ads...they paid the bills. They subsidized the writers and photographers (and, yes, editors and art director) who produced ND. A university press budget doesn't really make up the difference, and that's not at all meant to be disrespectful to the kind folks in Austin. That's just part of the challenge. But the cover price will be more than the cover price of a magazine, and that's why.

We have no idea what you'll make of this thing when it's done and available at your corner bookstore for fondling. I'm not sure what I'll think of it when I see it. But it's good work, and I liked doing it, and I am pretty confident you'll like reading it.

And I'm real confident that you'll tell us what you think, when it's time.

Now...about cleaning that office...

Posted by Grant at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

July 19, 2008

Plant & Krauss, Return To Sender

Sitting on the floor at Lexington's Rupp Arena last night, many long steps removed from the third-level seats where we are fortunate enough to see the University of Kentucky basketball team play once or twice a season, I took a long moment to try to remember the last occasion on which I had been to such a place to see music.

Not counting two trips to Starwood, an outdoor lawn and band shell outside of Nashville, where we went for sport to see a tour that included Ratt and Poison and, I think, Great White (and one more), and where I saw Sonic Youth open for Pearl Jam, the best I can remember is that I went to some suburban Los Angeles shed to see KISS, which would have been ten or eleven years ago. And that was my last arena show.

Long have I held to the belief that there's little point in going to such places to see music, because music cannot happen on such a huge stage, in such a vast room; and because few among the audience go there for the music. They go for the event, for the proximity to fame. They go because it's the only context in which they understand music to be offered, and sorting out the confusing array of clubs and emerging (or submerging) performers is too much trouble for the casual listener. (And, anyway, in Lexington, the Dame has been closed and will shortly be demolished for some enormous block-sized structure that it is not clear the city needs, nor its citizens want.)

Once I expressed this opinion in a piece David Menconi wrote advancing the Down From The Mountain tour, which by then had run a great many miles. That, and my suggestion that O Brother was analogous to the "Dueling Banjos" flurry following Deliverance in the mid-'70s inspired T Bone Burnett to e-mail a couple of angry notes my way.

(I seemed unable to make him understand the Deliverance reference, but Eric Darling's soundtrack album -- or whatever it was -- was hugely inspirational to me as a child. I took up the banjo, through sixth and seventh grade, tender years, which, at least, finally allowed me to practice upstairs where my parents could hear that indeed I had no talent, not for that and not for the piano downstairs I had been banging on for six years, and so I was allowed to quit and take up typing. Deliverance was the album -- I've never seen the movie, nor read the book from which it was adapted -- which cracked open the door to roots music a little further, past creeping down to my dad's office and listening to Tiny Freeman on Saturday nights. So it wasn't meant as an insult, suggesting O Brother would have similar impact, but I suspect Mr. Burnett had hoped to change the world a bit more this time 'round. And, perhaps, he has.)

It is also true that my tastes in music are not so broadly shared that the artists I wish to see are often asked to play in basketball arenas.

And so, having seen the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss tour open its run across the state in Louisville -- a beautiful but inevitably tentative show which I inexpertly reviewed here -- we came to Rupp, gifted unexpectedly with wonderful seats, not so much expecting to see great music as to see what great musicians had done with themselves in the intervening weeks. Last night's show was the penultimate on this swing, which concludes tonight in Nashville, and then they all take a break. Or at least pause to do other things for a while.

Let us not pretend that we were anywhere but a partially-sold arena. The top level, where we occasionally sit to see Coach Gillespie confound fans and critics alike, was curtained off. There were seats available elsewhere. The fellow next to me had a piercing whistle he offered regularly by way of approval, but it happened to be in my good ear -- not the one the .357 went off near some years back (OK, I shot it, but it was supposed to have a .38 load in it, and that's about all I know about guns) -- and I hadn't thought to bring earplugs to an acoustic show, and the middle-aged couple in front of us were as engaged in their own betrothal as they were the show. Same as it ever was.

All that's true.

But this is also true: T Bone Burnett was, much as it pains me to admit...Burnett was right. Music can happen on an arena stage, and this slowly dawned on me as the evening wore on. The trick, which I should have seen coming, is to place six of the best musicians at work on the western half of the planet in one place, let them get to know each other -- but not too well, I suppose -- and, providing the egos stay in check, fun will be had. (I am not sure how often this trick can be repeated, nor if it should be tried by anybody else.)

