Hey friends!
I’m writing you from the passenger seat, bound for Omaha. I started this Travelogue yesterday in Mitchell, South Dakota, on our first day off from traveling since we got back on the road. Pamela and I hadn’t been through South Dakota until this week, when we did a surprising amount of touristing – visiting Deadwood, Wall Drug, Mount Rushmore, Badlands National Park and The World’s Only Corn Palace – and brought our grand total of states visited in Roadetta so far to 46. Tonight we’re singing in Omaha, Nebraska, a state I’ve never played in, then heading onward to our first-ever gigs in Kansas and Arkansas as well. Our schedule’s filled in pretty sweetly since I wrote you last:
Sat Sep 14 • Omaha, NE • FolkHouse concert at Joslyn Castle
Sun Sep 15 • Lawrence, KS • Vintage Church
Mon Sep 16 • Salina, KS • E Bar Z House Concert
Wed-Sun Sept 18-22 • Winfield, KS • Walnut Valley Festival
Mon Sep 23 • Tulsa, OK • Writers Night feature at the Colony
Wed Sep 25 • Fayetteville, AR • Folk School of Fayetteville
Fri Sep 27 • Asheville, NC • private house concert
Sat Sep 28 • Weaverville, NC • Stage 11 House Concerts
Sun Sep 29 • Cary, NC • house concert
Mon Sep 30 • Roanoke, VA • 3rd Street Coffeehouse
Fri Oct 4 • Marblehead, MA • Me&Thee Music
Sat Oct 5 • Amherst, MA • Pioneer Valley Folklore Society
Sun Oct 6 • Mystic, CT • White Pine Woods House Concert
Fri Oct 11 • Goshen, CT • Black Bear Americana Music Festival
Sat Oct 12 • Rochester, NY • Golden Link Folk Singing Society
Sun Oct 13 • Allentown (Breinigsville), PA • Rush House Concert
Wed Oct 16 • Huntington, NY • Folk Music Society of Huntington
Fri Oct 18 • Syracuse, NY • Folkus Concert Series
Sat Oct 19 • Fanwood, NJ • Fanwood Concert Series
Sun Oct 20 • Ithaca, NY • TBC
Wed Oct 23 • Georgian Bluffs, ON • private house concert
Thu Oct 24 • Grafton, ON • FromScratch Farm
Fri Oct 25 • Kingston, ON • Live Wire Concert Series
Sat Oct 26 • Kitchener, ON • Folk Night at the Registry w/ Jay Linden opening
Sun Oct 27 • Toronto, ON • TBC
Mon Oct 28 • Perth, ON • Listening Room Concert Series
Fri Nov 1 • Chelsea, QC • Motel Chelsea
Sat Nov 2 • Ottawa, ON • Tunes After Noon
Tue Nov 5 • Akron, OH • GHS Presents
Wed Nov 6 • Columbus, OH • Rambling House w/ Eric Nassau opening
Thu Nov 7 • Nashville, IN • Brown County Inn
Fri Nov 8 • Carmel, IN • TBA
Sat Nov 9 • Kalamazoo, MI • TBA
Sun Nov 10 • Grand Rapids, MI • TBA
Thu Nov 14 • Toledo, OH • Lucas County Public Library
Fri Nov 15 • where should we play around Lansing/Ann Arbor???
Sat Nov 16 • Detroit (Birmingham), MI • Mama’s Coffeehouse
With Ramblers Choir (Scott Nolan, Joe Nolan, Scott Cook and Pamela Mae):
Nov 20 • Winnipeg, MB • Park Theatre
Nov 21 • Inglis, MB • Roots at Rusty’s
Nov 22 • Saskatoon, SK • The Bassment
Nov 23 • Watson, SK • Watson and District Regional Library
Nov 24 • Regina, SK • The Artesian
Nov 26 • Vulcan, AB • Nine In a Line Brewing
Nov 27 • Nanton, AB • Loree house concert
Nov 28 • Canmore, AB • ArtsPlace
Nov 29 • Calgary, AB • Fish Creek Concerts
Nov 30 • Edmonton, AB • Northern Lights Folk Club
Dec 1 • Vermilion, AB • Vermilion Folk Club
We had a great run around Alberta with Corin Raymond and Naomi Shore just now, including a sold-out sendoff at the Yardbird Suite in Edmonton that was easily one of the sweetest shows I’ve ever been part of.
photo by Mia Clarke
All our shows together felt great, with a harmonious synergy in the match-up, a nice overlap among our crowds, and plenty of old friends dropping in. Pamela and I backed up Corin and Naomi on the second half of their set each night, and it was scary and delightful to play lead guitar in a band for once. Our run together ended in Lethbridge last Saturday, and on Sunday we crossed the border into obscurity, playing in Bozeman, Montana for a crowd of about ten people.
It felt so good, though. For one, we were relieved just to have made it across the border without incident. We actually had to pay an extra $2800 US to expedite Pamela’s visa this time, since our case got randomly assigned to the California Processing Center and we were informed that the 90-day waiting period we’d been rushing our paperwork to meet would now be 180 days. Even after paying the extortionate fee, there’s still no guarantee of approval, and even once it’s approved, there’s no guarantee of anything until you get to the border. But we made it.
