idea hours

and Kobe, Japan

Oh hey, I’m playing in Japan really soon! The Tokyo show is sold out but there are still tickets left for this one at Guggenheim House in Kobe:

4/18 (木) 神戸 旧グッゲンハイム邸（078-220-3924）
開場 7:00pm／開演 7:30pm
予約 4,500円／当日 5,000円　※別途ドリンク代不要
学生500円割引（予約・当日共／要証明書提示）
チケット：旧グッゲンハイム邸事務局 (guggenheim2007@gmail.com)／7e.p.
フード：ワンダカレー
共催：塩屋音楽会

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walking and writing

I used to dream about waking up super early as a routine. Spending those early morning hours when the mind is still soup just swimming around in it, writing down cool stuff, noticing subtleties, hearing a bird here and there, making the day feel twice as long (in a good way)… but it always slipped through my grip whenever I’d try to establish a new routine. I’d set the alarm and do it for a few days but the nights were also so fun and fertile and I have to sleep sometime so I’d revert to the way of the 20 something year old. Then I had a kid and it changed of course because babies bulldoze your everything. My brain changed and I’m a whole different guy. That was 9 years ago. Now I still routinely wake up early whether I want to or not, and I’m enjoying it.

But these past few weeks it’s been a little exaggerated. Not like Carson who starts the “day” at like 2 am in order to get to the primo fishing spot in time, but still, I’ve been pushing it. I’ve been doing the occasional very very early morning hike before everyone else wakes up, headlamp on a dark trail, getting legitimately spooked.

And while I walk I mumble. It’s not meditative. I’m doing the opposite of polishing the perfect mind mirror, I’m gathering dust. I’ve been in “writing mode” for a couple years now, writing songs/poems/words/things I don’t even know what. Ideas in words. Lots of songs I’m really proud of have come from this, and they weirdly keep coming, so I keep doing what I’m doing. These last early dark walks have brought forth a big blob of words that I’m hoping will be the last piece of this new Mount Eerie album I’ve been working on for a long while now. I’m excited to eventually tell everyone all about it. I feel like I’ve been saying “I’ve been writing, I’ve been recording” for a long time now. But I have. It grows.

At the moment I’m traveling. So now jetlag keeps me on this early morning schedule. I wake up and the world seems asleep. My mom is awake, famous in my family for being up at these insane hours, and not even for farming or fishing purposes. We are fishing for something else in the dark I guess.

I love it, this possibly inconvenient inheritance. I have always craved this access to the early morning hours where it seems art comes from. In the pre-dawn murk the lines between things are indistinct. The oneness of things seems like a no brainer. Dreams crawl the ground here. And who am I even? I will know later when the sun clears it all up, but for now I am that dark blue sky blush.

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On the theme, here’s one of my most favorite poems:

Mother Night by Jim Harrison

When you wake at three AM you don't think
of your age or sex and rarely your name
or the plot of your life which has never
broken itself down into logical pieces.
At three AM you have the gift of incomprehension
wherein the galaxies make more sense
than your job or the government. Jesus at the well
with Mary Magdalene is much more vivid
than your car. You can clearly see the bear
climb to heaven on a golden rope in the children's
story no one ever wrote. Your childhood horse
named June still stomps the ground for an apple.
What is morning and what if it doesn't arrive?
One morning Mother dropped an egg and asked
me if God was the same species as we are?
Smear of light at five AM. Sound of Webber's
sheep flock and sandhill cranes across the road,
burble of irrigation ditch beneath my window.
She said, "Only lunatics save newspapers
and magazines," fried me two eggs, then said,
"If you want to understand mortality look at birds."
Blue moon, two full moons this month,
which I conclude are two full moons. In what
direction do the dead fly off the earth?
Rising sun. A thousand blackbirds pronounce day.

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this other thing

I got mentioned favorably in a Guardian article about the ongoing efforts to regulate the wild and bad ticket sales practices. Also mentioned a bunch: my fellow touring musician Taylor Swift. Check it out.

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OK, bye.
Phil

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currently reading:

Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment by Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart

Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Koren

Zen Roots: The First Thousand Years translated by Red Pine