MJ

We played wherever they would let us. Churches. Basements. Living rooms. We played a Thanksgiving dinner on the beach In Massachusetts in the spring. We played a theater where Houdini disappeared. When there was no venue, we’d make one up. Do you have ten chairs and ten friends with ten dollars? There were no guarantees or performance fees. Just a handshake at the end of the show and we’ll take whatever you can spare. I’d open and show everyone the world from a distance. He’d show you the world down to the smallest detail inside your soul. Everyone felt a little better when we left. No time for small talk. There were more miles to cover. Unless there’s pie, of course.

Sometimes in the green room or in the wings I was the willing apprentice. Other times  I was the boss. The parent. The teacher. The therapist. The patient. Always the driver. Something about traveling with someone who is somewhat infamous for a car wreck makes you want to drive all the time.  At some point I guess I used all my tread. Just like a worn tire. There were bigger fish in the river I guess. “This is the business we’ve chosen” he’d say. I hated that kind of cowardly bullshit.

It’s a strange thing to read all these eulogies. Few people knew the man inside the Bear suit that I knew. That’s good. The myth is always better. And hopeful. What’s that saying about false hope?

I still carry the scars with me everyday in my clenched fists, but they’re less now. There must be an appropriate cliche about time and wounds? Once again, I have been left to do the heavy lifting and explaining. The grunt work. I’m going to let him off the hook one more time, like I always seemed to do.

I got to watch him bring a lot of light to a lot of people. Sometimes one at a time. He did his job on this mortal coil. And I know he would really love reading all the amazing things people are saying about him. Except for that one line he hated:

The best songwriter you never heard of…

That’s getting a lot of play today.

It’s complicated. You know.

Carry on, Captain. Rest easy.

I’ll be at the Wake Forest Listening Room on August 1st opening for Dana Cooper! Get your tix ASAP!

There are many reasons I took my foot off the gas as far as live performing goes. Mainly, I got tired of the old song and dance where I send an email to a booker at a club, telling them how great I am, how great other people think I am, nice things people have said about me, and all of the great places I’ve played and great people I’ve played with, only to get no response. Not even a “no thanks.” This is not an experience that is exclusive to me. I think if you ask any musician who books themselves, they will tell you that this is the standard operating procedure. Send 100 emails, and if you get one back, then that’s a success. Furthermore, I’ve been booking gigs for myself and others my entire adult life and I just tired of it. When I was in my 20s I was an agent for some pretty big folk acts like Richie Havens and Janis Ian, among others. Of course, it was pretty easy to book those legends, and they got paid pretty well. When I left that agency to pursue my own career, I always hoped I would get my own agent to do my dirty work. (During that time, I did get head-hunted by ICM, one of the biggest agencies in the world. They have offices overlooking Central Park. Someday I’ll tell the story of how I ended up at that interview wearing a jacket, tie, dress shirt, and a pair of cargo shorts!)

Fast forward to 2009, and I am living in Austin, TX trying to make ends meet through a series of part-time jobs while moonlighting in the clubs every night, trying to build an audience of my own when, I met a person who was trying to start a new booking agency. Considering I already had a rather impressive resume in that field, it sounded like a great idea and we joined forces and started our own booking agency. This time around, I wasn't representing known legends of folk music, but instead I was representing unknown cult artists and songwriters who were inevitably on their way down the ladder of success, hitting their head on every rung in the process, and not handling it great. Plus, the 2008 financial crisis did some real damage to the level of musician who made their living from touring in smaller clubs. The music business thrives on consumers having extra money, and when money’s tight, people don’t want to spend their hard earned cash on small artists. Why spend $30 for one night of a singer-songwriter when you can spend $300 and see every band in the world over the course of a weekend at one of the giant festivals? It was tough time to book, but I did my work the best I could while booking myself and stewarding my own career at the same time. A typical day would involve waking up in a shitty Motel, getting two large coffees, driving 8 hours to the next club, sending booking emails to clubs during soundcheck, playing a show, and then going back to the hotel and working for another hour or two before crashing out and repeating the same process the next day. During that stretch of time, I’d be out on the road almost 200 nights a year. I was doing pretty well. I had gotten to play some of the coolest places on earth, and I was a fill-in for James McMurtry at the Continental Club in Austin for a bit. But, after a while the stress and lack of income related to all the hard work made me realize that I had to focus on my own career, and I stopped booking for other people.

I did finally get my own agent in 2016, when I was about to put out my album POOR MAN’S BIBLE. It was supposed to be my big break. We all know what happened there. (If you don’t, read my piece “The Long Road Back To Obscurity”). Then the pandemic and lock down came. I don’t really want to get into what it’s like playing an online show, but to me, it’s kind of weird. You are in a room, by yourself, playing to an inanimate object. You can’t feel the crowd, or hear the applause. It’s a real disconnected experience. But we did what we had to do to get through it.

When the pandemic ended and live music started coming back, I certainly thought that people would be more appreciative about live music than they ever were, after missing the one of a kind experience for so long, but as usual, I was wrong! I went back to playing my once-a-month residency at a local bar, but the honeymoon did not last very long. Every show I played was marred by loud conversations and disinterested sound people. It was extremely frustrating. I spend a lot of time working on my songs, especially the lyrics, and if people are just going to talk while I’m playing, what’s the point, really? You might as well just throw on the jukebox. And so, I withdrew from live music. I no longer wanted to do the booking song and dance, and I no longer wanted to play to people who were not listening. Does that make me a diva? Well if it does, so be it. I work way too hard and quite frankly, write way too well to put up with that kind of crap. Until now. Lately I’ve been getting the urge to perform live again. My songs are built for this moment in time. I feel the need to connect with fellow human beings again for the first time in a long time. I even want to put a band together and bring forth some soul-saving, earth-shaking rock and roll music. So, I’ve been back doing the booking song and dance. I have sent over 150 emails to clubs in the Triangle and Triad area, and as of this writing I have received ZERO responses. But I will keep on trying!

In the meantime, if you would like me to come to your town, or if you want to host a show (do you know how to host a house concert?), or you have an opening on a bill that I might fit on, shoot me an email at mikejunemusic@gmail.com . But definitely get a ticket to see me open for Dana Cooper at the Wake Forest Listening Room on August 1st. It’s a great, quiet room, and I can’t wait to play. I have seven records of material to mine, and about 3 records of new, unheard material as well. I’m itching to get back and play again. To make people think. And to move. And to feel. So let’s do it!

MJ

July 2025

Hey it’s been a while! At least it feels like it. This is my first time reaching out in a stretch. It’s not that I’ve been busy. Or working hard on something. Or that I had nothing say. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

Sometimes I just don’t feel like it.

Is that ok?

Is there something wrong with me?

This is America, after all, and we are all told to believe that hard work is everything. Hard work will be the main ingredient to make all of your dreams come true. Of course, not all dreams come true, and even if your dreams don’t come to fulfillment, you’ll have the reward of feeling good about all of the work you’ve done. Hard work is it’s own reward, they say.

I feel like I’ve worked hard most of my life. Sure, I’ve had my dalliances: my lost summers chasing the Dead, my addiction-fueled benders, and other brief periods of time where work, nonetheless hard work, was not a priority. But other than those periods, I have always worked. Maybe not at the exact things I should have been working hard at, but I worked hard nonetheless. When I was in high school, I always had a job when I wasn’t playing sports. I was a bag boy at Shop Rite (a Union job!), a Foodtown cashier, and I ripped up carpets on the weekends for a flooring company. I worked extra hard in the summertime at being a better football player, because I wasn’t the biggest or fastest and I knew I had to be better with my technique and knowledge than everybody else. During the school year, I would get up early every Saturday morning and drive a half-hour to Montclair State University to work with a pitching coach while all of my friends who I partied with the night before slept in until noon, because baseball was my ticket to college and I wasn’t as physically talented as most players, so I had to put the extra time in.

After high school, I had to make ends meet for college, and since then I have worked just about every job under the sun. I worked in an organic food store. I worked as a landscaper in the heat and the rain. I’ve been a construction laborer, hauling bricks with my bare hands. One year I got up at 3 AM every morning, rain or shine, temperature be damned, to ride the back of the garbage truck through swanky neighborhoods where famous baseball players and rappers lived, lifting heavy, smelly trash cans over my head, and running next to the truck for eight hours straight. There were a lot of moments when I thought about letting go of the truck and splattering myself on the road, just to get out of the grueling work. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I did a very short stretch as a gravedigger. Not as fun as Hamlet would lead you to believe, and most people that work in cemeteries don’t get jokes about Yorrick. I spent countless late nights in busy kitchens, trying to get out before last call. I taught preschool kids…with a nasty hangover. I worked in the hellscape that is the corporate office, with my own cubicle and all of the back-stabbing of office politics. All the while, all of those years, I was moonlighting in the bars and clubs, playing my music, practicing guitar, writing songs, booking gigs, playing gigs, organizing rehearsals, making song charts, making flyers, promoting shows, making albums, making album covers, organizing photo shoots, plotting tours, and plotting tours and booking them for other artists. I was basically putting in at least eight hours a day working after work. Usually more.

And then when I finally started earning enough in music to quit the day jobs, the real work started: booking shows, promoting them, driving hours on end, day in day out, sleeping in the car, shaving at rest stops, sleeping in the worst Motel 6 in Jackson or whatever tertiary market I found myself in, hustling, grinding, and barely surviving, staying out on the road for almost 200 nights a year for close to a decade, sacrificing relationships, friendships, creature comforts, and my sanity along the way. And if I was home for a week or two, there’d be a few days of work to earn extra money, whether it was installing air conditioners in the Texas summer heat, or running the morning shift in the local diner, there were very few days off when I wasn’t on tour. I think that qualifies as working hard.

Did my dreams come true?

No.

Do I feel good about all the hard work?

Not really.

Is that ok?

Does that make me a a bad American?

It’s not that I don’t appreciate the ethic of hard work. I really don’t know any other way to do things. If you’re not going to do the it right, what’s the point of doing them at all? It’s just when I look around I see a whole lot of people doing way better than I am, and I don’t think they’ve worked hard as I have. Just look at the White House. Is being the head of Health and Human Services the first real job RFK Jr. has ever had? Sure seems like it. It doesn’t seem like he worked too hard. Donald Trump never worked a real day in his stupid life. In fact, when I think real hard about it, if hard work was the secret to success in the USA, my friend Maria would be the Queen. She works 3 jobs, seven days a week. And if you told her to take a day off, she would find a fourth job instead. She works way harder than anybody I know. I don’t think she’s rich, and I don’t think that all of her dreams have come true. In fact, I’m sure her two bedroom apartment on the cheaper side of town doesn’t have a finished basement or an indoor pool, or even a golden toilet. Maybe she’s not working hard enough.

When I was coming up in the music business in the late nineties, it was an unwritten rule that working artists wouldn’t be seriously considered by agents and managers unless they were doing a minimum of 100 shows a year. So I followed that golden rule. But somebody must have changed the rules along the way without telling me because I look around at the musicians I came up with and see a lot of people who didn’t put their noses to the grindstone at all. That one guy on the bill with me? He played with his semi-famous father occasionally for years until he went out on his own. That woman making all the waves? I avoided her at all costs when we were younger because I didn’t want to be a victim of her blind ambition. She’s only made one record, but she’s a great ass kisser and people love having their asses kissed. Do you know why you are seeing that name opening for a lot of big acts? Instead of touring and making records, that person just “networked”. That band you just saw at the festival in that brand new sprinter van, playing those sweet vintage guitars? Bankrolled by their wealthy and supportive parents. Assholes!

But I’m not complaining. I’m too stupidly proud to let anybody bankroll me. Too co-dependent to accept favors from anybody. I’m way too honest to kiss your ass. And I’m just the right combination of shy, self-righteous, and dumb to be outwardly ambitious. All I have is the hard work I was told would lead me to success. But now I look around and realize that I really don’t have much to show for the hard work. Do you hear that growling in your stomach? That’s the sound of the pride of hard work!

And now I’m a little too old to give shit.

Still, the need to work hard haunts me daily, minute by minute. When my eyes open at 5 AM most mornings, my first thought is usually “what should we be doing right now? Why are you just laying there? You should be doing something!” This is my curse. If idle hands are the devil’s playground, the devil must not think I’m very fun to play with. Come to think of it, I did go down to the crossroads, but all I got was a chicken sandwich from the Churches at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49. Just my luck.

During the pandemic, when we were all stuck inside and left to our own devices, and basically given free reign to live life in pajamas, eating bon-bons on the couch every afternoon, while binging on deliciously disposable TV shows, I continued to work hard. At first, when we thought it would just be a few weeks, I built a patio and redesigned our entire back yard. And when it became apparent that it was going to be a long term lockdown, I made a schedule: Workout at 7, breakfast at 8. An hour of French everyday, followed by an hour of brain teasers, and then some Yoga and meditation. Then we’re going to write for an hour. Followed by jazz guitar practice and then a few hours of songwriting, play the piano for an hour, and on and and on until dinnertime. The work was a good distraction, and it was beneficial mentally, and kept me somewhat sane, but at the end of the day, I don’t have too much to show for it. I have a pile of songs nobody will ever hear, I forgot how to play “My Favorite Things,” and if you asked me to say something in French, I’d probably answer in Spanish. I’m definitely not enlightened. And my brain is still playing games…it’s just that I didn’t ask it to.

Towards the end of the pandemic, I began to put the pieces together for what would become by latest album, Modern American Folk Music. Between that and working construction, I was working at least 14 hours most days for about a year straight. I would get up early, and try to get some recording done while drinking my coffee before I hit the gym. The Eddie Van Halen-inspired solo on “Blue Skies” was recorded at 5:30AM on a Tuesday morning, totally by accident. Then it would be off to eight or so hours of physical labor, followed by more recording. I worked hard on that record for nearly three years, trying to make the very best record I could make on my own. Not only did I have to work hard making the music, I also had to teach myself a lot about recording, mixing, and mastering a record, as well as learning how to play a variety of instruments I had never touched in my life. It was a long and complicated process. But since I was working hard, it was all going to pay off.

Modern American Folk Music was my first new record in seven years, so I definitely wanted to make sure that I put the work in to give it a chance to be heard and to reach a wider audience. It had been a while since I had put out a record commercially, and even longer since I had promoted a new record, since my previous two had been promoted (or lack thereof) by a record label. In the time that had passed between records, the marketing landscape had certainly changed. A process that used to consist of making a good graphic and posting it on a social media platform, doing a few email blasts, and sending a few copies of the album to some trusted music writers had become something different entirely. In today’s instant-internet society, in order to properly promote your record as an independent artist, you need to feed the algorithm. And feed it a lot.

In 2025, for an independent musician to make a dent in the social media landscape, a nice graphic posted on a social media platform isn’t going to cut it. Now you need to post on several different platforms. You need a short, snappy promo and graphic for Threads. You need a question to get “engagement” on Twitter. You need to post a video on Facebook, but you have to put the link the comments, not in the original post, or it won’t be seen. Honestly, it probably won’t be seen anyway unless it makes people angry or appeals to racists. For Instagram, you’re going to need a nice graphic for your post, a short video for your reel, and an even shorter video or funny picture for your story. There are several different forms of social media posts, and you shouldn’t post them all at the same time. Stagger them. But the video you use for your Instagram reel needs to be different than the one you use for Tik Tok, because of some shit I don’t understand at all. And in order for you to have a better chance at your social media posts and videos being seen, you need to post every day. Several times a day. That means coming up with an idea for a video, or something to say, or a song to sing. And do it daily. You need to design a graphic and make it on photoshop. You need to film several reels. And even though you tell yourself its only going to take a few minutes, it’s probably going to take you at least an hour or two by the time you get everything set up, get the lighting right, find the angle you want, and then nail the performance or script, which never happens on the first take, ever. But that’s OK, because all of these videos and pictures and graphics are going to need to be edited, and of course, unless you are a professional editor with a degree from UCLA film school, it’s going to take a little while to edit all of those videos correctly. And you have to touch up the new photos you need to post. And make that graphic in photoshop that you need for the platforms where you aren’t posting the videos you’re editing. And the you need to upload them to Tik Tok. To Facebook. To YouTube. To Instagram. Three times. That’s going to take a while. That’s OK, while it uploads you can send yet another bunch of promo emails to these independent music journalists, who have awful taste in music, and even though you absolutely know that none of them will listen to your dance-inspired political record, and if they do, they certainly won’t get it, but you still do the work because you know if you don’t you’ll only have yourself to blame for your lack of success.

And when you’re done with that, you should shoot another 20 or 30 emails to bookers at local venues, because you really need, and want, to get out and play some shows, connect with your fans who don’t see your social media posts even though they follow you on every platform, and maybe make a few extra dollars. You’ve emailed every local club in a fifty mile radius every 2 weeks for 3 months, and haven’t even garnered a single response yet, and even though it’s pretty fucking humiliating, you still do the work because if you don’t you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself for the lack of success.

So, of course, I do the work.

Did my work pay off?

Well, I have no gigs coming up. Not a single booker at a local venue has so much as responded to any of my emails. Neither my music video or plethora of promo shorts went viral. Two out of the hundreds of music publications I contacted wanted me to pay them to listen to my album (Americana Highways and Relix), and only one reviewed it.

Do I feel good about the hard work?

Honestly, not really.

The fact that I did the work certainly alleviates some of guilt I would feel if I hadn’t done it, but I was raised Catholic so the guilt remains, and being rejected and ignored isn’t much of a payoff at the end of the day. I mean, I do enjoy making videos and coming up with fun, creative ideas for the. and making them the is cool, but it is very time consuming, especially when the art is just getting lost in the sea of hundreds of thousands of songs and videos that get released every week by people all over the world. I’d much rather be spending all of those hours playing my guitar, or working on a song, or a record…you know, making music. Like a musician!

Maybe that’s part of the problem with modern music, which often seems so disposable and silly. After all, a guy dressed up as a cowboy from the ‘60s is going to be a lot more interesting as you're scrolling your reels than some middle aged white guy in a t-shirt. And if his music sounds exactly like music you’ve already been hearing your entire life, it’s even easier. But when I really started getting serious about music, I got serious about playing, and about writing, and about making records, and maybe moving art, or the world, forward a step or two. Honestly, I’m not made for the social media landscape. When the cameras start rolling, I get self-conscious. I talk in slow, mumbly voice a lot of times. I get nervous and stutter. And playing music alone in a room to a camera is just plain weird sometimes. Music was meant for audiences. Or at least an audient. (That’s what you call it when there is only one person in the audience. I’ve played to audients all around the world!) When somebody is playing on a computer stream, or making a Tik-Tok video, they’re really not playing for anybody. And it’s kind of weird. I don’t want to do that. I don’t really like it. I want to make music for people. I want to sing to real humans. I don’t want to make a reel. Or reels. But, if you don’t do the work, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself.