The show was in an incredibly charming 75 year-old trades hall called the Gallatin Labor Temple, and was put on by the Bozeman Folklore Society, who’ve been presenting roots music since 1988. Most importantly it brought out beautiful Bozeman people, and they sang along, and we slept in the parking lot afterward, happy.
The next day we went to a used bookstore called Isle of Books, and the gal who helped us there knew about every book Pamela was interested in, and I was reminded of how flabbergastingly interesting curious people can be. We rode bikes around, digging the extensive trails and the beautiful backyard sheds and just generally marvelling at Bozeman, a mountain town that has become nearly impossibly unaffordable for many of the funky kind of folks who used to live there and made it interesting.
That day’s drive took us into much less magical territory – the first ‘riverside campsite’ we aimed for ended up being the old site of a WWII prisoner-of-war camp, a gravel lot next to an oil refinery complete with overflowing garbage cans, the local gun club headquarters, and an assortment of folks living in tents. We drove on, because we could. The saddest thing about it for me wasn’t even that people are staying there, it was that it costs $30 a night. Billboards along the highway advertised various solutions to feelings of having been shafted: legal eagles who’ll fight for accident victims, Republican politicians who’ll fight for Montanans, and of course Jesus, who’ll fight for your soul.
The next day we drove to Sheridan, Wyoming for a house concert hosted by The Two Tracks, a band we met at Storyhill Fest in Minnesota last year. It was the night of the first (and probably only) debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, but the house was packed with folks who told us, in various ways, that they’d rather feel good about their fellow humans by gathering together with them in the real world than feel bad about them by watching the big show. We sang “Say Can You See” and “A Bigger Tent” to big cheers, and had a lot of different conversations afterward about hope and tolerance and viewpoint-diversity and living in Wyoming and what a better world might look like.
photo by Dave Heubner
We did make it most of the way through the replay of the debate (with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn's cynical commentary) during our drive the next day. Both Pamela and I have found the soap opera of US politics particularly compelling this season, and no wonder, it’s stage-managed, big-budget TV! They’re expected to spend 10 billion dollars on ads this time around. And the plot twists have been intense!
Now, I imagine some of my readers may be fired up for Kamala Harris, and I certainly don’t want to poop on anyone’s parade, nor do I want to pretend that there aren’t real things in play between a candidate who at least motions toward civility and restraint and taking care of our planet versus another who admires Viktor Orban and leads chants of “drill, baby, drill,” but I also want to be honest. Both of them misrepresented facts, sidestepped meaningful questions, and repeated tired talking points, while never offering even a glimpse of anything like an alternative to the extractivist, consumerist, militarist shit-show we call the status quo. Sure, Trump acted crazier and told way bigger lies (Harris, for example, repeated the false accusation that Trump failed to condemn the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, where Trump went way bigger with made-up stories about doctors in America practicing infanticide and Haitians in Ohio eating people’s pets). But truly, I want better than either of them have to give. I won’t say we deserve better, because I’m not sure what that means. But we need better. We need a fundamental change in our economic and political system if we’re going to avoid turning this world into a hellscape. Kamala Harris is running to be the President of the United States, and the President of the United States is not equipped to solve the problem. As our comrade Carsie Blanton put it recently:
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Our problem is that we - and all life on the planet - are being fed into a very big machine, which is crisscrossing continents, picking up speed. You and I were blessed to be born a few thousand miles ahead of its gnashing blades, where the living is cushy, for now. Each day, this machine sucks tonnes of oil from the ground, smelts iron into weapons of war, flattens rainforests into plantations, pulls lithium from the earth and forges it into tiny bleeping boxes (which it then casts out, like so many flying monkeys, to extinguish glimmers of intelligent thought). Each year, this machine takes millions of children from their parents, and millions of parents from their children. It rains shrapnel on them from the sky, infects them with malaria and AIDS, dehydrates and irradiates them. It forces them into mines and sweatshops to spend sixteen hour workdays breathing carcinogens. It rips them from their homes and flings them into refugee encampments, into tents on city streets, into deserts and seas on their way to other countries. This machine melts sixty-million-year-old glaciers and drops them into warming oceans, which it empties of fish and fills with plastic. It burns oil to ship those fish around the globe in planes, and to till fields and sow grain, and to wrap up little pieces of cows, releasing lashings of methane and carbon. Forty percent of the food it creates is left to rot, while ten percent of human beings starve. The machine is called capitalism, and there is no political candidate who will save us from it. It makeths our candidates, and it takeths them away. |
We’ll be singing the same songs in Akron, Ohio on Election Day. I’ll be relieved if America chooses Harris and Walz over Trump and Vance. But I won’t kid myself that our problems are solved, or that voting alone will solve them. I’ll be disappointed if it goes the other way. But I won’t conclude that it’s hopeless. I’ll keep trying to find common ground with the people I talk to. And I’ll keep trying to imagine a better world.
