Here’s a clip of something I’m working on. Rough and new and recorded from my really fancy IPHONE MEMO RECORDER so, you know, don’t go “omg how beta”. The mix of vocals to piano is determined by how far away you’re sitting from the phone when you sing. Yeah.

I’ll need a drip
Swallow and a few good chords
Lamp light, late night
Of course I’ll need a big full moon

Fever Pitch

Then suddenly, I’ve got all this new stuff to listen to, the furniture has been rearranged and I’m feeling totally blessed, brave and fluid for the first time in years. Here’s what’s going on in my head and warming my toes; a soundtrack for an early thaw.

*can we talk about Foals? I am absolutely in love with them. I saw them at the GAMC last year and they were AMAZING. Total bliss.

* Feist has a new record out. It’s good. You should get it.

Sigh. Makes me happy. Thanks, Clevergirl, for filling my ego bank with watermelon jolly ranchers, eyes with tears, and writing something as rad as “It’s summertime/ I’m on the road/ Fill the tank and feed my soul/ I dream of things/ You make them true”.

Please pretend there’s a decent band to back this. Consistent drum beat to keep time, something I seem to completely lack capacity to produce for myself. Though that may have something to do with forgetting the chords. It’s ROUGH. Like sandpaper cat tongue walk through my neighborhood on the day before payday, but hey. It’s progress.

Enough. Basta. Check it out.

(download) Four Walls

(hosted) Four Walls

Carry Your Bones

This is either a sad moonless night
Or a reason to believe that something isn’t right
Dark scribbling under a nice lamp won’t heal all wounds
But it won’t hurt either

It’s not intentional, and is a very anti-songcrafting approach, but that’s the way it’s always been for me. The recordings people love the most are always the add-on at the last minute ones, things that I just banged out and the words were sitting in my head and BOOM, completed song in under five minutes. Which is to say that I am not doing much, more channeling and shaping than anything. Which is to say all my hard work amounts to very little and I should learn how to get out of my own way. Or take up a hobby with a quantifiable output, like needlepoint.

But lately I’ve been playing piano next to a Bernese Mountain Dog on a regular basis, and she’s having an effect, needing attention every ten minutes or so and pushing her fat nose under my bassline-playing hand and messing everything up. I forget where I was, stop and then have to start over again.

I think she’s making me pay attention. All of the sudden, something I wrote YEARS ago has resurfaced with a fresh chord changes, and it’s good! It’s fun to play and feels contemporary.

Similarly, when my daughter cooks with me, things turn out much better than my solo endeavors. She has let this go to her head a little and spent all afternoon yesterday telling the nice man at the appliance store that she’s going to open a bakery.

I’m standing here not because I am supposed to
I’m not explaining cause I can barely breathe
Four walls are all
That’s holding me at all
I crawled under the lamp
Even inside the shade
I still need the sun to shine on me

I considered joining the Glide choir but I really and truly had to consider whether I would be able to get any singing done in between all that crying.

I should insert here that I’m a tree-hugging humanist and aetheist by any definition. I believe in a sort of Emersonian oversoul-type shindig, where we’re good to one another and we either take or give and in the end it boils down to how much of each. I believe that loyalty and friendship are political as much as religious. But then again, everything is everything. Donny Hathaway and Lauryn Hill both said it right.

Songs like the one below make me believe that my mother-in-law (with all her keeping of the family in her prayers and hoping for the salvation of the soul of her super gay daughter) and I do, at a root level, have something very valuable in common: a great respect for singing one’s soul, no matter which god claims to hold on to it, and using music to get straight to the point. Tell it, Kelly Price.

I do not have my requisite summer evening glass of wine because I am living in fear of fruit flies. It is cherry tomato and gushy nectarine season in the fruit basket. And yesterday we set out to use our new juicer to stop being so goddamn fat all the time, and then realized that Craigslist giveth, and Craigslist taketh away. Earlier this summer I scored so heavily with Michelle Obama the Yamaha scooter that we used up all our karma and now we have a shitty juicer that puts juice everywhere except in the receptacle. Well, we DID have one until this afternoon when I realized the fruit flies had seized the opportunity to do a condo conversion in the leftover carrot pulp and I promptly threw the whole thing in the garbage.

My shredded index finger (for which I will be suing Microplane, or my mother, or whomever is responsible for getting me into the mess of wanting to grate my own cheese with a torture device) is looking more like science fiction special effect today with its white blood cell activating and antibiotic cream lathering. Did you know that the old school of letting a wound “dry out” is not actually a good idea? My father drilled that into my head- exposing your owies to fresh air was the fastest way to healing. Apparently, airing out promotes cell death, the opposite of what you want to facilitate healthy repairing of damaged tissue and it’s best to keep things under a thick layer of ointment and out of sight. Oh, and scarring. Moisture reduces scarring.

Tomorrow is the first official day that the children belong to me all day. We are beginning the non-vacation part of maternity leave with no backup and no plans in place. I’ll either blow it off and set the oldest down in front of Phineas and Ferb and hand the baby his favorite spatula to gnaw on, or rock it out by getting amped early and journeying to the new Boot and Shoe Service Cafe in the old Cafe DiBartolo space on Oakland’s Grand Ave. Oh how I loved their bougainvillea patio. I hope it has been preserved.

