On Skepticism and Eye Contact
Sat, March 22, Contrabandits Contra Dance, Arlington Community Center, Arlington KS
Wed April 8, Curious Pair Presents, Oklahoma City, OK, Solo
Thurs April 9, Tulsa Botanic Garden, Tulsa, OK, Solo
Sun April 13, Starlight Canyon B&B, Amarillo TX, Solo
Fri May 2, John Boyd’s w/The Matchsellers, KCMO %
Sat May 3, Village Wine, Effingham IL, %
Sun May 4, Switchyard House Concert, Bloomington IN, %
Wed May 7, Goshen Brewing, Goshen IN, %
Thurs May 8, Robin Theatre, Lansing MI, %
Fri May 9, House Concert w/Bobcat Opossum, Ft Wayne IN, %
Sat May 10, Ivas John’s, Cape Girardeau MO, %
Sun May 11, Flotsam Farm w/Creek Stink, Sycamore MO, %
% - John Depew Trio
Holy cow, what a month!
We had an incredible time on this year’s first 4-night trio run around KS, playing in Wichita, Lawrence, Hays, and Alma, with packed houses for every show. Huge thanks to everyone who helped make each of those nights work; to our friends Little Big Twang, 80 Proof Alice, and Signal Ridge for sharing the stage with us, and especially to everyone who came out to any of these shows. Seriously, thank you.
I just got back to my rural KS home late last night (actually early this morning) from a week in Portland OR, Trout Lake WA, and Whidbey Island WA, a really neat opportunity to make music with some new friends.
Lincoln Crockett and I first connected…
…via a third party who thought we’d each enjoy the other’s work, which turned out to be true. Lincoln is an excellent musician and songwriter, and has a similar taste for musical non-conformity, and at least as important as all that, I found him to be a really enjoyable and thought-provocative person to be around. He lives with his awesome accomplice/wife Rachel in a beautifully simple self-built cabin in Trout Lake, WA, a house I could have spent a week looking at and asking questions about, in a town as idyllic as they come.
He’s a thinker, articulate conversationalist, and compassionate human who has mostly stepped out of the music performance world to focus on a more urgent calling, helping others heal themselves. As he puts it, he is trying to “push the limits of our psycho-social concepts about where the energy that we are meets the people that we conceptualize ourselves to be.” This is deeply interesting to me, as you might imagine, although I feel I didn’t have enough time this weekend to really get a full understanding of what his ideas are here.
Speaking from my own experience and thought process, I’d say where I think Lincoln and I align is on the idea that everything is connected, not in some vague, new-age-y way, but just actually and simply, we’re all made of the same stuff as everything else. Even the rigorous minds of theoretical physics are telling us that the fundamental building block of all matter is energy. I often think of this as God’s creativity. In other words, everything that exists is comprised entirely of God, while also retaining its own individual character. This feels like a fundamental paradox in the universe. Okay, that bobber’s drifted pretty far out, and I’ll leave it there for now, see if anything bites.
Skepticism is a really important tool in today’s world,
there’s no doubt about that. However, I’ve really been struggling to find a balance between being doubtful of the full truthfulness of many things I’m hearing and reading, on one hand, while on the other hand, trying to maintain a ‘heart-posture’ of openness to the possibility that good things do indeed happen and the reality that it is, even today…especially today, our individual actions and ways of being in the world that add up to create ‘society-wide’ problems. All the skepticism that seems required to interpret current events and media coverage thereof seems to work against the open-heartedness that we desperately need in order to counteract what is going to be a very difficult era at least in U.S. history, I’d say regardless of who gets their way at this point.
It is, ultimately, our acceptance of certain ‘truths’ that create the world we live in at any given moment, a world that is tragically arbitrary and asinine. It doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, I’d say we have a responsibility to create a new truth when the current one doesn’t serve the best interests of the earth or the vast majority of living things on it. The new truth is going to have to be one of intense personal responsibility. We will not be able to delegate this to our representatives, nor to the corporations, nor can we push it off to our grandchildren. We need to face it now. This is a question of aligning ourselves fully with our values, which necessarily requires that we know what our values are. The challenge is, we can no longer afford to blame an outside force, say ‘Republicans’ or ‘Democrats’ or ‘the economy’ or ‘management’, for making us live in ways we can’t stand tall in and be proud of.
Easier said than done, yes, but we have each risen to meet many a steep challenge head-on; we can do it again, more fiercely, now. It’s the only viable option, so far as I can see.
Now, this:
This is a brand new song, one that came out while I was at my ‘frien-tor’ Pat’s place a couple of months ago. I had been messing around with a split-tuned mandolin (each pair of strings is tuned to two different notes, in this case, FG-CD-GA-DE). This plays off a conversation I overheard between Josh Wardlaw and Peter late one night last year at Winfield. They were joking about one chord and one word, the simplest song. Somehow that thought bubbled up when this tune was in the process of coming out. I think it’ll be on the next record, most likely. Junco on the Vine:
and this…
riding the bus through Seattle
then light rail, then through the airport
a city of 4 million souls
though you rarely see one
bodies climb aboard
bodies disembark
headphones, downcast eyes
smartphone thumbs
these beautiful people
all day long, crowd after crowd
I wish someone would catch my eye
even for them to say, somberly, ‘fuck you.’