Lent

Today is the first day of Lent, little sweetheart. As I’ve said before, I really didn’t know much about these days of religious observance until after your tragic passing - when I truly needed both to examine my own beliefs and to find some sense of ritual in contemplation, meditation and prayer. Also, your passing was in those very months of Lent and Eastertide. Because the pandemic made in-person worship all but impossible, I don’t really have a church just now, but the days themselves can provide guidance. As do you, always. Please be near me, little sweetheart, and help me be as good as you want me to be. Help me find you. With all my love forever…

Each Song A Prayer

Sometimes after we finish an album, little sweetheart, I don’t pick up a guitar for weeks but tonight I did. Instead of the very specific concentration on overdubs, which was where I was at - writing, playing and recording guitar and other parts for the new songs - I just powered up and played whatever came to mind, not necessarily any of the songs from the new album. 

I think I’ve said this before, little sweetheart, that playing and singing the songs I write for, especially when I revisit one or two that I haven’t played in a while, is a very intense and emotional experience, very much like prayer. I cried and cried as I played some of them tonight, little sweetheart. And that is as it should be. 

How very much I love and long for you. With all my heart. 

Valentines

It’s Valentines Day, little sweetheart! 

Remember those cookies we liked at Safeway, so much? Kind of almost like little pieces of cake, soft and vanilla and thick with icing for all different sorts of holidays - green shamrocks for Paddy’s Day, Red White and Blue for July 4th, Pink and white hearts for today? We’d get a box of a dozen and try not eat them all in your car as we sat by the bay watching the waves come in, sometimes spotting a dolphin or two! Well, they had a few boxes at D’ags this weekend, so I bought a dozen (a dozen cookies, not a dozen boxes!) just for the occasion. 

Thinking of you, as always. Oh, also... I sent flowers to you and your mom, which I believe have arrived safely. 

With all my love forever. 

 

Weighty Days

It’s an odd day, today, little sweetheart. It’s a date always sticks in my mind. 

February 12th. It was the day, 12 years ago, when I came out to San Francisco for what I couldn’t know at the time would be the last of our days together. We had many more plans, including your returning here to New York for my birthday in April - to do a workshop of one of my plays, to go into the studio to record more of the Flag Day EP and for an overnight trip to Philly to see Low in concert.

My mom used to get me a desk calendar every Christmas, the kind where you pull off the page from yesterday every morning to see the new day’s image and date. As often, my flight to SF was very early before dawn that day but I did turn the calendar’s page so that it read February 12. It never had another page turned. When I returned on April 4 after your tragic passing, it still read Feb 12. And it has to this day. For years it was here in the front room on the bookshelf and later out in the red table room on the dresser. I never threw it away but I apparently put it away somewhere last year and don’t immediately know its whereabouts. It’s an incredibly sad reminder, so I suppose it’s for the best that I don’t actually have it my immediate field of vision.

That morning was begun with such excitement and promise. I was on my way to see you! A screening of the short film we’d made - an adaptation I’d written of one of my own one act plays - was scheduled for the next day and then I was going with you down to San Jose to see you in “On The Waterfront”. I stayed on to work on another project with you that came together during my visit and changed my flight back to April 4, the weekend after it finished, but we never got that far.

These days now leading up to the dark anniversary of your accident and tragic passing are coming on, as they do each year. I can feel their weightiness. And I will bow my head in prayer and quiet contemplation with faith that we will endure and you and I will be together again soon and forever. 

With all my love.
 

KFJC...

Little sweetheart, when Of Love and Loss first came out, we got a really nice review from Toronto’s Ground Control Magazine. The writer, Daryl Darko Barnett, later interviewed me and I found out he actually lived in NorCal. Over the next few years we got to be friends and he was often telling me about a great college station in Los Altos Hills - KFJC. He really thought they’d like our stuff and it was his - and I’d later discover - lots of NorCal folks favorite station. 

I routinely sent them new releases but never heard anything until one day when Daryl called me. He was driving around and he had the station on but he was in the mountains and it kept coming in and out but he heard them back announce us. He didn’t hear the song but he heard our name, little sweetheart. So, I looked up who was on air just then and it was Carson Street, kind of KFJC’s main deejay. 

I got in touch and he told me the station had loved Til Morning Is Nigh and that it had been in their Heavily Played Albums list. Carson, of course, has gone on to be a great friend and advocate of ours. It was he, little sweetheart, who did the three hour special about us in 2020 just before we released Deux Anges. 

Today, Carson and the station added In The Hours Left Until Dawn to the current library. The album doesn’t come out until April 7 but they have an advance copy and it should be on several shows before the week is even out. 

Listen, little sweetheart - you’re on the radio!  

CAMP Radio Show - Jan 31

Little sweetheart, our CAMP show is actually every four weeks, so even though we say it’s a monthly show, sometimes, like this month, there’s actually two of them! The second January show was aired yesterday and is now up the MixCloud archive, here. I love that always the very first and very last thing we hear each month is your voice! With all my love forever.