Music I flew into Anchorage on Sunday night. My friend's grandfather, Larry, was supposed to pick me up from the airport. I had never met this man. I had only had a brief conversation with him on the phone that day. He said he'd pick me up in a "red Escape". I assumed that was some kind of SUV. I got my luggage after t...   More

Music Alaska is a large elephant's head mounted on the rear wall of the smoky pool hall of Canada, something the United States won in a raffle and decided to stick somewhere inconspicuous for awhile. It's a symbol of our wild and fancy past, when we would get drunk and buy a bunch of land.

Alaska is a...   More

Music The drive from Brooklyn to Philadelphia should take two hours. For us, it took seven. We got onto the Jersey Turnpike—me, Gill, and Nathan—around twelve-thirty and saw the Statue of Liberty right ahead of us. You couldn't tell that it was a large statue on an island in a harbor. You couldn't see wa...   More

Music When you're going to New York City and you call friends to see if you can stay with them, there's always that point—about seven seconds into your telephone conversation—where they all say the same thing. Not the exact same words, necessarily, but the same essential thing. The tone of their voice ch...   More

Music Michael Leahy is a tall man. (And I assume that I am like most people in that I consider anyone taller than me to be "tall" and anyone shorter than me to be "short." But then, I'm exactly six feet tall, which is God's Preferred Height, which means that anyone who is taller or shorter than me is freakish and wr...   More

Music To what extent does being a writer prevent someone from experiencing and enjoying the world? Often the traits that lead to being a good writer—ability to listen, attention to detail, sober-mindedness—are the very same traits that lead to not having a good time at all. I think about this a lot. And ...   More

Music There is nothing funny about Los Angeles. Any movie or tv show getting made there always turns out not funny. Even if funny people are involved and they have funny ideas, somehow in the middle of the process of making their film or tv show, some official representative from L.A. comes by the set with a bunch o...   More

Music San Francisco in the warm sun of early February... I used to live there in 1996 and it's where I had my first attempts at live performance. There was a coffee shop just off the corner of Haight and Ashbury called Coffee Zone that had a weekly open mic night. It didn't attract as many Grateful Dead coverers as ...   More

Music When I toured California a year ago, I asked everyone I met where they thought the border between Northern and Southern California would be if we were for some reason forced to split the state in two. ("Two states, we want two states..."). The answer was the same from everyone, whether I was in San Francisco o...   More

Music Touring is generally not the glorious venture one would hope it would be. I'll tell you that I'm touring California for two weeks and you'll think of the sunshine and the goldenness and you'll ignore the fact that most of what we call "The Road" is actually a bunch of black, dirty ROAD. There's a lot of road on ...   More