If you don’t make the reels. If you don’t post the graphic. If you don’t create engagement. You have got to make that video to promote that show. And that other video with the cover song. And that instructional video that nobody asked for. Maybe a bullshit inspirational quote like “An artist is the heart of society. We make a difference.” Sorry buddy, you don’t. You're not getting enough engagement for that kind of reach. You want to be a musician? Put that guitar down. Put that pen away. Maybe make some more videos to feed the algorithm. Or post something controversial. Post that reel. Tweet that tweet. Write your newsletter. Start a podcast. And you have got to get that Substack out to the people.

If you don’t do the hard work, you’ll have nobody to blame but yourself!

But sometimes I just don’t feel like it.

Somebody once asked Miles Davis what he would do if he wasn’t a successful musician. His answer was simple: “I’d be playing music. I love music. I hear it all the time. I’m hearing it now.” I feel that deeply, and sometimes begrudgingly. But I have been hearing music in my head my whole life. I’ve been making up songs since I was in nursery school. Even today I drive my wife nuts with my non-stop songs about the cat, or whatever we are doing. (We call them Topic-ra, an art form unto itself that requires it’s own essay to properly explain it). In short, I will always be making music.

So if you don’t hear from me for a while, or don’t see my videos on Instagram, or an engagement-bait Tweet, or a series of selfies, or whatever becomes the must-do promotional tool of the day, don’t worry. I’m still making music.

On my own terms.

Because when it comes to all of the noise, the social media, and all of the other BS that is involved with making music, but isn’t music, sometimes I just don’t feel like it.

I think that’s OK.

MJ - May 2025

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I am reticent to use this space as a political billboard. After all, my music speaks for itself. And there are so many other things I would rather talk about. Baseball season is starting. The NFL Draft is coming. I’ve been way back into To Pimp A Butterfly. I made one of the greatest live Grateful Dead playlists of all time on Apple Music. I would much rather be telling you about any of those things. But now is not the time for that.

The world, our world, has been thrown into chaos. It feels like every ten minutes, a new missive is announced, upending the semblance of order we’ve known all of our lives. For people like me, who merely want all human beings on earth, regardless of sex, sexual orientation, religion, politics, or race to be able to have access to food, to shelter, and to basic healthcare, we are deeply hurt by many of these new orders. Unfortunately, there is an entire political movement who does not want the same things for our fellow human beings, and they are running roughshod over all of the progress our society has made in the past 100 years , only to usher in a new era of already failed ideas that has disaster written all over it. It’s a stupid, boorish philosophy, and it’s harmful to so many people, including those that are currently cheering it on from the sidelines.

I am not one for political hyperbole. I am not one to cry “wolf”, but if you look outside your window, there is a wolf right outside. I’m no fool. I’ve always been a history buff. I’ve read plenty of books. I’ve traveled. I’ve been to Germany several times. I’ve had deep conversations about Lou Reed with people who grew up behind the Iron Curtain. I’ve talked to people whose parents, who were just normal everyday working class people, backed the Nazis. I have been in a storage room in a museum near Hamburg filled with real Nazi propaganda. I’ve been to the Topography of Terror, the museum in Berlin that details the rise of the SS, Hitler and the Third Reich. Let me be clear: this is not a drill. This is the real thing.

The real thing means that we need to be on our toes. We need to be prepared for anything, Most of all, we need to have our facts straight, so we can fight the bullshit. Part of the strategy of this regime is to throw so much shit at you all at once that you can’t keep up with all of it, and it is a very effective strategy. It’s part of why it has taken me so long to get around to write here on my Substack: every time we are faced with a new story I get an idea, and I start ranting, only to have another, crazier story come along, and throw me off my game. It’s a lot. But I will not be silent, even if I am a little punch-drunk.

There are a lot of things I can complain about right now with the bat-shit crazy, world-changing news coming at us at neck-breaking speed. But let me tell what is really pissing me off at this moment:

Sure, America has a spending problem. Actually, according to economists, we really have a revenue problem, since we don’t collect enough tax money from the wealthy or corporations. And sure, there is plenty of waste. If you have followed me for any amount of time, you are probably aware of my constant calls for a significant cut in Defense spending, which is outrageous. We spend 6 times more than the rest of the world COMBINED on defense, yet we raise the amount we spend every year. But Elon Musk and Donald Trump are not making cuts where it counts.

Instead they are firing scientists, lawyers, and pretty much anybody who made Trump look bad during his first term. And they are eliminating anything they deem “woke”. Scientists, attorneys, FBI agents, meteorologists. This charade has nothing to do with spending and everything to do with Trump and Musk’s personal agenda. But here’s the thing: even if you wholeheartedly agree with the spending cuts, surely this could have been done in a better way.

Surely someone could have given some of these employees a few months warning, or a few weeks, or even a few days. Perhaps Elon Musk and DOGE could have had a plan to let everybody know what was happening. Instead, people are getting emails in the middle of the night telling them not to come in. And let’s be perfectly honest here: we all know a government worker in some shape or form. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you do think that these are shoddy individuals stealing money from the taxpayers and spending it all lavishly. But that’s bullshit.

The people that work for the government are just people like anybody else. They go to a job they mostly hate. They work with annoying people. They watch the clock until it hits 5. They dream of the weekend. Yeah, they probably have better healthcare and pension then you do, but they certainly aren’t living on easy street. They’re working people just like anyone else.

Yet, these men, who loudly claim their love for America and American values, are not only shredding the Constitution, they are throwing hard-working, law abiding, freedom-loving Americans out of their jobs with no warning and for no good reason. Sure, we’re told of the reasons, but we aren’t allowed to see the evidence or question Musk: the judge, jury and executioner. They are just indiscriminately firing people who do jobs working FOR the American people. And many of you are cheering them on.

Park Rangers with new families. People who live abroad that help battle disease. People with mortgages and families, who worked hard too get with they have. And you’re cheering for their demise. For their suffering. And here’s the kick: whenever whatever this purge is finally ends, and government spending is lower, and taxes are cut, you aren’t even going to know the difference. The amount of money you save with these tax breaks are going to give you $50 extra dollars a week. And that $50 is going to pale in comparison to the price of healthcare going up. The price of insurance going up. The price of everyday items, from food to household goods, going up. And the price of freedom being decimated. As of this writing, DOGE is claiming to have saved $55 Billion dollars (although evidence suggests it is far less). That is just over 1% of the Federal Budget. So, next time you get your paycheck, and you’re wishing that it was a little bit bigger, just use your imagination (or a calculator) and add 1% to that check (keeping in mind that if things go according to plan, you’ll never see that Social Security money they’re taking out) and then think about the 10,000-plus families all across America who have no idea where their next paycheck is coming from, thanks to Elon Musk.

Keep cheering.

MJ

May I suggest donating to the ACLU, who will be representing fired workers, and all other walks of life who are getting trampled by this administration’s haphazard BS.

www.aclu.org

**My ADD makes me a terrible proof-reader and spell checker**

In the last few weeks I have had the urge to write a long-form piece about several different topics: Christmas, 2024 Year in Review, the exploitation of independent artists, and a host of different complaints and observations that I’ve jotted down in my notebook recently, but as soon as I get enough energy to write about one of those issues, another one comes up and it knocks the steam right out of me and I lose my concentration.

Instead, I’m just going to expel a few petty grievances and few brief thoughts on ’24 in hopes that it will allow a smooth transition into the New Year…

The notion that a single tick of the clock on New Years and having your fortune change at the stroke of midnight is, of course, ridiculous, but I, like every other human being, need markers for my life, and the New Year is as good as any other. We all need to believe in something. During the normal course of the year, when I need to make a change, mix-up my routine, or alter my course in any way, I always do it on a Monday. If I tried to quit something on a Thursday, there would be no chance of that happening. But on a Monday, for some reason, it works for me. New week, new life, right? I can’t explain why my brain works that way, but there is actually some science that backs up this theory of a new week, new month, or new year being a great way to start anew. I’ve had a lot of success quitting things in the past: opiates, alcohol, nicotine (fingers crossed!) . My 2025 includes two things I want to quit: Sugar and self-doubt, which kind of go together is some ways. Sugar is the drug of all drugs for me. It is my constant refuge in times of stress. And self-doubt, well I have been full of self-doubt and lacking confidence my entire life. In 2024 I was able to see the damage it’s done to my life, my relationships, and my career. I’ve also been full of sugar most of that time! So in 2025, expect a louder, perhaps more brash, and hopefully more confident, and sugar-free (mostly!) Mike June.

2024 was disappointing in so many ways for me. The election of Trump was a huge disappointment, not only in a political sense, but for what it says about our society as a whole. Donald Trump is a poor excuse for a human being and the idea that he would be reelected after his first term, which presidential historians consider one of the worst terms in American history, is somewhat baffling to me. Unfortunately, our society is consumed by the misinformation and tribalism, and it all gets magnified through social media. To make things worse, the media sees Trump as a golden calf, whose unpredictable and outrageous behavior provides them with endless ratings and roundtable discussions. And as disappointing as it is for those of us who did not vote for him, I can assure you that it will be just as disappointing, if not more, to those who did vote for him. His plans are ridiculously stupid, and make no sense in real life. Tariffs, mass deportations, and cutting taxes for the wealthy (AGAIN) is just not good policy no matter what side you lean to. Such policies were the main ingredients in what became known as Great Depression. To make matters worse, the people he is choosing to put those plans into action are inexperienced and ignorant, not too mention, they all seen to have issues with assaulting women. It’s going to be a four year clown show. He’s not even President yet, and people are already sick of his bullshit. As I write this, he is currently lying to America about the attack in New Orleans, and blaming the “open border.” But a cult is a cult an personally, I’ve thrown up my hands and given up trying to present the Trump voter with facts, figures, and reason. They are immune to those things. Of course, Trump isn’t the dangerous figurehead many on the left make him out to be. Yes, he is a fascist, but an incredibly stupid one. To me, he is more of a symbol of what America is right now: a population of mostly self-interested, greedy people. It’s a quality that, in some way, has always been part of the American fabric, bubbling underneath the surface, but now it is visible for all of us to see: People out for themselves, not thinking of others. We saw this in the lead up to election: a lot of “I don’t like his_____, but MY _______”. You can fill in the blanks anyway you want to. You can see it in the greed working in the smallest aspects of life, whether it be the way people drive, or in the way the lesser of us are treated. The richest man in the world, who could solve world hunger AND the climate crisis by writing a few checks, is trying to get the US Government to stop giving subsidies to the poorest and neediest amongst us. It’s a disgusting attitude toward humanity. Unfortunately, that attitude that is one of the only things that seems to be trickling down from the top. So for 2025, I’m going to resist this behavior and make sure that in I go out of my way to show consideration for other people: whether it’s holding the door open for a stranger, or letting somebody cut in line at the store, or just being a considerate driver. Lucky for me, I already do most of those things, so that’s an easy one.

My biggest accomplishment of 2024 was putting out a record! Modern American Folk Music. That was exciting. It had been a long time since I released new music. Seven years. It was a record that I worked extremely hard on. I took a lot of musical chances, exploring rhythms and sounds well outside of my comfort zone. Artistically, I couldn’t be happier: I heard something in my head and took a giant leap, and in way, it paid off. I got a lot of great feedback from fans and friends. Some people said it was brilliant (it is!), challenging, beautiful…and I’ll begrudgingly agree with all of those comments.

The music press, however, did not give it the air that I thought it deserved. And that’s fine. To be honest, I didn’t really expect to get a lot of press. But what was really disappointing was the number of publications who offered to review Modern American Folk Music for a fee. There are always the random scammers offering up and coming musicians a pie in the sky for the right price, whether it be publicity or increased social media followers, but getting these offers from publications that act as gatekeepers to the music industry, like Relix Magazine and the website Americana Highways is really disappointing. It’s pure exploitation, and it’s wrong. When these “gatekeepers” are only publishing or covering those who are able to pay a fee, it dilutes the quality of music that you end up hearing. And when these reviews are published without the readers knowing that they are basically paid advertisements, well, thats just fraudulent.

The thing that bothers me most publications that request I pay them for them to listen or review my record is simple: I’ve already paid my motherfucking dues. And then some. Hell, I’ve paid other people’s dues. I have made 7 records without the help of a benefactor or a label. I have never had a publicist promote my records to the press or to radio, simply because I’ve never had that kind of extra money laying around to just throw away in the hopes of someone who has a fraction of the knowledge about music that I have will praise it on their little-read website. I’ve never had an agent booking my shows. My father isn’t a musician with connections. I’ve done it all by hand. I’ve gotten in the van and played hundreds of shows, crisscrossing this country, and others, for a pittance, trying to get people to hear my music and selling CDs out of the proverbial trunk of my car. I have willingly sacrificed many of the creature comforts of life that many people take for granted. And my records that didn’t get any press? They’re pretty fucking good, if I can say so myself. The songwriting his pretty fucking good. The production and concept behind each record is pretty fucking good. I’ve done my work. They can pay ME $60 to listen to my record.

It constantly amazes me how little respect the people covering music actually have for the hard work that goes into making the music that they eventually hear. I’ve been working my ass off for years, and have contributed quite a bit to help out people in the music business, and I constantly go out of my way to challenge myself in the music that I make and the subjects that write about. One of the most frustrating aspects of not getting recognition from the press is to hear people praise other bands and songwriters for their artistic bravery for broaching a subject that I wrote about five or ten years before. It ironic, music fans and writers are always pining for somebody with integrity to come along who won’t “sellout.” They want “authenticity”. Unless that authentic artist doesn’t have an extra $60 laying around. But what is integrity in this day and age, anyway? After I received the email from Americana Highways, which came on Christmas Eve, requesting $60 for them to listen to my album, I removed their name from the email and posted it on my Instagram in it’s entirety. And wouldn’t you know it: after sending them 15 emails over the past 4 months with no reply or acknowledgment from them at all, they responded within 5 minutes of me posting their ridiculous request! The email said that they would review Modern American Folk Music for FREE if I would just take the post with their email down. I did take the post down, but told them to go get fucked. I didn’t want their review.

Ok….

Now that it’s 2025 that’s all in the past…but it felt really good to get it off my chest. Nobody should be hauling any of that their stuff around in the New Year like a pile of junk in an old shopping cart. It’s best to let some of it go.

I have big plans for 2025: I’m already working on a few new projects. I have a huge pile of songs that have collected over the past few years. I think I want to record them acoustically and put them out as a collection. Sometimes, when I have a pile of songs sitting on my desk, I either need to record them and get them out to the world, or burn them just to be able to move forward with the next project. The clearing of the decks, so to speak. Keep an eye out.

I plan on playing a lot more shows. 2024 was a down year for me as far as performing goes, mostly by design, as the song and dance that is booking shows has grown more tiresome to me, but I’m going to try more this year. I’m also thinking about putting a band together and get back to rocking and rolling the way God, or Neil Young, intended me to. If you’re reading this and you are interested in putting on a show, or having me come to your town, send me a message!

I’m going to eat better and exercise more. Yeah, I do go to the gym 6 days a week. But this year I’m going to try harder! And maybe not work out just so I can eat ice cream on the weekends!

I’m going to do my best to be open to people and possibilities.

I’m going to do my best and try and forgive those who have done me wrong in the past, and let go of old grievances that I’ve been carrying around. Some of them for far too long, and far too little. I’m also going to try and to learn to forgive myself for my inadequacies, real and imagined.

I’m going to stay off of social media. Everybody should stay off of social media. It’s one of those things, like cancelling cable, that would simply make the world a better place. (And please, sign up for my mailing list or my Substack!)

And most of all, I’m going to try and appreciate the things I have and the people that I love more consciously. I’m not sure if I do that enough, but I’m going to give it my best in ’25.

And I’m going to continue to be grateful to the people who encourage my artistic ventures, support me financially in any little way, and continue to listen and appreciate the music I make. There are probably ten or twenty people that have supported me over the past twenty years that have made a huge difference to me, whether through kind words, encouragement, or sharing my music with the world and, occasionally, some money. I could name them all right now off the top of my head, but I don’t want to embarrass anybody or mistakenly leave somebody out, but I’m sure that you know who you are. Just know that I do appreciate it, even when I’m crying or complaining about the world conspiring against me! Thank you so much.

I hope you all have a blessed safe and happy New Year. Please, try to do one thing this year to make the world a better place for everybody. Anything! Everybody has to do SOMETHING! Thanks!

Peace,

MJa

I made my coffee, poured a cup, and then I sat down with my iPad and opened up the New York Times, as I have been doing almost daily for about 40 years. Well, not on an iPad, but you get it.  Honestly, these days I just scroll through the headlines with a mixture of fear and dread, usually stopping at the opinion section to see if there’s anybody that might have something insightful to say about the world we live in today. I was immediately drawn to a vivid painting of Kamala Harris in a straw hat, with a vivid yellow background, and the article that accompanied it. I started to read.

I was immediately drawn in by the authors opening in which she described being a southerner living in New York, and the acrobatics of mouth and mind that come along with that territory. I am from New Jersey, and I grew up just a few miles from New York City, and I have been living in the south, first in Austin,  and now a small town near Durham, NC for over 15 years. So, I often have to navigate between the world of “Y’alls” and “YouGuys.” I felt a connection to the writer at that moment. But then, about four or five paragraphs in, I was stopped in my tracks. THAT NAME. I immediately felt my good morning vibes come crashing down like a wave onto the shores of my depression.

***

I just turned 49 a few weeks ago. I’ve been around the world. I’ve been in jail. I lived in Newark, NJ for a few years. I’ve been to more funerals than I care to remember. In short: I’ve seen and done some shit. And if you had asked me about online bullying five or ten years ago, I would have probably written it off as “kids today”, or made a remark about this “overly sensitive culture that we live in today.” How can someone be bullied online? Can’t they just turn off the computer and walk away, or delete their account from whatever platform the bullying is taking place on? I really did not view online bullying as an actual thing. After all, it isn’t the same as being stuffed in a locker. Then it happened to me.

It was the spring of 2020, and George Floyd had just been murdered by a cop on a Minneapolis street in broad daylight. Emotions were raw, and tensions were high, especially on the social media platforms. Especially on Twitter. I was never a huge Twitter user, and social media is basically poison my personality type, but I always found it a useful place to follow breaking news and conversations on certain topics. Plus, as a musician, you “need” to be on there to keep up your social media presence and attract new fans.  (I’m not so sure about that these days, as the dreaded algorithm seems to severely limit any kind of promotional post I try to make make)

I don’t even remember what the exact post was about, but I think it had something to do with George Floyd’s death and whether he should have been “following the orders” of the police, a ridiculous argument that comes up every time a person of color gets harassed, or killed, by the police. The Bully was on Floyd’s side, and two of the Bully’s fans were arguing against it. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect of:

“Why couldn’t he (Floyd)  be peaceful like MLK”

Siding with The Bully, I replied:

“And they killed MLK too!”

