The Personal

After many years of high stress, overwork, moving every year or two, exhausting ourselves with touring and trying to pay bills, and renting tiny, expensive apartments where we couldn't fully settle, Ingrid and I finally own our own home. We’re in Asheville, North Carolina, a town we truly love, with close family and friends nearby, and creative, interesting people everywhere.

By way of other miracles, after cobbling together a mishmash of jobs for the past decade, I find myself making music full time again, traveling the world, writing new songs, relearning old ones, reclaiming my life's work and building on it both with Girlyman and Mouths of Babes. Friendships and collaborations I grieved with my whole soul and considered lost forever are back with more love and care than I dared to dream possible. (More on that last part, perhaps, in a future post.)

This didn’t happen by itself; it happened because we insisted on it. Exhausted from years of barely getting by, we scrimped and saved almost pathologically, hanging on to the idea that at some point something had to work. This, of course, was despite the collapse of the music industry, the American dream, democracy, and our nervous systems.

I will also say that, having tried pretty much everything else (antidepressants, therapy, breathwork, blame, rage, crying, writing, alcohol, weed, EMDR, meditation, and so on), as a last resort I finally did the internal work necessary to start healing some of my deepest wounds. It’s hard to explain what this looked like without getting a little in the weeds, but suffice it to say that I had help. It was very gentle and didn’t look like anything I had done before. There was no other way but in, and in I finally went.

At that point, I was so humbled by all the years of having my ass handed to me by life that I was relieved when my stories fell apart. I stopped taking everything personally. I forgave everyone, and I healed. (More on this, maybe, in a future post as well).

That really happened, so I know it’s possible. From there, things began to flow in a different way.

A few other things helped – primarily, other people’s belief in me and their insistence on showing up over and over through my extended remix of Dark Night of the Soul. Man, I played that one until the record was more scratches than sound.

But with hindsight, Ingrid and I didn’t sit on intuition; despite its sometimes anemic call, we let it guide us into possibility. We felt called back east, so we packed up our stuff yet again and moved yet AGAIN. I had a hunch it was time to reach out to one of these old, lost friends, and I did.

Life met us where we were. Good fortune and helping hands arrived when we were almost completely tapped out from cascading health and family crises, nearly broke, and nearly broken. We are lucky, and we also never gave up. Both things were necessary, with hindsight.

Which brings me to…

The World

As everything feels more and more chaotic and hopeless here in the US and globally, I can't help but see what I've learned about repair and regeneration in my personal life as an allegory. Things can come back, and when they finally do, after being crushed nearly out of existence, it’s with a fury that you could not have fathomed when it was so dark.

I don’t think this is just me projecting my own experience – there is huge creative energy swirling and coalescing right now in ways that I haven't quite seen before in my lifetime (one example that leaps to mind is the work of and her late spouse , which is so enormous it’s currently channeling energy from beyond the grave). As AI tries to take us apart, steal our work, become us, our humanity is rising up with new urgency. As inequality becomes more stark, the stakes grow higher. The staggering pile of bullshit grows ever more hideous. But if you look closer, there is big art emerging at the same time (listen to ’s “Plowshare Prayer”), big grassroots movements that put everything on the line. The response to all this dehumanization is rising up, and it’s pissed. It is saying, no; it is saying, we insist on our humanity; it is saying, we are still here and we will scratch and claw our way back.

To paraphrase , it is saying we will keep this little flame alive, and all the more so because you are trying so hard to extinguish it. I can’t help but think that as fucked as everything is, there is great potential in this moment.

The truth is, despite my songs, I wasn’t born an optimist. I have had to drag myself into the courtroom and lay out exhibits A, B, and C before myself over and over to believe the evidence that says it will all be OK. Despite this surge of energy, I don't know where any of it is heading. Things could get a lot worse before they get better. We could see total collapse before resurrection. I don’t know.

But right now I'm grateful just to get to do the work of inhabiting this liminal space. I will keep answering this call, whatever it is, until I’m gone, and (if this is any indication) perhaps beyond. That is, as far as I can tell, what we’re doing here.

But the narrative that everything is terrible now is so ubiquitous that I felt like it should be said – things can come back around in ways you don't expect. They can and they do. I’ve come to believe that regeneration is the rule, not the exception. Just ask our backyard, so crazy with weeds from all the rain that it is becoming a jungle. There is massive energy available right now if we can just stop to notice it. And in my opinion, it’s a moment that is worth noticing, which means pausing to stop documenting, dissecting, or fighting it and each other long enough to actually experience it.

A couple years ago, Ingrid and I were playing on a riverboat in the Douro Valley in Portugal. One morning, we came up to the top deck as the boat was casually gliding through absolutely spectacular countryside - rolling vineyards, olive groves, deep undulating green hills rising up against an impossibly blue sky. Everything was silent. Around us, a few people frantically dug in their bags for their phones to take pictures. I looked through the viewfinder of mine too. It was pointless. There was no way to capture this, and soon it would change.

"The best we can do is just try to be here," I said to Ingrid, "and really take this in." It was impossible to do even that. It was too magnificent, and too fleeting.

That is how I feel now, here at home in Asheville, too, on an ordinary morning as the rain slows to a drizzle and the day stretches out before me. How lucky are we to be alive for this, and to get to help shape what it becomes?