The show -- Plant called it a revue, which is what it is, and what it can still grow into being -- has much evolved since Louisville. I can't speak to the set list because, again, I don't take notes at concerts, save to suggest that they weren't all the same songs, not even close. More than that, it is now clear that Raising Sand is no longer the purpose for the tour, it's the pretext on which they are allowed to continue having fun in public. (And, of course, get paid handsomely for their efforts. Though I suspect the principals might still do better financially as solo headliners; that's not the point.)

And, this night, anyhow, the dynamic has changed, the focus has sharpened. Burnett took only one song at center stage ("Let The Good Times Roll," only he introduced it by its Cajun French name, which I am unable to render accurately), which works better for the flow of things. Plant and Krauss are clearly much more comfortable with each other, more certain where the other will come in and step back, able now to joke because the quality of their work together is comfortably assured. And Plant, to his credit, has shed the arena rock moves which were still his instinctive response to songs -- especially those from the Zeppelin catalogue -- in Louisville.

That focus also means they lean less heavily on the sidemen, which is probably a good thing, though, inevitably, I'd like always to see more of Stuart Duncan and Buddy Miller. Other times, in other contexts. In the meantime, they keep learning new songs, new ways to play with each other, and the audience -- wherever and whoever it may be -- is virtually irrelevant. Fun is being had on stage. Music is being made, music of the highest possible quality.

Even in a basketball arena.

Posted by Grant at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

July 9, 2008

Solomon Burke, slight return

Among the discursive threads Buddy Miller and I tugged at during the nearly two hours we spoke last March, Solomon Burke figured prominently. For various reasons -- I was pulled in several directions, and, even at 6,000 words, limited to space -- that discussion didn't make it into the final piece.

Which was fine. The point seemed made that Buddy was (in the Young Fresh Fellows line) a man who loved music.

Despite the inevitable ups and downs of the recording process, I'm confident that Buddy thoroughly enjoyed making Nashville with Solomon Burke. Thoroughly enjoyed. And had plans to make another.

"I think we're going to do...I mean, he told Rolling Stone that we were doing a record together, a gospel record," Buddy said back in March. "I mean, we were all talking about it. Julie said, 'Yeah, we'll set up a tent outside and set up chairs in our room, and we'll do a live gospel record here, you just come in and preach and we'll play and back you up for a few days, and we'll have a record. I'll write the songs.'

"It was like we were getting a plan together, and I said, 'Yeah, I'll put up a banner out front: REVIVAL TONIGHT WITH SOLOMON BURKE.' And we may still do that.

"We cut 'Dirty Water,' that song of ours which can be looked at any number of ways, I think politically is how he was kind of [looking at it], and that's the kind of gospel record he wants to make, things that tie in that aren't, well, I shouldn't speak for him."

Not long after that last issue of the magazine showed up on my doorstep, I opened a package from Shout! Factory containing Solomon's new Like A Fire. Produced by Steve Jordan, and not by Buddy Miller. I felt an immediate sadness, though it would be presumptuous (no, silly) to suggest that Buddy and I are more than slightly acquainted with each other.

Maybe Buddy knew it was coming, maybe he didn't. Certainly Buddy has a hectic schedule, and Burke is hardly obliged to do anything, much less wait for Buddy to have time to make another album with him. And, regardless, the existence of Like A Fire in no way closes the door to Buddy producing a gospel record on Solomon Burke. They still might, and I still hope they do.

But, as I played the album over and over again driving out to the farm this spring, I couldn't get past my prejudice that it wasn't the album I wanted to hear from Solomon Burke. And, in the main, I think David Cantwell's review (elsewhere on this site) says most of what I would have said on that subject, had I gotten 'round to writing one myself.