I moved on with my online life, scrolling mindlessly through the days minutia, but a few minutes later I got a notification that my reply had been quoted in a  re-tweet. I promptly pressed the button to see what kind of response my quip had received. And there it was: My response, “And they killed MLK too!”, was quoted and retweeted by the Bully himself, to his thousands of followers:

“This clown is trying to white-wash history”

Ugh.

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In May of 2020 I probably had about 200, maybe 300 Twitter followers. Maybe less. It didn’t matter. Nobody “liked” my tweets, or re-tweeted my sharp, learned analysis of all things human. I was mostly tweeting into the void, my insights falling like a tree in the woods. From the days of Myspace, through the Facebook years, up to today's assorted clusterfuck of vanity machines, I’ve never been “good” at social media. I’ve never had a lot of followers, and I always felt a little weird, and still do, requesting somebody’s “friend” acceptance. I’m a little shy. I’m not an exhibitionist. I think I’m always right. I have a quick temper. I am stubborn. I am an addict, and I don’t come off great on social media. I’m the exact kind of person who should not be using social media. In fact, I’m sure that people who only know me through the lens of social media probably have a pretty distorted picture the kind of person I am, and rightfully so. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Facebook. But it’s 2024, and I could make a billion of excuses as to why I’m still on social media, but those excuses don’t matter. I’m still using it, despite my own personal mishaps. And here we are.

When I first started out in the music business, hard work was the key to getting your foot in the door. If you wanted to start getting some serious attention, then you had to hit the road and play as many shows as possible. In the world of artist booking, if you didn’t play one hundred shows a year, you wouldn’t receive any serious interest from booking agents or talent buyers. You needed to build an audience, and show that you were growing that audience through repeated performances and all of the work that goes into performing. There was an entire world of singers and songwriters traversing the country, playing hundreds of gigs, drawing small but enthusiastic, paying crowds, and making a decent living. This is the model I based my music career on when I first set out to make a living playing being a musician. From the early 2000s to around 2008, I prided myself on being a hardworking musician, playing as many gigs as possible, and collecting every email address I could along the way.

When the financial markets crashed in 2008, it sent a ripple through the world of independent music. Live music, after all, is essentially a business built on people having disposable cash. Entertainment, no matter how small the price, is a luxury for most folks. After the crash, not many people had that extra money, and the landscape of the touring business changed. Promoters who used to book four or five shows a week, offering artists a small, but guaranteed rate, could no longer book that many shows or deliver the small fees without fear of losing their shirt. A lot of this venues closed. The road became a free-for-all. When every artist is playing for lower fees, or “door deals”, it opens the door to a wider range of artists, and, in a way, floods the market. I watched with my own eyes as established artists, some of them used to making a thousand dollars a night, were forced to play smaller rooms to much smaller crowds for a percentage of what they were used to making. This was not only hard on them financially, but mentally as well. One night I got I got a call from a promoter of a 40 seat listening room who had hosted my friend, who just a few years prior was playing to 1000 people a night. The promoter was worried about this artist, as he had spent his entire show berating the six people who actually showed up because the other 34 people did not. Hard times indeed.

Over the next several years, the mark of an artist’s work would be measured less by the quality or quantity of their work, as streaming replaced selling, and the number of social media followers replaced real-time and real-life concert and record sales numbers. The work of an independent musician had changed from being a hard-worn road dog to being a social networker, and with it, the measure of a musician changed. Many of us who had spent years building up an audience piece by piece through songs and hard work were left behind by those more willing to be use their vanity and brown-nosing skills to create an illusion on social media rather than putting the hard work down on tape and counting the miles. I used to have a rule when I was a booking agent: if the number of photo shoots that artist has done is greater than the number of songs they’ve released, then I’ll pass. Today, that’s the norm. If I just scroll quickly down my Instagram feed, I can instantly show you four or five artists that have not really made much music, or played many shows, but have the monetary means to be able to project the image that they are living the “rock and roll life”. They have lots of pictures with bigger, more renowned artists, due to spending more of their time glad-handing, ass-kissing and getting selfies than they are honing their craft. After all, social media is a visual medium, and what people see matters more than what people hear these days. I know of one 40-something year old musician who is making some waves in the music world, and only has one record and an EP, but a lot of more famous friends than most people. That blows my old, antiquated mind.

Where would we be right now if the entire history of twentieth century music rested upon Elvis’ ability to attract Twitter followers? Could you imagine Dylan with a Twitter account in 1965? What would have happened to John Lennon if he had made his infamous “bigger than Jesus” comment in the age of Facebook? Thankfully, we’ll never know.

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“Was that directed at me?”

That was my response to the Bully, who had obviously misread or misinterpreted my response to his original tweet. I waited several hours for a response and got nothing.

Actually, to say I got nothing would be wrong. I got plenty. Suddenly, my little profile, with just a few hundred followers and almost no engagement activity, was blowing up. And not in a good way. Now I was a racist. An moron. A white supremacist. My email inbox, which received maybe three or four emails directly from my website a month, received fifteen emails in one day. None of them complimentary.

In the course of just a few hours, a misinterpreted tweet had suddenly given me a reputation as a white supremacist, and the Bully’s minions were very thorough. One of my albums was flagged for review by the Apple Store, as it was reported to have been infringing some kind of copyright. I wasn’t threatened by any of this activity, or offended, just annoyed. It was all just bullshit. The worst kind of bullshit, too: totally avoidable, stupid bullshit.

This is the world of social media, where a comment is taken out of context, misread, and taken as fact by people who don’t know, or want to know, the context. These people emailing me, or commenting about me on Twitter didn’t know me, who I am, or my history. Nor did the Bully. But here I am, a singer-songwriter who has been writing about racism and police brutality long before the George Floyd murder, and I’m “white-washing history”. So I posted in my defense, and I paraphrase:

“I know (The Bully) is new to being “woke” but I’ve been writing songs about racism and police brutality for over a decade”

And then the real good stuff started. The Bully quickly replied ultimate Musician Bully move:

“Yeah, well I never heard of you”

Oh yes. The social media equivalent of “Do you know who I am?”.

And then another quick tweet before I could even reply. Again, paraphrasing:

“I bet your DDDD GGGG songs are really good”, a dig at me, insinuating that my music was somehow lame and simplistic. (My music, by the way, is far more complex and intelligent than The Bully’s by every measure…I really needed to throw that in!)

I should have replied with my song “Fall From Grace” from Poor Man’s Bible and that probably would have shut him up, but I’m never good at saying what I need to say in the moment, especially in a situation like this, where I’m caught off-guard. That’s the main reason I became a writer. My Irish temper and my need to be right all the time often get the best of me.

I forget the series of events that happened next, but the conversation went back and forth briefly. The Bully continued to insult my music, and my lack of success in the music business.

The point was clear: my lack of success, exemplified by my number of followers, meant that I had no recourse, and no right to defend myself, and no right to the truth. For the rest of the day I felt like the world was spiraling out of control. In just a matter of hours, I went from being an obscure leftist songwriter with 300 followers making a comical quip to an unsuccessful loser of a songwriter with a penchant for racist ideologies known to thousands. How did this happen? How did it happen so fast? I felt helpless.

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As I get older, one of the things I find fascinating is connecting a term or set of words that once seemed foreign and distant with a familiar feeling you once felt, but could not identify. The power of the mind is amazing, and as I get older, I often recall memories of moments I have not thought about in decades. Bullying was like that for me.

When I was growing up, I didn’t have a lot of bullies, or at least the way they are portrayed on television. There was no big, dumb kid pushing me around, trying to take my lunch money. I didn’t experience bullying in that sense, so I didn’t really know what being bullied, in the traditional sense, felt like. But when this incident on Twitter happened, I had an emotional flashback to a particular time in my life.

When I was in high school, I played football. In our high school, all of the freshman played on the freshman team, which was completely separate from the varsity team. When you became a sophomore, you were included on the varsity team, and every summer, right before the school year started, the entire team would go the Pocono Mountains for three or four days of  a training camp, featuring long morning runs with your helmet on, three practices a day in the summer heat, terrible summer camp food, and, of course, the hazing.

Hazing, until recently, had been a right of passage in sports, fraternities, and a host of other segments of American life where privileged gate keepers use fear and punishment to test the loyalty of those who want to enter their world. It’s a ritual that probably dates back to the very first time humans decided that there was a particular segment of their society who were not “good enough” to join their club. Hazing was designed to keep out the weak, and hold power over those allowed to be included through fear tactics and “othering”. A loyalty test, so to speak. In the world of high school football, it is (or was) pretty much an expected ritual.

The entire sophomore class was aware of the hazing stories. Were we going to be paddled? Forced to eat bugs? The urban legends ran wild throughout our little football enclave. But when we got to camp, we were happily relieved to find that the seniors in that particular class were benevolent rulers. They merely slapped masking tape with unflattering nicknames on our helmets and made us take an embarrassing “class photo” of all of the sophomore players in their underwear. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the stories our imaginations had conjured. Unfortunately for me, I had my own personal hazing at that camp.

I was never blessed with incredible athletic ability, so when I started playing football, my lack of blazing speed and physical size gave me a disadvantage when it came to getting on the field. But I worked very hard. I would spend the summers trying to get stronger, faster, and smarter so that when I did get my opportunity, I would be ready. I knew that our coaches had no reason to think that I would contribute to the team going into the season, but when off-season practices began a few weeks before camp started, I showed that I was more fit, more prepared, and more improved than any other player in my class. The coaches began to notice. And so did one particular junior.

As a freshman, I played safety. I did ok. I had a few interceptions, but I was also not the fastest player. In the offseason, I had lifted weights religiously and worked on my running speed in order to become a better safety, but when the coaches saw my new size and improved speed, they had me moved to Middle Linebacker, a position that required speed and strength, as well as the ability to grasp defensive concepts and communicate them to the rest of the team. If I had anything going for me, it was my football IQ. The best part about getting moved to Middle Linebacker for me was that it moved me way up on the depth chart. As a safety, I was maybe the 5th or 6th best player, but once I got moved to Middle Linebacker, I became the third man in line to start. It was a good place to be as a sophomore. The coaches loved the way I adapted to the position, and I was thriving. There was only one person that wasn’t happy about it: the Junior ahead of me on the depth chart. And he let me know about it.

All summer long leading up to the trip to the Poconos, I would get these little hints that camp was not going to be good for me. Whether it was at a football practice, or out at a party, the Junior would tell me how he was going to make my life hell at camp. It made me nervous, of course. I was a just a slight, socially awkward sophomore, trying to fit into this new world that was high school. I was insecure about everything.

In the days leading up to our camp trip, I was so frightened about what would happen to me, but I couldn’t say a word to anybody. First of all, I wanted to fit in with the team, and I certainly didn’t want to make waves by ratting on another player. And outside of football, this Junior who was bullying me was somewhat popular in school, and was the older brother of one of my best friends, so showing any kind of fear or trepidation would be socially damaging for me. I knew that nobody would stand up for me.

When camp came, none of the seniors, who I dreaded all summer long, did anything remotely threatening. In fact, most of them were very nice and helpful to us young kids experiencing camp for the first time. But at every turn over those four days of camp, the Junior would strike. During one practice, he stepped on my leg with his cleats. Every time I came into the cabin after a practice or a meal, I found find my clothes and equipment thrown all over the place. At one point, I found my mattress in the shower, with the indication that it was pissed on. I was afraid to eat my food, drink my drinks, and I could not sleep.

In situations like this, nobody wants to stand up for you when you're just a little sophomore. The older kids are “in the club” and your friends, who would normally be your best defenders and have your back if you were going to fight a rival from another school in the diner parking lot, don’t want to be bullied either. It’s a lonely place. The power of the bully does not lie on the physical damage they can do, but the fear that they can create. It’s mental warfare.

I did survive this bullying. In fact, on the last day of camp I made a long run, juking the Junior out of his cleats. Throughout the rest of the season, I proved my worth as a player and forced the Junior to show me some respect, which he begrudgingly did. In a turn of events that should be a surprise to no one, that bully eventually became a cop. Over the last thirty or so years, I had forgotten about those terrible feelings of fear that were caused by that experience,  but the Twitter incident with The Bully bought those forgotten feelings rushing back.

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It’s a lonely feeling when you get ganged up on by a bully. You just want to set the record straight, show the world that you are in the right, and be vindicated. But in situations like the one with The Bully, there is no recourse. I could yell into the void, posting in my defense all I wanted, but my tiny little following is no match for a larger presence in the social media atmosphere, where those with more followers have more reach to a larger audience, and therefore, much more power. The voice of the little people just gets drowned out in all of the noise. And sadly, the people with the larger followings are unaware of the raw power they have at their fingertips.

After 24 hours of accusatory Twitter replies and poorly written, loosely threatening emails, I felt the best thing I could do was defend myself on my own turf. I figured that anybody who would want to throw more gasoline on the fire via email would be coming at me through my website, so I wrote a blog post defending myself and posted it in on my site. In that post, I explained the situation, my history as a musician who has been writing about racism, inequality, and police brutality, and a brief history about singers who spent their careers singing protest songs. I call these people The Saints of Good Intentions.

I’m sure protest music has been around since the first song was ever written. Music is the great communicator, and what better way is there to draw attention to injustice than through a catchy song?  Many folk songs, stretching back long before the recording age, dealt with issues that plagued society, particularly the common and poorer classes. But at the dawn of rock and roll and the rise of the music industry, a pattern emerged. Although many early “protest singers” like Guthrie and Seeger, became influential in the grand scheme of things, none of them had any hits of any kind, and were mostly fringe character in the cultural landscape. That all changed when Bob Dylan began writing his own protest songs, using the language of poetry to create fiery and powerful songs. Dylan’s influence was felt deeply outside of folk music, influencing bands like The Beatles to write and sing about topics of the day like war, poverty, and civil rights. There was a period in the late sixties, with the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War raging, and the draft taking so many young men into a war they didn’t want to fight, when protest music was on the top of the charts. But that wouldn’t last.

Throughout the rock and roll era, there have been ebbs and flows of protest, or topical music making the charts. The mid-to-late sixties was dominated by anti-war and civil rights music. In the early seventies, R&B music was dominated by music expressing the problems and issues in the Black Community, best exemplified by Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin On.” Even the Temptations were making psychedelic protest music, along side greats like Curtis Mayfield.  In the late seventies there was a brief blast of topical punk that countered the care-free vibes of the Disco Era (although Disco itself was a form of protest music, too), but that soon gave way to New Wave, forcing the more political hard-core punk underground.  And then there was the “heartland rock” that captured the frustration of Reagan’s working class America with Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”, Mellencamp’s “Small Town”, and even Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is”. But what happens to protest singers when the cultural zeitgeist moves on to another trend? In many cases, they end up forgotten.

Nina Simone started singing protest songs very early in her career, but by the time she was established in the early seventies and the songs of the Civil Rights era were no longer in fashion, she still kept at it. In turn, she was shunned by the industry, and it eventually crushed her. Phil Ochs was one of the great protest singers of the sixties, but he refused to change, his record sales slipped as protest music went out of fashion, and he ended up hanging himself. There are many examples of these tragic stories throughout music history, and one could easily surmise that these singers, who so desperately wanted their music to help create change in the world, felt defeated by an industry that only cared about the issues when the records sold. They were crushed by the world they were trying to save.

I never wanted to sing topical or protest songs. There were a few mildly topical songs, like “Shoot to Slide” on my first few albums, but I never thought I had the smarts, or the knowledge to put my words out there and take a stand on issues I cared about. But all of that changed around 2004, when the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars began. At the time, there was a was a lot of great new music exploding into the culture. Arcade Fire, TV on the Radio, and My Morning Jacket were a few of the bands I was into at the time. I kept waiting for that one record to come out from one of these artists: the record that would expose the corruption of the Bush era, and galvanize the people to take to the streets , speaking truth to power. But it never happened. So I started writing my own little protest songs. But I didn’t have the nerve to record or release them. I played them when I was home alone, or left them to collect dust. Finally, in 2011, after touring post-financial crash America for a few years and seeing first-hand the hurt and devastation that it caused to so many people throughout the country, and the rising tide of open racism that came along with the crash and the inauguration of a Black president, I decided to record some of those songs. I released “Talkin’ Revolution Blues” in 2012. My first topical record.

In a sweet twist of irony, it was this record, featuring the song “Hard Times,” that I handed to The Bully backstage at a show at The Continental Club in Austin during SXSW of 2013. We had a mutual friend, who I was planning to work with on my next record. He thanked me for the record and moved on. At the time, nobody in Americana or Rock, or at least in the world of music dominated by white people, was singing about topics like racism and police brutality, except for me. I got a lot of shit from fans and critics, and a lot of “I liked the love songs better”, but these important topics were being talked about in the R&B and Hip-pop world. Some of the best records of the last decade plus, like Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly”, D’Angelo’s “Black Messiah”, and Solange’s “A Seat At The Table”, were exploring all of these issues in a way that no Americana songwriter could touch, and they didn’t. Until George Floyd was killed in broad daylight. It was front page news. It was “cause celeb.” All of the sudden, white Americana singers, who were all raised in the South but, for some reason, never said a word about racism, were all protest singers. When in Rome, I guess.

I made all of these points in my blog post that I put up on my website, without mentioning the Bully’s name. I didn’t want to continue to stir the pot, and I sure as hell didn’t want to continue getting animus from him, his fans, and his followers. I just wanted to clear my name and defend myself from being called a white-washing racist without having to deal with the shit-show that is Twitter. Instead, it just got worse.

I posted my blog piece late at night, and when morning came, I thought the entire incident was over. But I was wrong. The Bully had somehow read the blog post, and took issue with the fact that I pointed out that he had never once uttered a single word in his music about anything other than himself until George Floyd became the topic of the day, so that it was quite hypocritical for him to be calling me a “white washer” of history.  Bully’s don’t like being called out. Especially one who was conducting a quiet promo campaign to get people to compare him to Springsteen.

First, he tweeted that he was planning to tell me I was “ok” because he checked with some mutual friends and they vouched for me, as if the act of him misreading my tweet and then announcing me to the world as a racist was my fault. But since I made my blog post, he was no longer going to do that. Of course, this is ridiculous because I had done nothing that needed vouching for, since he had been in the wrong the entire time. When a handful of my fans tweeted at him, telling him to back off, he told them to “go back to their mother’s basement”, a common retort you see on social media from people who can’t defend their own thoughts or actions in any meaningful way. To me, it’s a clear sign that the attacker doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to win the argument, so they turn to belittling anybody who challenges them. When examining the lyrical content of the Bully’s music, that theory tracks.

