Summer Nights

In the shade of the ol' palm tree

It’s the first day of summer and I can only vaguely recall the hyper thrill of stashing my schoolbooks and settling in for a nearly three month break from almost any kind of schedule. I wasn’t much of a summer camp kid, aside from a few notable exceptions (Basketball camp? Whose fucking idea was that? Yeah, probably mine.), so I would usually spend the summers hanging around with neighborhood friends and, later, working all week only to blow most of my money on records in Harvard Square.

After finally finishing college (I took a circuitous multi-schooled route), during the years that I worked for the Department of Transportation, I really got the feel for the loss of Summer as a significant, or indeed, even joyous, time.  Not having a family of my own and usually using up most of my vacation time on three-day “tours” or jaunts to New York to play at CBGB’s, I spent my summers in Boston carrying on as usual and they became a time like any other – only hotter and humid as all get-out.

Summer this year is taking on a new tone.  You might think that, living in Southern California, summer would have no meaning at all.  But these first couple months (our summer kinda starts in early May) are noticeably different.  This year, in particular, cosmic variables are lining up particularly well.  Granted, it’s our first summer in the Valley, but even so, there’s been a nearly constant wind whose result is clearer skies, the temperature has been hanging out at a back-patio-perfect 75°, and for the first time in a good few years I am actually home to enjoy it.  No radio shows.  No brief – yet fantastic – tours with Indigo Girls. No last-minute jaunts to the East Coast. To have this concentrated time to just be is both amazing and confusing.  But I’ve got plenty to do and somehow I’ve been managing to keep all my work local thus far. Between writing & recording songs for myself, working on finishing The PKO record, recording a new Matt Nathanson album, co-writing with Matt MacKelcan, Isaac Johnson, and Max Lugavere, and playing shows with Dave Bernal, Matt Bunsen & the Burners and others, I am actually finding time to do yard work, plant things, go to the farmer’s market, cook, and *gasp* actually see friends that live here in Los Angeles! (How’s that for a run-on sentence, Mrs. Robinson?)

While I know that the albums will be completed and inevitable tours will follow, this time is when I regain the ability to see my life as more than a succession of shows, more than a scramble to get everything done in the spaces between home and away.  It’s the clearer view outside of myself – the human being who has been hard-wired such that music is the core of my being. A reminder that there are other passions, slower paces, warmer evenings, quieter spaces, spontaneous decisions, unexpected options.  Mostly it’s about regaining the balance and remembering that this is what it’s all about, just as much as that is what it’s all about.

In that way, I can regain a faint semblance of what summers were like for the 13-year-old me.  I can sit back and breathe, knowing that, even if I do have to get up in the morning and work, I’ve still got a few months of Summer left to do nothing at all.  Well, that’s B.S. But I can at least suspend that reality from time to time, and that’s a step in the right direction.