I’m leaning toward the latter. After all, what sort of mother am I if I only educate my eldest about the wonder of coffee (she knew how to grind beans and make a single drip cup by age one, and I am completely serious)? The baby must start toeing the family line eventually.

Here’s a soundtrack for the sun tomorrow. May you all have deliriously happy fruitflies in your wine glasses too.

The terminology for when all loved ones are sleeping soundly (dogs included) and I’m free to sit, write and, well, drink. They say not to drink by oneself, but when you’re a sommelier trying to maintain your palate, and the rest of your family would gladly choose an Italian soda (or breastmilk) any day of the week over the finest Riesling in the world, you’re all you’ve got.

The end goal of this activity is the paradise of really listening to whatever potentially life-changing music I’ve been frantically trying to absorb in between squawks from the children or texts from the employer or the blasting of Teena Marie from the neighbor’s very open and poorly decorated upstairs window. These times, it is quiet but for the occasional binging of the iPhone as daily spam trickles in. Oh nighttime, I love you so!

Tonight, the music is winning. The wine is this awful bottle from Lodi which I knew would be crap but my friend insisted it was earth shattering.. It’s wine and all, it’s just not saying much to me beyond “I’m a blend Portugese grapes grown in Lodi and that’s about all that makes me interesting”. This one isn’t cheaply oak chipped and it’s not trying to be all 16% alcohol twizzler bomb Zinfandel, which is nice, but that’s all the good stuff I can say.

The music is a little iffy because I’m using Spotify, which allows me to stream virtually any song I want to listen to (as in, hey, I wonder what Wiz Khalifa actually sounds like and boom there it is, and it’s not very good) but it’s kind of annoying because the whole point of Glass of Wine is not having to curate the evening and if I don’t manage what I’m streaming I’ll end up listening to that god awful Brian McKnight I accidentally clicked on earlier.

This might all be much more fun if I hadn’t accidentally shaved my knuckle off on the microplane cheese grater yesterday. I’m keeping a brave face and my finger is in a splint, covered with antibiotic cream and lovingly wrapped, but I am terrified of not being able to play piano after this disaster is over, and all I can think about are the staph infections people on YouTube seem to get in their injuries, rendering their limbs and internal organs useless after only two weeks. Does wine support white blood cell activity by any chance?

* I may only be posting this pic to show off my Laguiole wine key but I’m two glasses in and I no longer care about humility.

* I feel bad just talking about wine being bad even if I don’t reference the vineyard. I would make a terrible critic. I would be all Paula Abdul “you did your best”.

* Spotify does not have my challenge song of all time: 1991’s live version of “Slack Motherfucker” as covered by fIREHOSE. They have the Superchunk studio version but I am not impressed. Though the bassline does go with the Portugese grapes somehow.

I just HAD to have a glass of wine. The house is (finally) quiet: all family members sleeping, all dogs admonished from couches, dishwasher empty, laundry load put in. I can attempt to distill the ideas that are rocketing around in my head into coherent thoughts.

First, I am SO excited about dinnerparty- my new company. I’ll be throwing dinner parties in super secret non-traditional dining spaces. This summer I’ll host a series of high-end events to get things flowing. My lovely wife will be photographing the magic for all to ogle.  I can’t give much away but to say that the first event is based on a classic children’s story…  I can’t wait!

Secondly, I’ve started rehearsing for a spring concert. Solo, perhaps? Not sure yet. Two songs are in the pipeline after a two hour session last week and there are more on the verge. They basically write themselves. I just catch them as they’re falling into place and put them in the right order. In my younger years I didn’t care much about craft, and several friendships with good  songwriters were ended over method (I can’t get down with grinding it out. What’s the point?). I like to think I’m a bit more focused now, with scheduled rehearsals and all.

Anyway, there’s the plan. Coming to a venue near you, if you live within 12 square blocks from my house on the Oakland-Berkeley border. Ha.

Thirdly, spring is on the move. The rest of the country is feeling ill from cold and sloggy freezing awful blizzard apocalypse while we in the Bay Area are casually watching birds flit about in the sun and expecting the bulbs to peek out of the ground any day. Tortuous, but true. These warm, delightful mornings make me think of two things:

HEY it’s tax time, you better get it together

and, simultaneously,

HEY it’s time to update my wardrobe- when can I go shopping?

Clearly tax time does not get along well with wardrobe reshaping. They hang in midair together, having a staring contest and trying to look mean all through February until one gives in. Typically fashion trumps.

What is a look book, you ask? You probably don’t ask that but just in case… it’s a little booklet (or large binder, in my case) full of inspiration and fun things you run across as the weather changes that will inform your buying decisions and fashion objectives for the next season. For instance, I spent nearly two years wrapped up in the idea of “sexy librarian” and have the look book to prove it. You know, cabernet lips, liquid liner, tweedy fitted skirts with the slightest flirty trumpet flare at the bottom, round-toed pumps and fitted sweaters, dark tights and the ubiquitous bun or chic ponytail. Sexy librarian.

I have before me several months worth of magazines to tear through before I finish this glass of wine and high-tail it upstairs.

Night all, and happy thaw.