My only reply to The Bully was to basically tell him to fuck off. That I had done nothing wrong. That all he needed to do was tweet an apology for basically calling me a racist in front of his thousands of followers.

His reply was to belittle me again, with a “good luck with your ‘career,”  insinuating that I wasn’t a popular enough artist to receive an apology.

But I was done arguing with this clown.

Then, the biggest bully move of all: He started following me on Twitter. That was beyond creepy.

I promptly deleted my Twitter account.

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The hardest part of my online bullying experience was not the fact that I was publicly humiliated and silenced. Or the flood of angry emails from ignorant fans of the Bully. Or having to deal with the faceless streaming services in order to get the album that was flagged back online, although dealing with all of this things was a time consuming ordeal that could have easily been avoided if The Bully had just acted like a man. The hardest part for me was the deafening silence of nearly all of my peers.

Throughout the entire episode, not one artist that I knew personally stepped up and defended me, despite the fact that at that point, I had released three albums in which racism and police brutality were major themes. Sadly, the only two people who publicly stood up for me were singer-songwriters that I only knew in passing. They know who they are, and I thank them for their bravery. I use the word “bravery” because that’s what it takes to step outside of your assigned role in the music business and call out assholes like The Bully who sit higher up on the industry food chain than you do, looking down on those below.

But bravery in the music industry should not be limited to standing up to bullies. It takes bravery to call out the sexual predators, the self-involved agents, the greedy labels, and the crooked promoters. I say bravery because when people stand up to the bad actors in the music business, they are often discarded and silenced. We have all heard the stories about the film industry and the stories of Harvey Weinstein’s behavior and how they were followed by literally hundreds of stories about hundreds of bad actors, and the fear that all of the victims lived with, afraid to tell their stories publicly in fear of being blackballed and exiled from the industry. The music business, even on the smallest levels, is no different.

In my experience, I felt so marginalized and afraid to stand up for myself, that instead of taking a Bully head on, I decided to put a post on my own webpage, where much fewer people would see it. I still, to this day, nearly 4 years later, feel an inexplicable fear to accept gigs in the city where the Bully lives. I feel belittled and marginalized. Worst of all, I still have a fear to tell my story because I don’t want to ever have to face that kind of backlash again. For example, I have had a major urge to email the writer of the opinion article that triggered the return of my trauma to tell her how misguided she was in using The Bully as an example of someone who writes about  toxic masculinity (ha!), but I weighed my need to express myself and tell my story with the bullshit and backlash I would face in doing so, and I opted for silence.

In the end, my story amounts to a hill of beans. I am fine. My life is relatively good. I have, and will, survive worse. I don’t ever think about The Bully, unless I see the name in print. However, there are certain opportunities that I may have lost in this ordeal. Will I ever be invited to be the opening act on a bill with someone who is friends with The Bully? Will the thousands of people who saw my name attached to “white washing history” ever wonder if it was true? Will they ever take the time and listen to my music and see that, in fact, I have not been white-washing history and that my music is proof? Will I ever get the credit for being a white guy who was singing about police brutality and racism long before the George Floyd murder, and unlike The Bully, continues to do so to this day?

Probably not. Because the fact remains that I am just a small fish in the music world, and an even smaller fish in the world of social media, and in the space that exits between those two worlds is an invisible hierarchy where those with more followers can create and control the narrative and use it as a bludgeon to silence anybody who may challenge them, or more importantly, their self-styled image. We see it in journalism, in politics, and in music. The internet is a powerful tool, and can be used to destroy people with very little effort. Of course, musicians who want to continue to have careers, or the chance at a career, will remain silent, and it will stay that way until musicians and music fans who yearn for truth and authenticity, take a stand. We should never be made afraid to do so.

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Well, today’s a big day. MODERN AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC is now out in the world. My first new release in 7 years. I feel pretty good about it, which wasn’t the case a week ago. If you’re an artist, or you live with an artist, I’m sure you would appreciate the conversation (probably not the right word for this interaction!) I had with my wife last week. I finished the album, and had sent a limited number of copies to some people in the press. Nobody got back to me for the first 24 hours (yes, my ridiculous expectations!). I flew into a panic:

ME: I think I’m done. I think I’m done with music. Nobody is going to like this record. Nobody

       cares. I can never catch a break. I should just sell my equipment, cancel my gigs, and   

       forget about it. I feel like I wasted my entire life.

WIFE: Junie, are you sure? It’s your passion. And I’ve heard the record. It sounds amazing.

ME: I know. I think it’s really great.

And there you have it: all of the insecurity and hubris of the artistic mind squeezed into just a few sentences. That’s just the way things go. I don’t know how many times while working on this record I thought I was making Pet Sounds, but it’s probably around the same number of times I thought I was making Lulu. (Lulu is the ill-fated collaboration between one of my heroes, Lou Reed, and one of my pre-teen music heroes, Metallica. It’s widely considered one of the worst albums ever. I listen to the record once a year in hopes that I hear something that will knock a wall down in my heart or mind. Still waiting!)

In my defense, I did have a reasonable excuse for my insecurity regarding this record. Whenever I’ve made other records, I’ve worked with other people: musicians, engineers, and producers who are there while you’re making it, who will give their two cents, and sometimes guide you in the right direction. In fact, all of my records previous to this one are, in some form or fashion, a collaboration. Lovesick was pre-produced with a band, and then built from the ground up with The Dirty Doves. Exile on Wilson Street was recorded live, and we knew what it would sound like in the instant we were recording it. I collaborated with a producer on Poor Man’s Bible. But this record was just me. I was the engineer, the producer, the band, the John, the Paul, and in my deepest moments of self-doubt, I was the Yoko, a passive figure who I could blame all of my problems on.

Working on the record in solitude, I really had no sounding board to tell me whether what I was doing was good or not. I would tell myself “it must be good, because I really like it, and that’s all that matters.” And then I would look to the right, where I have a picture of the album cover for Captain Beefheart’s “Trout Mask Replica” on my wall and be reminded that I do like a lot of things other people don’t. Then, in the best of moments, I’d look a little higher on my wall where I have a picture of Patti Smith next to a portrait of Malcolm X. Patti would say “Fuck it. Do what you want,” and Malcolm would reiterate with “by any means necessary.” That’s why they are my heroes.

When I was on the road a lot, I used to take pride in how long I could drive without stopping. In retrospect, it was probably a little dangerous, and even more stupid, and nobody’s ever corrected me on that one. I once drove every mile from Austin to Columbia, SC, only stopping for gas. Another time I went from Austin to Boise, ID. Asheville to Austin. New York City to Austin. And I don’t know how many times I went from LA to Austin without stopping, but sometimes after you’ve been on the road for a month or two, you just want to get home and not have to spend another $100 on a hotel room. The crazy thing is, on most of those drives, I had a passenger with me. But something happens around hour 18 or 19 of driving: I become obsessed with finishing what I started, and insist on finishing the job myself.I approached Modern American Folk Music the same way: I started all by myself, with the intention of bringing in better musicians to play some of the instruments. Then I decided that I should play most of the instruments. Then all of them. And as I was wrapping up the recording, I thought I’d share it with some friends to get their thoughts. And then I said “fuck it” and decided not to share it with anybody until the release date. So, when you go to listen to the record, just know that you are one of the first to hear this record outside of my house.

I’ve written a lot about why I made the record myself. Most of it comes from my experiences with the music business in the last few years, and my unwillingness to deal with the fragile egos of other musicians. When my agent fucked me, nobody stood up for me. When the label fucked me, everybody looked the other way. When I was bullied on Twitter by the dude from American Aquarium and then harassed by some of their fans, two people stood up for me, and they barely knew me. So, basically, when it comes to the music “community”, I’m kind of out of fucks to give. I think I’ve earned that right. At least with this album, there is nobody to blame but myself.

There is a lot I can say about this record. It started out of boredom and experimentation. Then it became an inside joke that I shared with myself. And then it became a concrete idea and a full-blown project. I did not make this to release to the world, or grow my fanbase, or impress anybody. I was just going with my instincts, and trying to entertain myself, and trying some things I’ve always wanted to do musically, but never got the chance. With those pesky kids out of the way, creativity would be all mine! I hope you will take this all into account when listening.

I really hope to find this album interesting. I hope it makes you think. I hope it makes you angry. That’s right: I don’t really want you to sit back and “enjoy this record”, although laying back on a bean bag with a big ol’ joint and a pair of headphones will certainly work with this piece of music. But I want this record, really, to motivate you in some form or fashion. I want it to make you angry about what’s going on in this world. I want it to make you want to vote, and maybe get other people to vote as well. I want it to make people think about their own behaviors, and how they can change it in an effort to improve the world. And in my heart of hearts, I really want you to get up and dance. Dancing is a lost art in this country. Rock and Roll was made for dancing. I blame the British bands of the late ‘60s and ‘70s for taking the dance out of rock, so let’s bring it back! Dancing is fun. It’s exercise. It’s an emotional release. It’s sexual. It’s political. And if you disagree with me on that last point, I will direct you to a little film called “Footloose”!

I want to give you a few tips about how to this record, but first I just want to put out a few thanks. First and foremost, my lovely and beautiful wife Jess Klein: thank you for supporting me through all of the crazy ups and downs, my mood swings, my depressive states, and my super-dark moments of self-doubt. I know it’s a lot. I’ve told you before, but without you in my life I would be living under a bridge somewhere. I mean that literally, but also as an emotional, and mental metaphor.

I would also like to thank the people who have kept me creating, and playing, and making my music. I don’t know all of your names, and I don’t want to publish the ones I do know, but you probably know who you are. If you were at a gig somewhere, or heard my record by mistake online and just said a simple “I like your music” or something like that: THANK YOU. It only takes ones of those to keep me going for a few years.

And to those people who have been in my orbit for a while, whether you are in Austin, New Jersey, Oklahoma City, Fort Dodge, the London suburbs, Dublin, Berlin, Barcelona, Prague, or Winnipeg: THANK YOU SO MUCH for being so kind and generous with your support over the years. I don’t feel that I deserve it. I’m constantly failing to reach my goals. Constantly bitter about my place in the music world, and just angry about the world in general( And I also have some bad qualities). Just a big thanks to everyone. Let’s see each other again! Let’s set up some shows! Have your people (YOU), call my people (my many personalities)!

Without further adieu, here are some tips for enjoying MODERN AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC:

Workout: this record is 7 songs and 35 minutes long. If you walk or run, or lift weights, you’ll find this album to the perfect listening companion. Not only will the rhythm of the music help you keep up the pace, the lyrics should get you motivated enough to do those last few reps! Don’t workout? You should! Working out helps keep you healthy and reduces stress! Stop making excuses! Go for that walk! Lift that barbell! Just do it!

Headphones: this record was kind of designed for headphones, as I assume that is what most people are listening to music on these days. This album has a lot of sonic textures and headphones should enhance the experience.

Dance: This is the best way to experience the record. Maybe put it on in the kitchen when you’re making dinner and get the entire family to get down. Are you shy about dancing? Well, close all of your blinds and turn out the lights, put the album on and let ‘er rip. Just let the music and the colors and sonic textures move your body. Don’t think about. Don’t feel embarrassed or ashamed. I’ve sent hose people at gigs who make fun of other people for dancing, or dancing in a way that seems “strange”. FUCK those people. They’re assholes and should be taken out back and taught a lesson. Hopefully you’ll sweat a little. And when you’re done, you’re going to feel 1000% better. I give you the Tony Manero guarantee!

And again, thank you so much for coming along for this ride. Please check your voter registration to make sure you are still registered, and get out there and vote in November!

People can change the world. All that it takes is for each person to do SOMETHING! So do something!

Peace,

MJ

Aug 30, 2024

Close your eyes and say the words.

What do you see?

Woody Guthrie.

Pete Seeger.

Joan Baez.

Bob Dylan.

An acoustic guitar.

A banjo.

Clog dancing.

Murder Ballads.

The Mountain Dulcimer.

An old cellphone.

Wait…what?

I guess folk music has been around me my entire life. I remember going to the the library in the small rural New York State town where I spent my early childhood, which was the building where Webster wrote his first dictionary, and repeatedly checking out an album that had “Puff the Magic Dragon” on it.

My father always played Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson in the house. I’m positive there were some folk songs being placed in my brain at that time without even knowing it.

But my first real foray in folk music came when I was around 14 or 15. My parents were children of the 60s in a biological sense, but they were not children of the 60s in the cultural sense. The house record collection leaned more towards Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, and Elvis than it did Cream, Hendrix, or The Doors, so the name “Bob Dylan” was mostly associated with “drugs” in my 50s house. Outside of “Rainy Day Woman”I really had no notion of his music until I took a guitar class during my freshman year of high school and learned “Blowin in the Wind”. At the time, I didn’t even know it was a Bob Dylan song, but I thought the lyrics were amazing. I had never heard such beautiful poetry about truth and justice in my life. It really made me think.

When I was 15, my father came home from his job at Sony (who owned CBS) with a promo issue of Dylan’s first Bootleg Series. I looked at the track listing on the back and saw “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Massacre Blues”. My family can trace it roots back to Bear Mountain, about 40 miles north of New York City on the Hudson River, all the way back to the late 17th Century, and I was drawn to the song. That song, and some of others on that first disc of the box set, was simple, funny and subversive. It tickled all of the senses that matter to me when it comes to music. I didn’t become a folkie in that moment, but that Dylan album certainly widened the path that I walk on now.

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In 2000 or 2001 I got a job that would forever change my life. I was still living in New Jersey, and my girlfriend at the time had a part-time job answering phones for her neighbor, who worked out of his basement in a small, one story house on a nondescript suburban street. She was going back to school and asked me if I would be interested in taking the job. It didn’t pay great, but it was pretty easy, and the boss was cool (I would have about 500 jobs of the same description throughout my life…even today!). I took the job without reservation.

The company that I started working for was a booking agency, operating out of a small basement in Westwood, NJ. At first, I manned the phones, printed and stapled contracts (remember those!), and mailed out press kits (Remember those!). I wasn’t super familiar with all of the artists that we represented, but over time I got to know quite a few of them quite well. The big name on our roster was Richie Havens, a true folk singer from the early days of the Greenwich Village folk scene and famously the first performer at Woodstock. (Maybe someday I’ll write about Richie’s feeling on Woodstock). We had Janis Ian (“At Seventeen”), The Clancy Brothers, and a host of contemporary singer-songwriters who were building careers out of view of mainstream America: Richard Shindell, one of the finest songwriters I’ve ever heard (And whose records were produced by Larry Campbell, who had then joined Dylan’s band, drawing me even closer to him). Vance Gilbert, a man whose beautiful songs are only rivaled by his wit, which lead him to be the opening act on many George Carlin shows, and one Jess Klein, who I spoke to, briefly, twice, during my tenure at the job. We even had Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa. (Side note: the last booking agent I had was booking people like me, who regularly play to almost nobody for a few hundred bucks. Celia Cruz demanded 6 figures, 40 plane tickets, and as many hotel rooms. When I suggested to my agent that he change his approach to booking me, he corrected me with “I know you’ve booked people and you have your way…”. The music biz! Oy!)

If that Bob Dylan box set was my intro to folk music, this was my college. I learned so much in just a few years. First and foremost, I learned that you don’t have to be on the radio or MTV to have a music career, and (at the time) a singer-songwriter could build a steady stream of decent income by working on the road and building a small, but committed audience. I learned how to a tour. I learned how to book an album promo tour (One of the very few things I know a lot about, and so very few musicians and booking agents don’t), and I also learned that maybe everything isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

We all have idealistic visions of our heroes, and often forget that despite the fortune and the fame, singers are just people with similar problems to the rest of us. I know that fans are idealistic because I probably got 100 phone calls from old hippies asking if Richie Havens would come to the old Woodstock site and play some songs around the campfire to celebrate 3 days of Peace and Love. For free. Why wouldn’t he?  He’s Richie Havens, a God amongst folkies, and a champion of human rights, peace, and love.

Richie did not share that view. In fact, Woodstock was a deep source of pain for Richie. I don’t want to speak for his feelings on the subject, but I got the feeling that he felt exploited by the album and the film. Although the film made him more famous than his music did, he was never compensated, and I think he felt burned by that, a feeling I can relate with.  And the guy was just trying to make a living, as were all of my clients. The peace and love and idealism I thought embodied folk music was really just a facade. And the music business was still the music business, no matter how many beads it wears around its neck.

I met some other folk heroes along the way. At my first regional folk alliance I met Pete Seeger. Maybe he was having a bad day, but he was a cranky old fuck. I met Tiny Tim once. Weird. But my favorite old crank was Dave Van Ronk. When I first met him, I had no clue who he was. He was just a weird old dude in a cowboy hat and a brightly colored southwestern-style Pancho that really looked more like a blanket. We had breakfast together once. He said something about the folk music business that stuck with me, and ended up being somewhat prescient. To paraphrase: he said that the powers that be had spent so much time either concentrating on the money that could be made from the old guard, or looking for the next big thing, that they were ignoring an entire generation of talent, and that would have negative effect of folk music in the long term. I think he was right.

I had such good times working that job. I met some great people. I learned a lot about the music business, songwriting, and performing. I drank a bottle of whiskey and played Townes Van Zandt tunes with Eric Taylor until four in the morning. I chain smoked with David Olney’s manager. I also learned some hard lessons.

I was, by far and away, the youngest booking agent in that scene. I was pretty naive about the business, I wanted to make friends, and I loved to party. Naturally, many of the younger singer-songwriters gravitated to me. We’d hang out. Drink. Play songs together. It was a circle of what I thought were friends. I could name a few, as a few of them are still active (none of them “made it”), but when I left that job to pursue my own music, I never heard from any of those people again. (Except for Felix McTeigue, RIP friend)

I left that job after a few years when I started making my first solo record (Crooked). One day Janis Ian was visiting town and we went out to lunch. Janis is a great, strong, tough, very blunt lady. And like me, loved to smoke. We were standing outside of a sushi restaurant chain-smoking. I had played her some tracks earlier in the day, and she just came out and said it: ”you need to decide what road you’re going to take. It should probably be the music.” She was the second person in “the biz” to give me that advice. Now, in my deepest times of pain and anguish, when the bitterness of life is too much to take and it feels like my entire life has been wasted, I think back to that moment and blame Janis Ian for the path I took. Just kidding! It was an honor to be nudged by someone who had been through the wringer of the music business several times over, and never gave an inch. I struck out on my own into the world of independent music.