The long summer
When I wrote you dear readers last, I was headed up to the Peace Country of British Columbia on a solo run that included a few days tripping down memory lane in Tumbler Ridge, an isolated coal-mining town I lived in from grades 6 through 9. I wrote a lot more to my Fellow Travellers on Patreon about that whole experience, but suffice it to say it stirred up a lot of ghosts for me. I might even write a song about it. I wrote one called “Cheap, Fast and Good” on the last of my days off up there, and released it to my Patreon on the way to North Country Fair Acoustic Music Camp.
It was a wonderful week at the camp, which I hadn’t been back to since I started it in 2021. I was really impressed with how it’s developed under the guidance of director Dan Barton in collaboration with the Fair folks. One day we had a panel of elders from the community talking about the Fair and the Association and the Land; another day we had an edible and medicinal plants walk led by resident good witch Toniese; another day we had an ecstatic dance workshop led by Krista Mendez that we instructors got to be the band for. We hung out on D minor for about forty-five minutes in total, with maybe another ten minutes where we switched it up to F. It was indeed ecstatic. And it was nothing I could imagine happening at any other music camp besides the North Country Fair Acoustic Music Camp.
We had a good crop of students, breakthroughs aplenty, wonderful weather and sweet jams around the firepit every night, with aurora borealis dancing overhead. It was absolute magic. Think about it and watch out for registration next year if you’re in the neighbourhood.
From there I picked up Pamela for a quick rip out to Trout Forest Music Festival in Ear Falls, Ontario – a gig we thought might connect to a longer tour back when we booked it, but which ended up just being a run out and back. It was beautiful all the same.
Back home in Edmonton, we hosted our Aussie buddy Justin Vilchez and got him into the studio to play on a few tracks for the new album. We also hosted Corin Raymond during the run of his one-man Fringe show Bookmarks, and took in more Fringe shows than we’d ever done before, maybe a dozen in total. I fell deeply in love with the art form, and with the culture around it – much like the musical Small Time, a nomadic life of moving from festival to festival and meeting up with fellow Fringers and freaks along the way.
We finished up our recording with Miles Wilkinson, and I finally started to feel like we’ve got a real album coming together. We took lots of long bike rides along the leafy trails of our town. Pamela also spent a lot of time in the garden, which displaced most of the front yard this year, blooming and buzzing with flowers and vines and happy pollinators. She had to harvest earlier than she’d wanted, but she left squashes on the vine for my folks to pick, and she even pressed a little grape juice from the vine we moved from her Auntie’s place earlier this year.
Before we knew it, our pal Naomi Shore had arrived as well, and we had a full house for a few days before setting off on our Alberta run. It was bittersweet saying goodbye to home, but it’s been an adventure since then, rambling through old, weird, endearing America.
We rolled through the Black Hills of South Dakota and saw a bunch of places my grandparents took us when I was young, like Deadwood, the cowboy version of Vegas, where Wild Bill Hickok was shot once upon a time and where my Grandad’s old buddy Pahaska, a prolific Native American painter, used to pose in a headdress with his pony for tourists who paid to take their picture with a real Indian.
We boondocked in the Badlands at a place called The Wall, pictured at the top of this Travelogue, and marveled at the scenery. We felt grateful for National Parks and public libraries. We visited Wall Drug, the mightiest tourist-trap truckstop of them all, where coffee is still five cents a cup.
And we visited the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, the last of the many “grain palaces” that cities on the Great Plains used to build to bring in tourists by train and encourage farmers to settle there. Mitchell started building Corn Palaces in 1892, decorating the walls every year with new murals made of split cobs of corn, and hosting huge festivals with acrobats, vaudevillians and famous headliners like John Philip Sousa, Tommy Dorsey, Lawrence Welk, Duke Ellington, The Three Stooges, Jimmy Dean, Pat Boone and Roy Rogers, on up to Willie Nelson and today’s country stars.
The palaces were smaller during the Great Depression and the two world wars, but they kept building them every year. From 1948 to ‘71, the murals were designed by Oscar Howe, a South Dakota-born Native American artist whose visionary work seems woefully under-appreciated in his home state. He brought in themes of the space age, nuclear peril, environmental destruction, and reconciliation with indigenous peoples, speaking to the spirit of the times in a way that was accessible and beautiful, like we're trying our best to do.
If you want to join us out here, we’ll be checking in with a little livestream from Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield on Tuesday at the usual time, 5:55pm Mountain, which’ll be 6:55 in Winfield (find your time here) via my Facebook and YouTube channels. And as always, there’s more happening over on my Patreon page, including the aforementioned “Cheap, Fast and Good” from July and another song called “You’ll Come In Crying” that I released at the end of August. There’s only one tier to the thing, and it’s pay what you can – a virtual pass-the-hat, or as Pamela says, socialist media.
It's a strange world, friends, but there sure are a lot of kind folks in it. Sending loads of love from here to wherever you are,
s