Nashville was full of life, as Solomon Burke clearly is. Like A Fire is, in the main, not. The title track seems, no matter how often I listen, like a mistake, for Burke's voice sounds thick and old and uncertain, and it's not a great song, much less so strong it begs to be the opening number, the theme for the whole work. It is followed by the most country number of the album, a Keb' Mo/Alan Dennis Rich co-write called "We Don't Need It" that will pair nicely with Charlie Rich's "Life's Little Ups And Downs" (yeah, I know Rich's wife wrote it) if I ever get on the radio. (Which I probably won't.) Except that there is redemption in Burke's song, and resignation in Rich's.

For the rest, there's a fine gospel song with Ben Harper, "A Minute To Rest And A Second To Pray", and the album closes with an awkward kind of Ray Price shuffle, "If I Give My Heart To You". And after all those trips to the farm the six other songs just blur together.

Cantwell is right. Time is running out, don't waste it on mediocre projects.

That said, I am once again reminded that we have lived through an extraordinary patch of muscular, knowing albums made by older artists. Ray Price has given us one, Johnny Cash gave us a good handful -- make what you will of American V, but remember what the singer knew about himself as he made it, that he knew well what he sounded like, and that he consciously, carefully worked with that. I'd toss Bettye LaVette into that mix, but she's not really of that generation. Porter Wagoner's last, to which we owe Marty Stuart a considerable debt, for I have been in receipt of a number of other late Wagoner offerings which existed simply to be sold off the merch table. Same, I fear, with Ralph Stanley, but, again, ponder the power of "Oh, Death." The knowing behind his rendition.

That, anyhow, is what I hope for from the next Solomon Burke album. That knowing and caring, and commitment.

Posted by Grant at 7:42 AM | Permalink

July 3, 2008

Walking the way the wind blows

This, then, is how one thing came to an end. It was the evening of June 30, and, as my co-editor had noted, that was the last day the final print edition of No Depression was meant to sit on newsstands.

We three here at home were in the midst of an impromptu cleaning frenzy. We had just installed a new CD player which holds five discs (a duplicate of the one we bought for the bookstore, days earlier), and Susan had turned it on so as to make the work go more pleasantly.

It was the sound of Greg Brown's voice which reminded me. It reminded me of my friend and our contributor, Mike Perry, whose path off the grid is much further along than mine will ever be -- but he has the advantage of having been raised on a dairy farm, not in the suburbs -- and whose last major piece for ND was a fine interview and character study of Mr. Brown.

And that reminded me, for reasons I shan't trouble the synapses to explain, that there sat in my fax machine a contract for Susan and me to sign. And so we did, and faxed it back.

With those signatures I ended my ownership interest in No Depression. I have troubled in the following days whether to mention this, and, if so, how best to do so. Because this has always been a deeply personal matter -- the writing and designing and publishing of our little magazine; the sense I have ever carried with me that I spoke to and with and among a community of friends, known and unknown -- I find that I cannot leave it unsaid.

So the first thing to be said is that I leave No Depression in good hands, in the care of people sworn to do right by our legacy. My leaving has to do with choices I wish to make in my life, and under no circumstances is it meant to suggest anything else. I asked to leave. It is time, and maybe I shall explain that at some later point, and perhaps you reading today have read enough of my musings these last few months, these last few years, so as to know already why that might be so.

The second thing is that I will not be entirely gone. With the forbearance of my remaining partners, I will continue to blog on this site. Sometimes I will even write about music, for it remains a fundamental part of who I am, if less a part of how I work toward the end of each day. And I will continue to design and co-edit (mostly design, this first issue) the bookazine we have engaged to publish through the University of Texas Press.

In this it should be clear that, for good and ill, I am a print person. And I am stepping aside because what No Depression needs right now is a web person. Persons, probably. They are on schedule -- as much as such things adhere to a schedule -- to relaunch this website come fall. But as I have watched this process unfold, it has become painfully clear to me that I haven't the stomach for it. It's not what I do, not who I am, not who I'm going to be.

And so I will step out of the way.

Here at home, when the cleaning was done, we opened a couple bottles of Hennepin, which claims now to be a saison though it's really a pretty good North American knockoff of the Belgian Duvel (so good a knockoff that Duvel now owns the brewery), and I never thought of Duvel as a farmhouse ale. No matter. We had a glass, and saluted.

For the rest, I am tanned, rested, and ready for what may come. And patient enough not to hasten its coming.

Y'all be good. I'll be watching. Listening.

Posted by Grant at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)