I would return to the folk and singer-songwriting scene several years later, as a performer, and again as a booking agent. In 2010, I was having a tough time making ends meet. I had moved to Austin and struggled to find work and decided that maybe I should get back to booking people, being that I’m surrounded by musicians looking for work! By that time, the music industry had changed. The financial crisis of 2008 really altered the game in terms of people’s spending habits, and music is a business that runs on people’s EXTRA money, and there wasn’t enough of it to go around.

The scene had also changed. With the collapse of the record buying public, the decline of radio, and an aging population, what we knew as folk music expanded its circle. It wasn’t just folkies anymore: it was aging rockers, one-hit pop wonders, and the new breed of Americana artists, in their Western shirts and vanity beards, seemingly trying to conjure some spirit of the past that never really existed (sound familiar, MAGA?). It was no longer about the facade of peace, justice, community and politics. In fact, the political aspect of the music was quietly discouraged. Richie Havens was replaced by John Oates. Woody Guthrie was represented by a guy bank-rolled by one of the biggest right-wing donors in American history. People’s goals seemed different than they did in the past. There is a story that people “in the know” know about something one of the former leaders of the Folk Alliance said, and it was reiterated to me in person after I released Talkin Revolution Blues. Again, to paraphrase: “No more hippies. No more crusty folk singers. No more fat lesbians. We need younger, good looking people to make this music reach a wider audience.”

Dave Van Ronk was right.

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Remember when I mentioned that I booked Jess Klein in 2001 at my old job, and how we never met or talked? Well, I ended up marrying her on April 3rd, 2016.

In the years in between our first fateful meeting, we both lived several different lives. Jess continued her music career, through all of the changes to the business and her fanbase, management and label issues, and ever- changing technology, she persevered, and continues working today (Even harder, I might add). I, myself, never had the fortune to have a record deal, or a manger, but I did have the fortune of knowing that I had to work hard, and I did, spending most of those years in between playing shows all over the US, making shoe-string budget records, and barely getting by while trying to establish myself as an artist (we’ll leave out the serious addiction, the arrests, and all that fun stuff in the name of brevity! You’ll have to wait for my memoir “Open Mike”, yet to be written, but what a title!). In short: we had both worked our asses off for almost two decades straight. So when my parents got us a trip to Jamaica as a wedding gift, to an all-inclusive resort, we took it as a chance to relax without thinking about work for the first time in our adult lives.

If you know anything about Jess and I, you can probably assume that we are not really “all inclusive resort” type people. First and foremost, neither of us drink. If I had a dollar for every time a resort worker made fun of us for ordering a club soda, I’d be the king of Jamaica: “Is ya all drivin’ home tonight?”. But we made the best of it, by relaxing the best we could (and for me, smoking a prodigious amount of weed) and eating several times a day, a rare treat for the singer-songwriter. After the first couple of days, realizing that there wasn’t much for us to do at the resort, we started taking long walks down the beach, off the resort property, to an area of vendors and craftsman: the Jamaican people making keepsakes to sell to tourists in order to eek out a living. It was on one of these walks that we met Starry, who made animal figures carved out of driftwood. His little booth was always surrounded by his friends. We started talking and getting friendly. Everyday on our walks would stop and the booth and have a little chat. We told them that we were artists as well.

That’s when Starry introduced us to his young friend, who seemed shy and quiet, and younger than the other guys. He told us that he, too, was a singer. We wanted to hear his music. The kid pulled an old, beaten up cell phone out of his pocket, It wasn’t a flip phone, but it wasn’t an iPhone either. I could only guess that he found it on the beach, or it was passed down to him by someone fortunate enough to get a new phone. He started playing a beat generated by the music programmed into the default settings of the phone. It was like having a backing track. He then started rapping in a patois about his day to day living, trying to find some food, trying to make a dollar, and trying to survive. The kid was probably 16, but his story made him seem aged and experienced. A light bulb went off in my head.

When we got home from our trip, it was time to start packing our things to make the big move from Austin to North Carolina. I think it was during that time, while listening to NPR, that I heard a piece about this new music being made in Africa by people using cellphones. Thats when the whole thing gelled for me: this was the new folk music. And why wouldn’t it be? Folk music is often defined by a few things:

• music made by common people

• An expression of the life of a particular people or community

• Music made with basic instruments

When you think about contemporary American folk, do you think  about Hall & Oates, with John Oates strumming his acoustic guitar and singing about the rigors of walking to the mailbox to pick up his royalty check? Or the road-worn troubadour, with a $3000 Martin Acoustic, singing about working class values, despite never having worked a day in his life. Or the  young woman, in her custom made cowboy boots, playing a cover of a Radiohead song on a Ukulele, knowing that if she fails, there’s always that trust fund to fall back on? No?  Well, these are all acts I’ve seen playing under the banner of folk music in the 21st Century.

But if Alan Lomax were alive today, and collecting field recordings, what would he be collecting? First of all, he definitely wouldn’t be driving around the American South with a beat up microphone and portable tape machine. He’d be sitting in the comforts of his own home, sifting through the thousands of submissions he received via email from people all over the world. Many of these songs would have probably recorded on cell phones. Everybody has one these days, they’re basically a necessity, and many of them come with recording apps that could be used to make entire records of decent quality. Last year, R&B performer and guitarist Steve Lacy was nominated for a Grammy for his song “Bad Habit”. A young kid from Compton, California, he came to prominence after his first two records garnered attention from acts like Kendrick Lamar and Beyonce, had made his records on an outdated cellphone.

If the folk and Rock and Roll explosion of the 20th Century was fueled by the easy access and affordability of the guitar, which you could get in a Sears catalog for a reasonable price in pre and post WWII America, then surely the folk music of the 21st Century will be powered by the computer. There is one in almost every home in America, and doubly so if you count the cellphone, and almost all of them are equipped with recording software already built into the basic model. A recording interface can be bought for around $100. And a midi-controller (it’s like a keyboard) that gives the user access to literally thousands of sounds can be purchased for around $80. When you add in the fact that anybody can upload and release a song to the entire world via the numerous streaming platforms at no cost, you can get an idea of what’s possible, and how much music being made my marginalized people is already out there. On the flip side, as of this writing, a new Folk and Americana album by modern icons of the genre was just released. It’s a beautiful record, made by supremely talented people, and the sound is definitely one that most people would associate with roots and folk music. But both performers were schooled at Berklee School of Music, come from relatively comfortable backgrounds, and record on equipment that most people couldn’t afford if they put a second mortgage on their house. Is that folk music? To a degree yes, but to another degree, maybe not.

My experience in Jamaica really made me think harder about what folk music is. Why isn’t hip-pop, a music that was born out of necessity, built on the use of a household item-turned instrument? Is the turntable any different than a washtub bass? Are the stories of people in inner city communities any less valuable than those in Appalachia? Why is “American Roots” music almost always reserved for Southern White Men? What about Doo-wop music, created by people using the only instrument they could afford, the voice, in working class neighborhoods in the cities of the Northeastern United States? What about the  disco music of the early seventies, born out of need for the gay and black communities to have a place to dance, at a time where dancing with a member of the same sex was illegal in most places? What could be more defiant than that? These are the things I was thinking about when creating Modern American Folk Music.

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I’ll be honest: there is a bit of humor in my choice to call my album Modern American Folk Music. There is a part of me that wanted to troll people, mostly middle aged and older white people,  who complain about modern music. It drives me nuts, and, quite frankly, I find it to be a little racist. The history of popular music in 20th Century America is one of white people dismissing black music, only to embrace it decades later. Gospel was called “field hollerin’”. Jazz was “primitive jungle music.” The Blues was the “devil’s music” and the idea of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil was a myth created by the white people who owned his music. His decedents didn’t see a dime of that money, probably millions of dollars all told, until the 21st century. Rock and Roll is really just R&B, and R&B was originally called “race music”by the industry, then R&B thanks to Jerry Wexler, and then Alan Freed came up with the idea to call it “Rock and Roll” to make it marketable to white kids, who surely couldn’t listen to “race music” at home. So, when I hear an old white guy say that rap isn’t music, despite the fact that it is 50 years old and the preeminent popular music worldwide, or that there is no good music any more, it kind of pisses me off. Isn’t that what people said about Charlie Parker? And Elvis?  And The Beatles?  But if you go see Tedeschi and Trucks at your local amphitheater, there will be 10,000 middle aged white people awkwardly moving to a music that is a decades old amalgamation of all of those musics that were denigrated in the past. That’s not to diminish the work of Tedeschi and Trucks, who clearly have an affinity and respect for the history and meaning of that music, and play it well. I just use it as an example for how quickly we forget about the past, which is one of the themes of Modern American Folk Music.

I view my record as a tribute to the folk music that inspired me: it’s homemade, made by someone who is a recording novice, and a novice on all of the instruments I played except for guitar. It’s made on pretty cheap instruments (I’ve been a touring musician all of my life, how am I going to afford a nice guitar?), and I made it on recording software that comes on every computer. It’s a topical record, covering many of the issues that plague our society today. Neil Young has a pretty good quote about synthesizers being the new folk music because they are accessible, and I used a lot of them. Joe Strummer was infatuated with rap and house music because anybody could afford to make it. And Dan Zanes, in his book “Deliver Me From Nowhere”, about the recording of Springsteen’s “Nebraska”,  talks about records recorded at home, such as Bon Iver’s “To Emma…” as a children of that epic Bruce record. I view my record in the same vein.

I really hope you enjoy the music, lyrics, and songs of Modern American Folk Music. But most importantly, I hope it opens your mind to the possibilities of new music, of new technology, and of new musical forms and ideas. Folk music is about community, and being the voice of everyday people, and those people are not limited to acoustic guitars and banjos. I honestly believe if we open our ears, and our hearts, to new sounds and new ideas and new voices, that we could really bridge some of the gaps in our culture that keep us divided. Music really does bring people together, and helps us understand people from outside our neighborhood. But we have to break down our boundaries and old, stubborn ideas of what music is to hear those stories. And in the modern age, we have to make the effort to seek out that music. I hope this album inspires people to do just that.

Now close your eyes and say the words “Folk music”.

What do you see?

I wrote Pilgrims several years ago as an opening number for an idea I had for a musical about the increasing influence of capitalism on American Christianity. A year or so later, our main character entered the frame.

I hope you enjoy the song, and video, and take some solace in the fact that we’re ready to fight!

MJ

The single is only available for download and listening at my Bandcamp page

And the video is available here:

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Who are your influences?

Ah, the dreaded question that every musician is asked during the course of an interview.

Who are my influences?

Everything I listen to acts as an influence. That ABBA song? I got the idea for a piano part from that tune. That part in “Blue Train” where the drummer hits the hi-hat instead of the snare? I took note. That really bad pop song? It influenced me on how not to do something.

KISS? Well, I haven’t taken their music seriously in about 40 years, but they certainly influenced my love of music when I was a very young child.

Which one is the correct answer?

It’s all an influence. The music we hear in the super market. The sounds we hear on the streets. If an artist is open to all possibilities, then every sound has some modicum of influence on that artist.

So, what are we talking about here?

Every artist has their baseline “influences”, or the artists whose quality of music they aspire to. I have a special place for the artists that mean the most to me: The Grateful Dead, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Coltrane, Mingus, Warren Zevon. Those are artists who I deeply admire and whose music I feel a deep connection to. They guide the way I think about words and music, and set the bar for the quality my own work. (AUTHORS NOTE: we are just going to assume the Beatles are part of this conversation…right?)

Then there are other kinds of influences, like the bands and artists who inspired you to be a musician in the first place. For me, this is a never ending list that gets added onto every few years. When I was a child, it was Kiss and Elvis. Then it was Willie Nelson. Then it was AC/DC.  I had an amazing experience when I was in middle school watching Def Leppard play a concert in the rain at the Orange County Fairgrounds that firmly planted the seeds of my desire to play music. By the time I hit my teens, I was enthralled by Metallica. Then when I was 15 or so, the grunge wave crashed upon the shores, and I was swept away by Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, and Temple of the Dog. Those bands lead me to Hendrix, who lead me to Dylan and Albert King, and eventually the Grateful Dead. The Dead opened up an entire world of music to me, from old country and folk songs, to African drumming, to The Meters. Since then there have been numerous bands that I had deep, and usually brief, obsessions with:  Wilco, Mott the Hoople, Bowie, John Prine, Captain Beefheart, Van Morrison, Beethoven, Thelonius Monk, and on and on. It continues to this day. I’ve taken little bits and pieces from each of them on my journey to this moment.

I’ve also been influenced by certain artists in a completely different way: not with their music, per se, but with their approach to the work of music. I only own one Jackson Browne record, and have rarely listened to his music, (which I do enjoy and I did meet him once), but I picked up a method of writing songs from him in a book I read about songwriting. Lou Reed is one of my all-time favorite artists, and I love his music and his writing, but I am more influenced by his willingness to do whatever inspires him, despite what fans and critics might say. Ditto for Neil Young, David Bowie, and Brian Eno. Literature is also huge influence, and I’ve learned a lot about the power of language from Jonathan Swift, Edgar Allan Poe, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet, who have all had a sizable influence on my lyric writing.

Finally, there is the music that is influencing me RIGHT NOW. I’m a curious explorer. I’m always looking for a new sound, a new word, or a new voice that is going to open up a portal in my mind and lead me down a new and interesting path. I’m really not one to live in the past, and I’m also a bit obsessive, so when I do find something that unlocks that thing inside of me, I tend to go deep down a rabbit hole to find out everything about that band, or artist, or genre of music, and really just absorb every bit of it that I can, until there is nothing left I can take from it. All of the records I’ve made in my life have had two or three records or artists that heavily influenced the creative process of that particular record. Most of the time, these influences can’t be heard or felt by the listener, but they are there, guiding my decisions about words, chords, and production techniques.

When I made my second record, Lovesick, I was deep into “experimental” music, for lack of a better term. I had discovered Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, Can, Sonic Youth, and No-Wave. Lyrically, I remember admiring the plain spoken poetry of Lucinda Williams’ World Without Tears record and the frank and difficult honesty of John Lennon’s songs. Lovesick, of course, sounds like a “Mike June” record, and drew a lot of comparisons to Dylan and Springsteen albums from critics when it was released, but the inner workings of my mind and the process of getting from the blank page to the finished album was deeply inspired by all of this new music I had discovered.

Exile On Wilson Street was inspired by the Stones, obviously, but I was also into Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance, and Dylan’s Together Through Life, while being heavily influenced by my new surroundings. I had just moved to Austin, Texas, and the sounds of artists like as Doug Sahm and Flacco Jimenez were helping me transition to my new home. (Of course, as is customary with my records, I was accused by one foreign Americana publication of ripping off Springsteen in a review in which they repeatedly referred to me as “Mr. Wilson”)

Poor Man’s Bible was musically inspired by Charles Mingus in ways that the listener would never figure, but I was also channeling Mott the Hoople, Johnny Thunders, and The Clash. The lyrical approach was inspired by Leonard Cohen, Marvin Gaye, and a host of protest singers like Woody Guthrie, but much of that inspiration came from reggae artists like Marley, Desmond Dekker, and Peter Tosh, among others. The listener may not pick up on these influences, but they are in there, adding spice and flavor to the inspirational stew.

Not all of the influences that guide the art are based in music alone. The social and political environment around us is just as much an influence on my creative process as any record or song. Many of the lyrics of the songs on MODERN AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC are inspired by present day issues. One of the main themes of the record is racism. Racism is still a big problem here in America, and we are facing a right-wing effort to reshape our education system by banning books, and rewriting parts of our history while ignoring others, such as the undeniable impact of systematic racism on our society at large. That type of thinking infuriates me, and I use my music to express that anger and frustration. And as much as the extreme racism of the far-right infuriates me, I am also discomforted by the many cultural blind-spots of well-meaning white liberals. Unfortunately, there is still a contingent of white baby boomers in my social media feed and in the bars and clubs I play who still refuse to recognize hip-pop as a legitimate form of music, despite it being the most dominant form of music throughout the world for the past thirty years. They are mostly the same people who spend halftime of the Super Bowl complaining that the Black Artist who is performing is not making “real music”(despite the fact that all Super Bowl performers play to backing tracks, including Springsteen and The Rolling Stones, and yes, even Tom Petty). That’s not to say that these people are bad people, but they are certainly ignorant of the history of popular music in America as it pertains to race. I’ll give to you the nickel version of the history of American popular music since the 20th Century: : African-Americans make music that is considered “primitive” or “crude” or “unsophisticated”  (gospel, blues, and jazz), and then twenty years or so go by and a white person discovers and performs it, and then they make a bunch of money for another white person. It took Pat Boone to teach us about Little Richard, Elvis Presley to teach us about Big Momma Thorton, and The Rolling Stones to teach us about Howlin’ Wolf. This is a troubling trend that continues to this day. If I had a dollar for every white person who never bothered to give Beyonce’s music a chance until she put a banjo on her record, despite her being one of the world’s biggest starts and an amazing artist in her own write, I’d be a wealthy man. (And that doesn’t even count talking about the history of racism as it pertains to the banjo!). I feel very deeply that this cultural divide, or blind spot, in which people are unwilling to go outside of their chosen cultural boundaries is effecting our society on a deeper level and keeping us from connecting with each other in a truly meaningful way. The beauty of music is that it tells our stories, and I feel that maybe we aren’t listening other people’s stories closely enough. When the Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in the light of day, so many people I know were shocked. But modern R&B and hip-pop are full of these true, heartbreaking stories. In the aftermath of the killing, protests sprang up, and controversy ensued, and it was sadly comical to watch many Americana artists on Twitter have to explain to their fans that they weren’t racists. Like, why didn’t they know already? These ideas and attitudes inspired the lyrics of Modern American Folk Music, but it also gave me the impetus to move away from the more-backwards looking and tradition-based impulses of Americana and modern acoustic music toward a more modern, and hopefully more inclusive, sound. For me, I would much rather to be part of moving something forward into a new place, rather than dragging it back in time to a place that wasn’t so great for many people.

Technology also had a large hand in the making of this record. As I wrote in my last Substack piece  about Modern American Folk Music, my financial budget for this record was around zero. Given my predicament, I was left to create music with the tools that I have available to me. That includes drum loops. There is a secret rule in modern music that the music must always be consistently on the beat. This was not the notion in the ’60s and 70s and if click tracks were available then, we might be having conversations about the influence of Pete Best on modern music. But in the ’80’s, industry standards changed and radio-ready music was now expected to be on the beat, which then lead to people’s expectations and perception of music changing, and now a consistent beat is paramount in most of the recorded music that we hear on the radio and elsewhere. (Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top talks about this  shift in great depth in interviews when he discusses the band’s transition from Texas blues band to MTV darlings in the early ’80’s) Today, nearly every record is made in this way. Yes, even your favorite roots-rocker who “only records on analog tape” will nudge a kick drum or a bass note here and there. I understand that many music fans may find that a bit shocking, but keep in mind that a record is not a live performance, and in my opinion, it is a completely different art-form.  The goal of each is different. A live performance is a communal event in which the audience is a participant in how the event transpires. A communal event between performer and listener. A recording is more like a painting, made to be hung on the walls of your mind where you go back to from time to time and discover new colors and brushstrokes with each listen.  The great Jerry Garcia put it best when he said “Making a record is like building a ship in a bottle. Live music is like rowing a boat in the ocean.”

In order to build my ship, I had to come to terms with my tools and accept the predictability and limitations of the drum machine. Depending on it as my rhythmic backbone was the easy part of it to accept, but drum loops are very limited in where they can take you, sonically and emotionally. As I wrote in my last piece, I have a dream to one day make a record in the vain of Van Morrison or the Band, but to attempt to make that kind of music, without the feel and touch of a human being, would be a fools errand, and, in turn,  make a pretty crappy record. That type of music requires feel and fluidity, and a certain groove that can only be replicated by a great, soulful drummer. Dance music is different. Dance music requires a solid beat. It requires repetition. Dancing itself requires it. Watching people dance to a driving, pulsating, four-on-the-floor beat is one thing, watching people dance to improvised free-jazz is another. There is a reason Modern Dance has yet to capture the imaginations of Americans the way that Saturday Night Fever did.  Dance music is not the music for sitting back in your bean bag with your headphones and a  joint.(Although that is a great way to enjoy Modern American Folk Music) It’s made to move your ass and shake your hips. I had already recorded a song with a machine-generated beat a few years back when I made a home demo of a song called “Pilgrims”, a one-off song I wrote for a musical that I had an idea for, but never got around to finishing. It was a quasi-dance song, somewhat inspired by the 80s and 90s work of Leonard Cohen. It gave me my blueprint for Modern American Folk Music. (And the song is the first single from the album).

Although I have never consciously made dance music before, I am in no way a stranger to the genre. First and foremost, I love dancing. And I’m not that bad at it either. Weddings, high-school dances, parties…I’ve never been afraid to get up and get down. In fact, it makes me sad that more people don’t dance openly in public. It’s pretty much the only natural way to react to music, yet I constantly find myself in a crowd of flat-footed shoe gazers who oftentimes snicker at the brave souls who actually do dance. I think dancing is one of the things that drew me to the Grateful Dead: for all of the ridicule and parody thrown at Deadheads for the way they danced at concerts, the beauty of the entire experience rested in the fact that you could let the music move you however you saw fit to move, without fear of judgement from the people around you. And dancing to  music makes you closer to it in a way that passive listening can never replicate. It is just good for the soul.

And maybe you haven’t heard, but I am from New Jersey. Dance music is part of our culture. Do you know what a “Guido” is? Look it up! When I was growing up, I would sometimes find myself tagging along to the local catholic school dances, which were vastly different than the dances at our public school. There was no “Celebration” or slow-dance ballads like Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” or other standard, wedding-ready dance numbers that were regularly rolled out at any dance-centered event I had ever been to . At the catholic school dances, the music was mostly techno and house music, both burgeoning new genres at the time. The heavy, repetitive beats, long breaks, and lack of lyrics lead to an intense, hard-core form of dancing, and I loved it. I may have been a bit of a wallflower, but it didn’t take much from a girl with heavily styled hair and a pair of Cavarrici pants to get me on the dance floor. Although I was too shy and unsure of myself to say so at the time, and also afraid to admit to liking something that rockers would consider “uncool”, that music and the intensity of the dance floor at the catholic school dances made a huge impression on me that has stuck throughout the years.

Finally, I have always loved not just dancing, but dance music. And that goes for all genres of music you can dance to, including Rock and Roll. People forget the cultural explosion Rock and Roll caused and the dangers it represented to the clean-cut status quo of Eisenhower’s America. The biggest and most frightening of those dangers was two teenagers moving their bodies in sexually suggestive ways, in-time with the music. It wasn’t the electric guitar, leather pants, or devil horns that made white society afraid of rock and roll. It was the freedom of expression that is dance. That’s why they only showed Elvis’ upper torso on television. It seems to me like the idea of dancing to rock music mostly died with the coming of bands like Led Zeppelin, forcing people who wanted to dance to look elsewhere for their salvation. But really, all music is essentially dance music, and names as disparate as Chubby Checkers, Chuck Berry, and Bob Wills all made music that people can dance to.  As a wise man once said: “Make their asses move and their minds will follow!”

During the pandemic, I found myself going down many rabbit holes with bands or artists that made music that made you want to move.  Maybe it was because the music was an antidote to  the isolation. Maybe it was nostalgia, creeping up on me as I get a little older. But whatever it was, it gave me the information, and the inspiration I needed and to start creating a record, that for all practical purposes, is essentially a dance record. This is some of the music that informed Modern American Folk Music

THE BEE GEES -

I have always been an unabashed fan of the Bee Gees. In fact, anybody who has ever been on the road with me has surely gotten an education on the music of the Bee Gees, particularly their pre-disco catalog. But during the pandemic, I found myself exploring their music on a much deeper level. My father died at the end of 2020, which coincided with the premiere of the HBO documentary “How Can You Mend A Broken Heart.”  I had already associated music of the brothers Gibb with much of my early childhood, but given the loss of my father and the Bee Gees story about brothers, familial bonds, and music, really struck the heart of me.

The Bee Gees’ early records (Odessa)  are more interesting than they are given credit for, and the songwriting is always well-crafted and unique, but the album I really fell deep into is their 1975 masterpiece Main Course. This band-centered record features a few huge hits like “Nights on Broadway”, “Jive Talkin”, and “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love)” while introducing the world to Barry’s new-found falsetto. But the album also contains  songs like the beautifully sung country ballad “Come On Over” (Bee Gees guitarist Alan Kendall played pedal steel on record and live on their tours) and the stoner-folk-rock of “Edge of the Universe”. It’s a record that takes me back to age 5, laying on the olive-green rug in my parent’s living room, rubbing my fingers over the embossed logo on “The Bee Gees Greatest Hits” LP, but it’s also an innovative and well-crafted album that deserves a listen.

SPARKS

“If you spend enough time around musicians and on tour buses, eventually the conversation will come around to Sparks” - Beck

That line is from the Edgar Wright documentary The Sparks Brothers, and it perfectly encapsulates my experience with a band that now ranks among my all-time favorites. All I ever heard from older musicians was “two brothers, one has a Hitler mustache”, but I never did hear their music. How a music nerd like myself missed a band that had been together, consistently making good records for 50 years is beyond me, but after listening to their 1979 electro-pop opus Number One Song In Heaven, I was hooked. Their entire catalog is impossible to categorize and they’ve been on the forefront of several musical styles over the span of their career: They were a proto-Queen art-rock band first and then dabbled in early punk (1976’s Big Beat), had synth pop hits in the ‘80s (“Tips for Teens”), had a huge European dance-floor hit in the ‘90s (“When Will I Get to Sing My Way”), and produced a Neo-classical masterpiece with 2012’s Lil Beethoven. But despite the changing styles, two things remain constant in Sparks’ music: great melodies and biting humor. Many of their songs sound catchy, fun, and somewhat silly, but if you dig a little bit beneath the surface you’ll find well-crafted pop songs with edgy, and often dark lyrics that poke fun at the music industry, and themselves. For instance, the song “Tits” from 1975’s Tony Visconti-produce gem Propaganda sounds like a fun song, but it’s actually about a man who is getting shit-faced in a bar, complaining about his wife not letting him touch her, while knowing that she’s cheating on him with the very man he’s drinking with. It’s really quite sad! To fully appreciate Sparks, you have to dig a little bit to find the gems. I’m so glad I did.

LCD SOUND SYSTEM

LCD Sound System broke out in a huge way in the early 2000’s with their club hit “All of My Friends”. Unfortunately for me, I never bothered to listen to them back then. I always saw the band name and assumed that James Murphy was an Irish DJ and it that just didn’t interest me at the time. But in 2013 I got home from a long tour, and as is customary after a long tour, I hit the couch to recuperate. On a whim, I chose the documentary movie Shut Up And Play The Hits, a concert film about their last live performance (They’ve since regrouped). It ends up James Murphy is not an Irish DJ, but a former recording engineer from New Jersey who hated dance music for most of his life, until an experience in a New York club completely changed him. And LCD Sound System is not just Murphy: although he makes all of his albums by himself, for live performances, LCD Soundsystem is a pretty big band with long-term members, and they blend an incredible mix of rock, punk, and dance music at their energetic shows. But my favorite feature of LCD Sound system is Murphy’s lyrics, which give voice to the aging, white, middle-aged hipster in a self-effacing manner with a wry sense of humor. How could I not appreciate that? If you’re an aging music nerd, check out the song “Losing My Edge” and you’ll probably either laugh or cry.

CURTIS MAYFIELD

When I say “protest music”, what comes to mind? Probably Woody Guthrie or maybe Pete Seeger? I probably would have had the same answer ten years ago, but in 2024, I go to Curtis Mayfield for my inspiration. The funky guitar, laid back grooves, and topical, poignant lyrics speak much more to today’s world and the issues we face in our world than the folk music of the past. We’re not building damns, after all. (Not to mention some of the questionable behavior exhibited by these singers throughout their lives).  Move On Up is an absolute masterpiece from an era which features a lot of overlooked protest music. The funk and R&B of the early seventies was a powerful time for protest music, and some great records and singles were made by a variety of acts like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Bill Withers, the Temptations, the Isley Brothers and a host of other artists inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and hard economic times in the black community. But nobody in that field hits me in the same way that Curtis does, with that open F# tuning, funky wah-wah, and that angelic voice delivering the bad news with a quiver of hope.

LEONARD COHEN

I make no effort to hide my love of Leonard Cohen. He is easily my favorite lyricist. His work always moves me in the heart and in the mind. To this day, I can clearly remember the feeling I had the first time I was properly introduced to his music. It was late at night, at a girlfriend's house. She turned down the lights, burned some candles, and played “Suzanne”. I was taken to another planet. Since that night, I have been a Cohen acolyte. Although he is mostly known as a folk singer, and his first couple of records confirm that notion, I have always been taken with his less popular work from the ’80’s and ’90’s. Where most artists who started out in the sixties seemed to stumble into the ‘80s lost in a cocaine daze, and struggling to find their footing with new sounds and technologies, Cohen embraced his age, his hard-fought wisdom, and the modern sounds.. His voice, never known for melodic singing, comes across deeper and wiser, and the lyrics on songs such as “Democracy,” “The Future,” and “I’m You’re Man” sound as if they are being sung by a Shaman, giving you important information that you’ll need to get to the next world.  I went to the records “The Future” and “I’m Your Man” early and often while making Modern American Folk music.

KENDRICK LAMAR AND DAVID BOWIE

I put these two together because one lead to the other for me. At the end of every year, I will usually peruse the plethora of “Best of the Year” lists put together by critics and music writers, and then I will go seek out a few of the records that ended up on several of the lists. That’s how I came to Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly in 2015. I listened to it a few times, but at first,  I didn’t fully grasp it.  A few months later I read an article about the making of David Bowie’s last, and my favorite, album Blackstar. According to the sources in the article, Bowie could not stop talking about Lamar and his record. What struck Bowie about Lamar was his willingness and ability to use every kind of music at his disposal to create a powerful track. Bowie used that template to make his last album, Blackstar. And Bowie speaking so lovingly about Lamar’s approach made me go back and dig into To Pimp A Butterfly, which gave me the inspiration to use every musical tool available to me on Modern American Folk Music.

Kendrick Lamar is a super-star and a once-in-a-generation talent. If you don’t think rapping is a skill, try taking any sentence and speaking it as fast as you can. Then put on some Kendrick Lamar and hear him spit rapid-fire verses that exhibit a mastery of the English language and deep insight, and  I’m sure you will reconsider. Not only is he an amazing rapper, Lamar is the best lyricist working in any genre of music today, in my opinion, and the opinion of the people who award the Pulitzer Prize, as he was the first rapper to receive the prestigious award. Not only is Lamar a mega-talented rapper and wordsmith, he makes great albums. To Pimp A Butterfly is one continuous story about a rapper who finds fame, and struggles with the of the expectations of being a  successful rapper while  being torn by feeling that he has a larger  commitment to his community. It’s a deep record that covers several topics, like mental health, and it features “Alright,” the unofficial theme song of the Black Lives Matter movement. The music contains elements of jazz and funk, is well-produced, and expertly arranged. The creation was aided by the likes of modern jazz giant Kamasi Washington and R&B legend Ron Isley. To Pimp A Butterfly is simply one of the best records of the 21st Century.

Other albums and artists

D’Angelo - The Black Messiah

You may remember D’Angelo from his late ’90s hit “Brown Sugar” and maybe from his exposed abdomen featured in the video for that song. Well, it took him many years to make a proper follow up, and it’s a gem. The Black Messiah  features D’Angelo, a true musical genius, on most of the instruments. He is joined by Pino Paladino (The Who, and every hit in the ‘80s) on bass and Questlove on drums. Lyrically, D’Angelo writes some great anti-racism tunes with songs such as “The Charade” and “1,000 Deaths”. If you like Sly Stone, Prince, and Stevie Wonder rolled into one package, check out D’Angelo.

Solange- A Seat At The Table

Solange Knowles is also known as Beyonce’s sister, but she is a powerful artist in her own right. A Seat At The Table is a concept album that speaks to the black experience in a way few other records have, with the songs interspersed with stories of real people. And it’s set to some beautiful music. A must listen. Plus, it’s got a song called “Junie”, so a bonus for me!

Can

This great German band was one of my first forays into the combination of noisy rock guitars and danceable rhythms. I remember hearing the album Tago Mago and being transported. I got all of their seminal ‘70s records soon after. What can be stranger than a bunch of Germans playing weird, dancy, and sometimes improvised music with a singer from Japan who sings in English? Much of modern dance music owes Can a tip of the hat. And I just recently found out that they were heavily influenced by the Grateful Dead!

Charlotte Cardin

The thing about young artists these days is that they are not afraid to say anything. Their lyrical honesty when it comes to sex, emotions, and life in general can make a middle aged dude like myself blush. I discovered this young Canadian pop-singer during on one of my Friday-morning forays into new music, where I go to the New Releases page of my streaming service and click on any interesting album covers and just hope I’m struck by something in the music. Cardin’s song “Confetti” is a dark and dancy  tune about the internal loneliness of an introvert. “Jim Carrey” is an upbeat pop song about trying to lose your ego. Both of those songs connected with me in a big way. I probably listened to her album 99 Nights for 3 straight weeks.

Daniel Lanois

I could not finish this piece without a tip of the cap to the great Daniel Lanois. If you don’t already know his name, there is a pretty good chance that you’ve heard the music he’s produced: U2’s Unforgettable Fire, Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, among other U2 records. Peter Gabriel’s So, with “Sledgehammer” and “In Your Eyes”, and the follow up Us. He also helmed three of my favorite records from the 90s, producing Emmylou Harris’ Wreckingball, Bob Dylan’s epic Time Out of Mind, and Willie Nelson’s Teatro, all in a row. He’s also worked with Neil Young, The Neville Bothers, and a host of others. I have always loved his signature sound of rhythmic drums, echoing guitars, and pulsating bass, created with the emotion and feel of a live concert.  And since I  really didn’t know much about recording techniques and equipment coming into this project, I often found myself “Googling” Daniel Lanois’ name to see if I could find some of his recording secrets. Lucky for me, he is a kind and generous artist, and has given tons of interviews about the records he made and the techniques he used to get the sounds he’s created. He was my guiding force on the production end.

Lanois is also a great guitar player and songwriter, and he influenced me in those areas as well. In fact, the Les Paul Goldtop I used on most of Modern American Folk Music is based on the Goldtop Lanois regularly plays, which he based on Neil Young's legendary black guitar. I even use similar amps. And Lanois’ song “The Maker”, which has been covered by everyone from Jerry Garcia to Emmylou Harris, is always an inspirational song that I pull out in tough times and have covered myself. But another aspect of Lanois’ work that I admire is his need to push music into the future, best demonstrated by his 2014 album Flesh and Machine, in which he plays a studio mixing board loaded with samples, using the faders manipulate the sound. He is joined by a drummer and bass player in this far-out piece of futuristic improvisation. It’s a live band, but Lanois is playing the mixer. It’s far out. His recent album Heavy Sun is a really cool take on modern gospel music, and I certainly got some mileage out of that one as well.

Well, I could go on and on talking about music, influences, albums, and everything under the sun, but I’ve got to run! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out! And I made a playlist of some of the music that I have written about. I use Apple as a streaming service, so here it is:

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/modern-american-inspiration/pl.u-d2b00GWuGxL7Rm

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Up next in OPEN MIKE: What is Folk Music?

The seeds of the music on this record were planted at several stops along the way by songs and musicians I have admired throughout the years, but I had never intended to make this record and make it in this way. I certainly didn’t plan to do it all by myself. But that’s how it ended up.

The initial pieces of this were born out of the pandemic, during the lockdown. In that time, I had written a plethora of songs, as I’m sure many songwriters did during that time.  I probably have two or three complete records worth of tunes of varying styles, that were written in isolation. With nothing but time to kill, I started making demos of those songs, so that when we were all finally free to start playing with other musicians, I would have a fully realized set of demos that I could share with the musicians as a blueprint for the kind of record I wanted to make.

That first batch of demos was the start of my dream record. It’s a vision that began when I was around twenty years old. I’ve always loved Van Morrison, and always connected with his music on a high level. Maybe it has something to do with being Irish. And an asshole. Regardless,  that run of albums: Astral Weeks, Moondance, St. Dominics Preview, The Band and His Street Choir, and Tupelo Honey, that is my sweet spot. There is something about those records that just hits me in the center of my being. They are organic, soulful, and alive, bursting with the flavors of jazz, blues, country, and soul music. The music seems so loose and so spontaneous, yet so well-crafted. I’ve always wanted to make a record like that with a tight core of great musicians, a horn section, and maybe a small string section, a pedal steel player, and three to five backup singers. That is the sound of my heart. It resonates with my roots. I had written a group of songs in that vain that I really loved and began making my demos. After a few weeks, I had all of the guitar parts down, including some rudimentary bass, vocals, and I filled in the rest of the space with drum loops and midi instruments, such as organs and horns, which don’t sound like the real thing, but can give the listener a ballpark idea of how the music might sound if they were real.  It was a solid blueprint for my dream record. The record I’m about to release,  Modern American Folk Music, is NOT that record.

Dreams are just dreams until you make them a reality, and reality had laid down one major obstacle on my road to making my dream record come to fruition: money. I’ve never had much of it, even for a poor musician. And making records has always been an expensive venture. But it also used to be profitable.

In the Golden Age of Rock and Roll, from the late sixties through the seventies, record labels would have no problem sinking $500,000 into a record, even for an artist of little note. Record sales at that time were reaching their commercial peak and the money was flowing. George Harrison could spend 12 hours at Abbey Road Studios with Phil Spector, recording a 30 second guitar solo for “My Sweet Lord”, because he was not only a Beatle with time and money to spare, but he could also sell a million copies of that record, and EMI would make a nice profit in the process, making that several-thousand-dollar guitar solo would a drop in the bucket, financially. And in those days, the corporate tax rate was such that record companies would rather spend money and write it off at a loss rather than pay more in taxes, so even prestige artists and unknowns would get generous recording budgets. Bruce Springsteen’s first two records didn’t sell at all, but he was still given a healthy budget to create the record that would become Born To Run.

Recording in the modern era, for most artists, is a losing proposition. With the advent of streaming, where a subscriber to a streaming service can have unlimited access to pretty much the entire world of recorded music, the sales of physical copies of vinyl and CDs have dropped precipitously, making the the chances of turning a profit, or breaking even, quite slim. If you are a fan of small-time singer-songwriters like myself, you’ve probably heard more than a few worried complaints from a artists about the fall-off in income for touring musicians that CDs used to provide, making the act of recording an entire album a risky financial proposition.

I had my own bit of financial disaster when I recorded Poor Man’s Bible. Although I had raised nearly $8000 to record the album, it wasn’t nearly enough for the completion of the recording, mixing, and mastering of the finished product. When you add in the cost of artwork design, production of the physical copies, and the shipping costs included with such a large order, the number gets even bigger.  So I dipped into my already meager savings to push myself over the finish line.

A year later, when I signed a record deal to release that record, I thought I would at least make back some of the few thousand I had sunk into the record. But when my support system fell apart and the record wasn’t promoted properly, it failed to sell. And even though it is my most streamed title to date, I don’t think I have even made $500 of my money back, since streaming services like Spotify pay a royalty rate that is literally a sliver of a penny.

This is the dilemma of the modern recording artist. And it isn’t even small time, indy acts. Los Lobos, one of America’s great rock and roll treasures over the last five decades, openly discussed their hesitation to go back into the recording studio when they were promoting their record Tin Can Trust a few years back. Why would an established band like Los Lobos, who are probably not going to have any of their new songs hit the charts at this point in their career, spend money to create what is essentially a business card? And lose money in the process?  They already have a solid audience and name recognition, and have made a steady income through constant touring over the past 40 plus years. Making a record, from a financial perspective, makes no sense for them. Luckily for us, they knew that the live shows would ultimately help to sustain any losses incurred by the recording process, although they did have to pare down considerably to fit their frugal budget. They made a great record, but the days of the studio experimentation that gave us the gems Kiko and Colossal Head will probably not come again. And that’s true of many of today’s recording artists.

Making a record is expensive. First, the recording studio can run costs of anywhere from $50 an hour to hundreds of dollars per hour.   Next, you need musicians. I’m a worker, so I try to insist that I pay the people that spend their time working with me. I’ve been very lucky in my journey to have friends and contributors offer to play pro bono, but it’s not something I would ever ask of somebody to do for me. Music is a job and It takes a lot of time and effort just to get good at the craft, and that time and effort should be rewarded. The cost of a musician often depends on the city you live in, and on that player’s reputation, and everybody wants good musicians. Laying down $800 a day to have a great drummer play for two days on your album is not considered outrageous by any stretch of the imagination. Lay that cost out for an entire band, and then add in the cost for speciality instruments like a fiddle player, a pedal steel, or a backing singer, and you’ve already tallied up more costs than most musicians can afford. Sometimes session players are more than willing to come to a rehearsal or two before the recording session, but that will usually costs a few hundred bucks as well. So, before we’ve even tracked our first note, we’ve already spent ten thousand dollars. To cover that amount through streaming royalties, and artist would need about 1,000,000 streams to make that money back. That’s not even counting the physical production, or the marketing and promotion of the album.

When an artist is working on a tight budget and trying to make a great record, time becomes the enemy of creation. For me, every time I’ve made a record, I have always felt the pressure of the clock ticking and the meter running. Every hour that goes by in the studio is money spent. Every take that isn’t perfect is time and money wasted. Plus, everybody needs to eat, and a lot of people smoke, so even when the proverbial tape isn’t rolling, you are still incurring costs. Sometimes this creates an atmosphere of tension, and playing music under pressure is often a recipe for disaster. Many times in my recording career I’ve uttered the words “that’s good enough” or the oft-repeated phrase “we’ll fix it in the mix” during recording sessions, because although I didn’t get the part that I had been hearing in my head, I had to accept it because I knew that the budget required us to move on to the next task. When time and money is limited, an artist has to make quick decisions, and often have to limit their ideas to ones they know might work, as opposed to exploring different ideas. Of course, there is something to be said about making a record live, loose and off-the cuff, as I did on 2012’s Exile on Wilson Street, but every record is different, and some recordings require more care and sensitivity than others.

In 2024, nearly every home PC, Mac, and iPhone comes with recording software on it, such as Logic or GarageBand. Steve Lacey, a young up and coming R&B singer and guitar player from Compton, California, made his first two records on his iPhone. Those records lead him to collaborations with Kendrick Lamar and Beyonce, and eventually, a Grammy nomination. In fact, people all around the world are using phones to make music. In parts of Africa, people use old, discarded phones, to make the beats that they use to tell their story to the rest of the world. Most of the recording software is intuitive and easy to use, and these programs allow an artist to access to thousands of different sounds, from cellos and violins, to Moog synthesizers, giving an artist with a limited budget and unlimited palette of colors to choose from. It was the access to this infinite library of sounds which eventually lead me down the path to recording this record on my own.

The primary reason for building a home studio was to cut costs, but the second most important factor for me was creative freedom. Throughout my recording career I’ve always had big ideas that were quashed by financial restraints.  My original intent for Poor Man’s Bible was to record those same songs with big-band jazz styled arrangements, pulling inspiration from Charles Mingus’ BLACK SAINT AND THE SINNER LADY, a favorite record of mine. But when I bought this idea up to prospective producers before I started making the record, I was told it was “too expensive” or “too complicated”. So instead of drawing from Mingus and making the record I heard in my head, I pared down the ideas. Instead of drawing inspiration from big-band Mingus, I had to draw inspiration from more budget-friendly acts like Leonard Cohen and Mott the Hoople in order to make the rock and roll record that you (probably don’t) have now.

Without the restraints of the studio costs (and the opinions of others), I was free to wallow in my own crapulence (to borrow a phrase from C. Montgomery Burns) and try anything I wanted. And I tried just about everything that came to mind.  One of the most rewarding experiences of recording MODERN AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC was working on ideas and experimenting with different sounds. If I spent all day attempting an idea that failed, I felt rewarded for knowing the it didn’t work as opposed to having the money-driven panic attack I would have had if I had spent several hundreds of dollars in a studio attempting something that did not work. When an artist is allowed to experiment in the studio, we not only find out which ideas work,  we often make new discoveries, or create “happy accidents” along the way. There are several moments on this album that were born out of failed ideas, and instead of it becoming a failed idea, it blossomed into an unexpected surprise. Those moments wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t have unlimited time to work, and for me, this is the greatest advantage to self-recording.

Another advantage that I have recording at The Golden Commode (that’s the name of my studio, an ode to the great Patti Smith) is the ability to work at my own pace, without having people look over my shoulder, waiting around for me to get something done. First and foremost, I am notoriously slow. Everything that I do well (a limited list for sure) I often do slow. I like to take my time, and do things in way that makes me comfortable, as opposed to whatever the “right way” might be. I find that when I rush, I make mistakes. When I multi-task, I make even more mistakes. And I also have a wandering mind (call it ADD, or whatever…I’m a space cadet, always have been), so when I work on something for an hour straight, I often find myself losing focus or hitting the proverbial wall. Working by myself allowed me to step away from the music when I needed to, instead of letting my scheduled studio time dictate the work flow for me. Taking a break, doing another task, going for a walk, or throwing on a baseball game (one of the biggest perks of home recording!) would help my mind relax, and I would come back to work with fresh ideas and a new plan of attack.

Having the time and space to record without pressure has a direct effect on the quality of the music. Often times, in a studio setting, a guitar player or a singer may only get five or ten chances to nail a part, given the time and financial restraints. This has always been a big issue for me for two reasons: the first is that I’m not exactly a virtuoso musician. I’m a competent guitar player and singer, but I’ve never played bass. I have never played piano or organ on a record. So I needed time to get comfortable on some of the instruments I needed to play and get my parts right. It sure as hell is a lot easier to do that without a bunch of people starting at me while looking at their watches and getting frustrated with my musical incompetence. But at home, I can work whenever I feel like it, in a flow that suits my wandering mind and my own creative schedule, and take my time with each part. Sometimes I would record at 5:30 AM before heading to work. Sometimes I would have a great idea at midnight, and instead of writing it down in notebook for the next time I went to the studio, where it would invariably get lost, I could go straight to my office and record the idea right away. Having the time, space, and privacy to work when it suited me best was invaluable to the creative process.

One aspect of recording alone that I found refreshing was doing my vocals. I’ve always been lauded for my voice, to varying degrees, but truth be told, I could never really sing. Or sing comfortably in the studio, at least. I often suffer from crippling self-doubt and low confidence, and don’t often perform up to my standards in a studio setting. Singing into an expensive microphone with a bunch of people watching, with money clock ticking away always made me nervous. My voice would tighten up, and I would never feel one hundred percent comfortable with the results. When I listen back to my past records (a rarity), I often shudder at the sound of my voice.

But recording in my own studio was an entirely different experience. I could try as many takes as I wanted, in a many voices as I wanted. There were no prying eyes to make me feel inhibited, so I was able to sing loudly and full-throated. If I went for a big note, or a high note, and missed, there was no skin off my back or sense of embarrassment.  Best of all, I could inhabit each song to fit whatever vibe or character that the particular song needed. I could dance like a fool, without being self-conscious. If I didn’t like the sound of the microphone I was using, I could change it up, without question or complaint from an engineer. If I didn’t like a lyric or a line that I had written, I could always go back and change it. Recording the vocals on Modern American Folk Music was one of the most liberating things that I’ve ever done in my recording experience, and it wouldn’t have been that way if I had not chosen to record on my own.

Recording at home is great, but there are some disadvantages to working in your home studio. For instance,  my house isn’t soundproofed, or isolated, so passing cars and trucks would occasionally spoil a take. We also have a lot of birds around here, and they love to sing right outside of my window. And rainy days made recording all but impossible with the sound of the rain coming off of the roof and the windows. Not to mention the random sounds produced by our dogs and cats.

Another big disadvantage to working by yourself is, believe it or not,  working by yourself. When you are the sole person recording, that means you take on all of the roles that are usually covered by studio employees, like setting up and breaking down the equipment and microphone stands. Sometimes a computer needs updating. On other days, that computer has a glitch and you have  spend all day on the internet searching for the solution to a problem you don’t really understand. When there is a buzz in one of the guitars you are using, you have to stop recording and become a guitar tech and set up that guitar. Some days I would spend hours searching for that random rattling sound coming out of an amplifier. So, even though you are saving money and working at your own pace, self-recording can sometimes be a much longer process because you are taking on the role of five people at once instead of dividing the labor. It can be trying at times.

But of all the disadvantages of self-recording, the biggest, and hardest, obstacle to overcome when working by yourself is actually working by yourself. I maintain that the reason Axl Rose took 9 years to finish the Guns N Roses record “Chinese Democracy” was simply because he could. If you have the money and the time, you can spend forever and a day in the studio, plugging away. No track is ever perfect, and the ideas never stop coming. Every time you listen back to a track you can hear the imperfections and the possibilities, and if you don’t practice some self-discipline, you’re going to wind up driving yourself crazy.  I work slow, and thats a big reason that it’s taken me two years plus to finish this record, but I’ve also erased and re-recorded every song a few times and started over. Between my low self-esteem and my perfectionism, it gets a little dicey! The reason I announced a release date to the public I was really just to give myself a deadline to finish it!

I’m really looking forward to releasing this record. Even though it lacks the star power of a big-name producer, or the sparkle of ace studio musicians, I feel like this is the most fully realized recording I’ve made to date. Working on it by myself liberated me in so many ways, not only financially, but artistically, and spiritually. The freedom to experiment and take risks lead me down so many roads that I’ve have never traveled, and some that I’ve only dreamed of traveling.  The vocals, the sounds, the guitar tones, and the songs all benefitted from the extra time and thought I was able to give every note of this record, and I really hope the listener hears that.

I would encourage every artist working today to explore the art of self-recording. We all have to face the challenges put forth by the financial realities of the modern age, but more importantly,  the liberation and creativity afforded to you by having the time to work at our own pace, on your own ideas, will help you grow immensely as an artist. I know a lot of musicians and artists get scared off by the technical side of recording, but if you just trust your ears and your heart, and make the music the way you hear it in your head, you will find it completely satisfying, artistically and otherwise. After all, you’ll have all the time you need to twist the knobs and find out what works best for you and what doesn’t.  And if you have any questions or need a tutorial, almost every producer and engineer in the world can be found talking about recording somewhere on the internet. So, next time you’re worried about making your next release, think about taking the leap and have some faith in yourself, and your creative process. It will be well worth it.

MJ

JUNE 2024

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Hello there.

It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? It is hard to believe it has been seven long years since I last released new music. How have you been? How are the kids? How’s that thing? I really hope this letter finds you all doing well. I know that the last seven years hasn’t been easy for any of us, given all that we have been through collectively as a society, and the emotional, physical, and mental toll it’s taken on each of us. Some of us are still struggling to come out of the pandemic-induced fog and readjust to the world, while others are thriving and making the best of the time that, perhaps we all realize now, is so precious. I fall into the first category. I am one of the many thousands of people who have been struggling to find, or rediscover, himself in this Brave New World, trying to reconfigure the pieces of the puzzle of a life that bears little resemblance to the life I was living seven years ago.

One of the biggest pieces of that jigsaw called My Life is my music. It is the thing that has most defined me over the past twenty years, and the thing that nearly destroyed me, but after a long absence from the recording world, and I’m happy to announce that I will have a new record coming out!

Modern American Folk Music will be released on August 30, 2024. My birthday weekend. It’s a political record. It’s a social record. It’s a pandemic record. And best of all, it’s kind of a dance record!

I am very excited, and scared shitless, to share this new work with the world. In order to provide the appropriate context for this piece of work, I will be writing a series of essays to explain the writing and recording process, the influences behind the sound, and my disappearance from the music scene for the past few years. Let’s start with what I’ve been up to…

Flash back to the time period where the suspect was last seen. It was 2016.  I was living in Austin, TX, and enjoying the fruits of nearly a decade of non-stop work in which I was writing songs, making records, and touring-non stop, while also doing my best to help out other musicians book shows so they could make ends meet. I had just finished POOR MAN’S BIBLE, my best work to date. The record was already getting great reviews before it was even released, and I was really proud of the work I put into the writing and recording of those songs. And best of all, Jess Klein and I got married in Austin, took our first-ever adult non-work vacation for our honeymoon, and then packed up our cars and moved to North Carolina, to a town that we had never even set foot in before. Life was good.

Not too long after we began to settle into our new home, I got an email from a local music fan and show organizer who had seen me play a few times while on tour,  asking me if I’d fill in last minute at a local roadhouse called The Kraken, on a bill with two touring songwriters from Ohio. He figured having somebody local might help out the draw for a show on a Sunday afternoon at 3 PM. It didn’t, and I played my set that day to about eight people. Now, if I’ve learned anything from the thousand or so shows I’ve played in my life (and maybe a lesson I wish I had learned sooner), is that you play to the people who showed up, and always give it your all, no matter what. And I did that day, for sure. The next day I got a random phone call from a record label, saying that somebody who had seen the show had passed my name along to them, and they might be interested in signing me. Wow.

I know that signing a record deal sounds like huge news to the uninitiated, and it is, but for me it was a really big deal. Up to this point, I’d always been a 100% independent artist. I’ve never had a manager to do leg work for me. I’ve never had a booking agent help me get shows and negotiate fees. I’ve never been able to afford a publicist to push my records to the press, or the ability to hire radio promoter to get me spins on AAA and Americana radio stations, and in turn, get my name on one of the many indie charts people use to measure success. I’ve never had a label pay for studio time, or the musicians I needed. I could never afford to have someone to do the artwork, pay the artists that needed to be paid, or pay for the production of the physical product. I definitely could never afford to put my records on vinyl. Everything I had achieved at that point: every review, record sale, radio spin, or artist profile written about me had come by my own hand, or the help of a few wonderful people who were doing something for me out of the kindness of their own heart, and a belief in my music. When you consider that I’m a shy Irish Catholic dude with super low self-esteem who doesn’t like talking about money or asking for help from anybody because he doesn’t really feel he deserves it, and is ashamed when he does get it, it’s pretty amazing that I was able to accomplish anything at all in that regard. My only experience asking people for assistance with my music was when I raised $2000 on Kickstarter for Talkin’ Revolution Blues. It was a nerve-wracking experience and emotionally debilitating process for me, waking up each day, wondering why nobody donated the night before, and worrying if I was going to make my goal, and wondering why people didn’t really like me. After that I tried to prove to artists that they didn’t need a site like Kickstarter taking 15% of their donations, and tried to raise the money to make Poor Man’s Bible on my own as an example. I fell woefully short of my goal, but I was afraid to continue to ask for more money from the public, so I ended up going broke (broke-er) trying to fulfill the pledges I had made. Again, I fell woefully short. I’m definitely not cut out for the Tik-Tok world and the modern philosophy of social media engagement. In fact, I’m terrible at it. So, in my mind, having a record label take care of a lot of that type of work would help to get my name and my music out to a wider audience without my self-esteem issues and other hang-ups getting in the way was a big, big deal.  I could just take care of the writing, performing, and driving and let people better equipped for promotion take care of the rest.  I could finally see a clear path to solidifying my career, and establishing a more consistent stream of income.

I signed the deal, and got a whopping $25 signing bonus, which I used to purchase ice cream, naturally. The label was going to put out and promote Poor Man’s Bible, which was already making “Best of the Year” lists in some circles. The label would also be giving me some money to make my next record. All systems were go. My next step was to find a booking agent. The booking agent is the real key to a solid touring career. Ask any artist and they will tell you that the most uncomfortable thing for an artist to do is to ask a club owner for a date at their club and then negotiate a fee. Ask any club owner about booking artists, and they’ll tell you how much they hate having to speak to the artist directly. I know both sides of the coin: In my early to mid twenties, I worked as booking agent for a rather successful booking agency, working out of my boss’ basement in North Jersey. I booked Woodstock icon Richie Havens, “At Seventeen” writer Janis Ian, latin-legend Celia Cruz, a host of Irish acts such as the Saw Doctors and Luka Bloom, as well as several American folk singers. In fact, one of the acts I was personably responsible for was none other than Jess Klein! (We did not know each other at the time, and we only met briefly, twice, in a professional setting, which I know she has no recollection of, although she says otherwise!)

During my time at the agency, I learned a lot about how to sustain a music career without having to be a big star. I learned how to book a tour, how to promote it, and what tools you needed to make an album-release tour successful. Furthermore, I had worked as a free-lance booking agent in Austin, where I worked with some well known Austin artists, a songwriter who once had a top forty hit, and a member of one of America’s most well-known family bands.

My experience in Austin was much more underground and DIY. My main job in that capacity was to get an artist back to working enough where I could hand them off to a better, more established agency. I had done this with a few artists, so when I needed a booking agency, I called the agent that I had sent several of my clients to, along with my coveted contact list, which I had spent years of hard, repetitive, work compiling. (If any of you have seen mid to low-level songwriters touring America in small clubs or house concerts, chances are I had a hand in connecting that artist or agent with the venue).

I called the agent and asked him if he would be interested in booking me. It wasn’t a very hard sell, considering that I had been touring constantly over the years, and the fact that I had shared all of my hard-earned information with him. I told him about the record deal, and my plan to tour endlessly to promote Poor Man’s Bible, and the record that would follow soon after. Besides, I would be doing most of the work. I just needed somebody to contact the venues, secure a date, and negotiate a fee. I would be handling all of the planning, promotion, and coordination between the label and the agency.  He agreed and assigned my touring schedule to his associate. My plan was coming to fruition.

Around that same time, I started working on what would become the record Election Day. I asked my friend Chip Robinson of the Backsliders to help out and co-produce, since I love Chip and admire his artistry. Plus, he is a local Raleigh, North Carolina legend who could help me navigate a scene I was brand new to, in case we needed to hire musicians or find a studio. I decided that I was going to go with a lighter touch, lyrically, than the super heavy religion-and-politics vibe of Poor Man’s Bible. I wrote a bunch of pretty easy, pretty funny songs, all based on what was going on a the time,  which was the lead up to the 2016 election.  For example, one of the songs “Danny’s Back In Business” was an upbeat story of a down and out loser who owned an old army-navy store that sold gas masks and bomb shelters, who was praying for a particular outcome in the election that would boost his sales and put him back on top. It was topical, but fun. For a few of the tracks, Chip gathered his old band, The Backsliders, and we went into the studio and cut 3 tracks live, right on the floor. The tracks we were laying down were sounding amazing. We were on our way.

About a month into having a new record label and a brand new booking agent, I had developed a detailed plan to release Poor Man’s Bible, tour the country, and hit radio stations in every stop along the way to promote each show and the record. I had never had this opportunity before and I was going to take full advantage of the resources at my disposal. I was laser focused.

Unfortunately, my new booking agent wasn’t. The associate who had been assigned to my schedule was not returning my phone calls, or answering my emails in a timely fashion, or any fashion. In the booking business, everyday that goes by is a week of booking lost. Things move fast, and the sooner you can secure a date, the better luck you’re going to have setting up the radio stops to promote the record and each show. Since I had a very detailed plan, I began to get very frustrated. That frustration soon began spilling into the recording process, and I was often worrying about on the tour and not focusing on recording process. Tensions in the studio began to appear as I became more nervous about the tour being booked. I also started feeling the invisible pressure of making something great for the record label that was putting its faith in me. It made me impatient in both the recording process, and the writing process. I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was probably the first time in my artistic career that I was trying to please anything or anyone besides my own perverse sonic pleasures. I slowly started to lose the newfound confidence I had gained from getting a record deal and an agent.

The most symbolic moment of this saga came when I was scheduled to speak to my new agent for the very first time. He had been ignoring me, but we still had time to start getting the album-release tour together if we got on the same page and started busting some ass. There had been a few hiccups, like him sending me emails about gigs that he was booking in venues I had specifically asked him not to book, which was alarming, but we had finally set-up a conference call for 1:00 PM on a Friday to discuss the tour.  I called his number. It went straight to voicemail. There was no return phone call. This, of course, was completely unprofessional, and a giant insult. I was becoming increasingly anxious.

The following Monday I emailed the head agent and let him know about the situation with his associate, and he told me he would take over my touring calendar and handle it personally. I was relieved. Meanwhile, the recording continued, but at the same time, I was feeling burnt out from my daily schedule and all of the stress that came with this newfound responsibility. My typical day involved working in a kitchen for a few hours, then driving an hour to Raleigh, picking up Chip, driving an hour back to my house where we had setup some studio equipment, recording for eight or so hours, driving Chip an hour back to Raleigh, and then driving for another hour back home to sleep. That had been my schedule for the better part of two months. I was feeling burnt out, but optimistic.

My ego took another hit or two when the label insisted on redesigning the cover of Poor Man’s Bible.  Normally, I wouldn’t stand for that kind of artistic interference, but I was so grateful that I was getting the opportunity to have a label put my record out that I didn’t fight it. Not too long after that, I was told that the label would not be printing the record on vinyl because it was too expensive. This especially hurt because getting vinyl copies of the record was one of main reasons I had wanted to sign with a record label in the first place, since I could never afford to do it on my own. Plus, I still owed vinyl copies to the fans who pledged a certain amount of money to my Poor Man’s Bible fundraiser, and I wanted to fulfill my obligations. At the same time, the label was pushing me to finish Election Day, which was still in bits and pieces. So I began to rush just to get it done.

It’s hard to remember the exact date or the order that events occurred. Many of these memories have become one giant cloud of heartbreak and trauma with the passing of time, but within a couple weeks of each other, before Christmas 2017, a few major events occurred:

The first, not in order of time, but of importance, and by far the most crushing blow came in late November of 2017. As I had already noted, I was planning to re-release Poor Man’s Bible in mid February 2018 and hit the road in March, and stay out on the road for as long as I possibly could, hoping capitalize on the buzz of an already acclaimed album, and if things went as planned, Election Day would be released while Poor Man’s Bible was still fresh in everyone’s mind. I had a great, detailed plan, and I really wanted to take advantage of the fact that I had people in my corner for the first time in my professional life. I wanted to work as much as possible, as I had always done, be able to cover all my bills, and hopefully, for the first time, maybe have a little extra left over in my wallet when I got back home. My entire life was depending on this tour, financially and otherwise. But from the time I switched over from the associate agent to the head agent, things got even weirder. There was nothing but radio silence. I had sent several emails looking for tour status updates, and got no response. I made phone calls and they went unanswered. I even had the record label, since they had a stake in this too,  start calling the agent to see if we could all get on the same page together. But he ignored their phone calls as well. I don’t remember the exact date, but I’m pretty sure it was somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas of 2017 when I finally got an email from the Head Agent, simply stating that the tour I had been planning since August was not going to happen because, and I quote: he “just didn’t have the time.” He didn’t have the time. 4 months after I shared my initial detailed plan, with only 2 and half months to go before the album release, and he just didn’t have time. This was incredibly upsetting for several reasons: the first was that touring on Poor Man’s Bible was the entirety of my expected income for 2018. The second was that I had done a lot for this agent: I had sent artist his way and shared all of my contacts with him. Didn’t I deserve just a little bit of consideration? But there was no offer of re-booking it, or any mention of financial consideration. I was crushed. I felt angry and betrayed.

The second crushing blow was when the final version of Election Day had gotten lost in the ether. We had finished most of the tracking, and the label was going to help me do some additional recording, and then mix the record. We had a few great cuts with The Backsliders, including a cover of Lou Reed’s “Busload of Faith”, and a couple of other great tracks like “Alright.” In this day and age, instead of loading up huge reels of tape and having them shipped off to the label by UPS, we just put files in a Dropbox folder and send them off via the internet. Now, I don’t know it was computer error, or a human error by me or Chip, or a bad internet connection, or maybe it was just the universe fucking with me, but when the tracks landed in the label’s inbox, pieces of the songs were missing. Not entire pieces, but tiny fragments here and there. Slivers of slivers of time, causing the all of the instruments to be out of time with each other. What had originally sounded like a solid, straight-ahead rock album now  sounded like a weird Captain Beefheart experiment gone wrong. We couldn’t figure it out and we couldn’t put the songs back together without starting from scratch. Pressed for time, I rushed to record a couple of acoustic tracks to fill out the record, but we had lost a few killer songs like “21st Century Man” and “Losers” that were really the heart of the record. “Losers” had an all time great hammond organ part played by Ed Fritz that was so heartbreaking that I teared up to the first time I heard his playing on it. The label was going to put the record out as an EP instead of a full-length album. The vision I had for the record had been erased. I felt like it was all my fault, and that I was letting down the record label who was taking a chance on me, my friend Chip, and everyone that had supported me. To add insult to injury, I couldn’t even choose the album cover I wanted because the label didn’t want to pay for photo rights. Election Day had become a record that had little resemblance to the record I set out to make. The label put the record out in September of 2018. At least that’s what I’m told. I didn’t hear from them again until May of 2019, when I wrote to them asking them to release me from any contractual obligations.

All of my hard work had lead to my dreams coming true, and then my dreams quickly turned into nightmares. And although being screwed over by the booking agent and record label were two of the biggest contributors to my downfall, those incidents were really just additional fuel to an already raging fire. You see, in the years leading up to this point, I had been suffering a death of a million little cuts while I was out on the road working. First it was the little things, like my name not being listed on show bills that I was playing on, on a show that I booked, that I had made all of the arrangements for. Or watching musicians that I had helped in the past host events, inviting other musicians to take part, but not me. It seemed like everyday I was suffering another tiny humiliation. For instance, I had a show booked at the famed Continental Club in Austin eight months in advance, which was a huge, huge deal for me. But on the night before the show, which I had had been promoting for months on end, and had hired musicians to play (who had turned down other work because of their obligations to me), I was told that I could not play my scheduled set because somebody with more connections than me had wanted to play instead.  I had to call the very professional musicians I had hired and explain why the gig got cancelled. Such slights are easily brushed off at the time, and you try to swallow your pride and put on a brave face and move forward, but over the course of several years, they added up, caused a lot of pain and resentment, and slowly eroded what little confidence I had built up. Losing the tour and having the record deal go sideways were just the giant straws that broke the camel’s back.

In 2018, I was coming apart little by little. I did a few small tours, mostly to small crowds. Poor Man’s Bible was released by the label, but with no tour to support it, they did very little, if anything, to help promote it. I was in dire need of money, so I got a job working in the kitchen of a local pub, an occupation I had sworn off years before when I started touring year-round. All the while I was watching the musical world I once knew move on without me. I would sit and scroll on my social media accounts, watching the agent who screwed me over continue to work with artists who I had once helped, some of whom I considered my friends. It was painful to see. It made me angry. Social media became a daily torture device for me, one in which I was more than happy to engage with. I would occasionally lash out on Facebook, which not only made me look bad in the eyes of those who didn’t know the full story, but it ultimately made me feel worse about myself. I would not only get mad at the agent and the artists he worked with, but I would inexplicably get angry at the music fans who supported them, and the venues that hosted them. Other times, some artist would put out a song that had a message about politics or society that was similar to a message in one of my songs, and fans and critics would hail them for being brave and outspoken, and I would fume over the fact that I had already written a song in that vain, yet received no credit. I was creating a no-win situation for myself in my mind and fighting with self-created figments of my imagination.

By 2019, my life had returned to where it had been a decade before: working a part-time day job, struggling to pay the bills, and trying to figure out my next move. But I was falling deeper into my depression and self-loathing. I struggled in and out of daily life, swallowing anger and resentment, feeling like a failure, and being envious of the people who continued to live the life that I had known so well just a few years before. I wondered why nobody liked me. Why did all this happen to me? Is my music not good enough? Am I not good enough? Am I doing something wrong to people? Why is nobody standing up for me? Why won’t somebody just tell me I suck? Why did I waste my entire life? Why is it so easy for people to throw me aside?

It had become clear to me that all of the people in the music business who I had known, who I had helped, who had called themselves my friends, were just using me the entire time, and now that I had nothing to offer them that would further their career, I had become useless. It was a cold and harsh reality. I had always told people at the end of my shows that the world was a good place full of more good people than bad people, but I had lost faith in that notion. I no longer wanted anything to do with the human race, especially self-centered, narcissistic, greedy musicians. I was isolated, alone, and had lost all direction and ambition. Then the pandemic came.

The pandemic was hard on everybody, so I won’t spend too much time rehashing our collective traumas, but we certainly had our share of the hard times in our house. Jess lost her step-father. Then my father died. It was before the vaccine, and travel was fraught with tension and fear, and there was no possibility for any kind of normal grieving process, given the restrictions. I also lost my grandmother. Then my cousin was killed. It was a lot, not to mention the daily strains of life that came along with the lock down. On the other hand, I was thriving in isolation. I had no want or need to be around people, so I was just fine. I gave myself a regimented schedule. I took jazz guitar lessons, and voice lessons, learned some French, did yoga everyday, built a patio, and wrote tons of songs. Jess and I started a band and did the occasional web-cast concert. But I also had a few mental breakdowns, mostly fueled by my anger and resentment about the way my music career had gone, my jealousy of other artists, and my ever-depleting sense of self worth. After the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, I had gotten involved in a discussion on Twitter in which the lead singer of a well-known Americana band read one of my Tweets incorrectly, and then retweeted my comment out to thousands of his followers with the accusation that I was “white washing history”. When I replied that he had misread my tweet and that I had been writing anti-racist songs about cops for over a decade, he came back with “I never heard of you”, etc, etc, the social media equivalent of “don’t you know who I am?”  He refused to make things right or apologize. Some of his fans sent me nasty emails. Worst of all, only one artist that knew me came to my defense to set things right. I had experienced on-line bullying for the first time, and the fact that virtually no one stood up for me only made matters worse and accelerated my mental decline.

Eventually I submitted to therapy, and then to medication. But it wasn’t until society began to open up again that I truly realized how deeply depressed I was. I wanted the lockdown to go on forever. I would have been perfectly fine playing weird gigs in empty rooms to a blacked out computer screen once a week for the rest of my life, never having to interact with anybody but my wife and the cat ever again. I was broken. I had lost my faith in humanity, and had little desire for any human contact. I no longer trusted people, especially people involved in music. I was really angry. I was really hurt.

As the world opened, I eventually took another job, this time working as a construction laborer, and it was very helpful. I worked with a crew of well-educated, empathetic guys who had all been musicians at one point or another. It was a good place for me to find the camaraderie and empathy I sorely needed at the time. Little by little I began to find my feet again. I dove into the pile of demos I had recorded during the pandemic.

At one point, in the spirit of curiosity and adventure, I put a synthesizer track on one of the songs I was messing with. I had never really experimented with synths or drum loops before, because was a “real musician” who played “real music”,  but the new sound sparked something inside of me. So I started down the rabbit hole, and started building tracks, working on songs in a way which I have never worked on songs before: The writing process was different. The lyrical approach was different, and I was doing all of the recording myself.

I guess at some point I figured I would just have better musicians re-record some of the tracks I was laying down, but as time went on I realized that this record was going to have to be something I was going to do all by myself, because counting on others was what got me screwed in the first place. I worked on it obsessively on it whenever I could, sometimes laying down tracks at 5 AM before going to the gym and then to the construction site. Sometimes, I would have to spend a few days learning an instrument or a part before I could record it properly. There was a long stretch during the recording where I didn’t think I’d even finish it, or if I did, I wasn’t sure if I’d release it. My head was full of self-doubt and fear. But I pushed through, and here we are. I have a brand new record.

I have huge reservations about releasing Modern American Folk Music. I have huge reservations about putting myself out there again. At the same time, I’m viewing this record a personal triumph. It’s a triumph of my independent spirit, as well as a triumph of my commitment to my art, and to my mental health. At this point in my life and my career, I’m certainly not in it for the money or the fame. I never really wanted any of that, anyway. All I ever really wanted was to be able to live a simple life, with the certain amount of freedom that being a musician affords. When it comes down to it, I don’t have too many options:  I’m just a middle aged white dude with 3 chords and a well-informed opinion who has no real experience doing anything other than playing music. As I’ve learned a bunch over the past few years, I’m not really cut out for much else. So making this record, and more importantly, releasing it, is a big landmark on my timeline.  Will it be successful? Will people like it? I wonder. But one of the best things that’s  happened to me through this entire experience is that in the course of all the ups and downs, and in the depths of the darkness I wallowed in, I seem to have lost all of the fucks I had left to give. So, if you like it, thank you. If not, well…maybe next time!

Thats where I have been, more or less. I’m not writing this to bitch or to complain, or call people out,  but I just felt like I needed to get this part of my story out there. In the music business, no matter how big or small the scene you’re part of is, you are not allowed to talk about these kinds of things, because nobody wants to lose their gig and a bigger artist can easily turn fans and industry people against you. Why stick up for some small-time, fringe songwriter when doing so might cost you your booking agent? Why call out an artist who has more fans than you for their shitty behavior when it might cost you a chance to open for them? Why do the right thing when you can just do your thing? There’s limited space in the entertainment field, so people keep their mouth shut.

But, I’ve been holding on to so many resentments and so much anger for so long, that I just needed to exorcise these demons and let them die in the light, and hopefully be rid of them once and for all, and just move forward living my life.

I also wanted to set the record straight from any rumors that you might have heard about me (I’ve heard a few doozies!). I have been trying my best over the past few years to quietly find forgiveness to those who hurt me, professionally and otherwise. It is a daily battle, but I’m trying to start everyday with an open heart and an open mind. The truth is, I’m truly blessed to even be writing this piece. I’ve done enough shit in my past where I’m lucky to even be alive, nonetheless to have a great life, a great wife, a roof over my head, and food in the fridge. That’s more than a lot of people have, and more than I probably deserve.

When you put it all in perspective, I have it way better than most of the entire population of the world. That’s a pretty lucky circumstance. And if I can have all of that, while continuing to try to find forgiveness and peace in my heart and mind, create my music the way I want to make it, express myself, and share my work with you…well, maybe we’ll be alright.

Mike June

June ’24.

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