"Front Row at the Fashion Show" featured on the Paste Magazine CD Sampler in the Dec 07 / Jan 08 issue

I'm very pleased to announce that my song "Front Row at the Fashion Show" is included on the CD Sampler in the current issue of Paste Magazine! Paste is an excellent publication, and I'm proud to have been covered by them ever since they first hit newsstands back in 2002...they've said nice things about my Sound Theology and Public Library albums, as well as featuring my video "You Don't Speak For Me" as their online Video-of-the-Day. Now, in support of my new Best of the 20th Century album, they selected "...Fashion Show" for the Dec 07 / Jan 08 CD sampler, along with songs by other artists like Jens Lekman, Ingrid Michaelson, Liam Finn, and Jars of Clay. Thanks to the folks at Paste for the support, and thanks to you folks who've been emailing me about the sampler ever since this new issue landed in your mailbox.

A few words about the song "Front Row at the Fashion Show:"

It's kinda weird, I guess, that this was the song that the Paste editors chose for inclusion. I assumed they'd pick an up-tempo pop song like "Tape" or "Ask Me in Nebraska," but hey, it's their sampler and they can put whatever they want on it. The song originally appeared on my 1997 album Recital, but the version on the Paste Sampler has never been heard before: it's a "radio edit," which I'm excited about. When I assembled the songs for the new Best of CD, I took the original "...Fashion Show" tracks from the Recital album and had them expertly remixed by my engineering pal John Simshauser. When the Paste editors came knocking, and requested "...Fashion Show" for their sampler, I was a bit hesitant to submit it "as is," because the album version features about 20 seconds of quiet banjo picking at the beginning of the song, before any singing begins. That's a real attention-span killer, and I had visions of tens of thousands of Paste subscribers reaching for the "skip" button on their CD players. SO, I went back to engineer John, and we chopped out most of the meandering banjo introduction, creating what the folks in showbiz call a "radio edit." So, THAT'S what you hear on the Paste sampler...a quick banjo progression, and BAM, the vocals. It's the teen-pop song-presentation philosophy: "Don't bore us, get to the chorus."

Some recording details: I wrote the song in my car (a 1991 Mazda Protege, at the time), pulled over on the side of I-90 in Southern Minnesota, on my way to Okoboji, IA for the Recital recording session. It was January 19, 1997. It was, obviously, the last song written for the Recital album. My pal Richard Bruxvoort-Colligan engineered the recording, and I played the song using my Grandpa's 1920s-era banjo-ukulele, my Dad's 1950s-era copper-bell trombone, and my Guild jumbo acoustic guitar. Rather than a normal drum set, I used some found items from around Richard's basement:
suitcase = bass drum
plastic garbage can = snare drum
cardboard box = floor tom
screwdriver and plastic spoon = drumsticks
oh yeah, and a tambourine
The no-drums drum set idea was inspired by Walter Salas-Humara's use of drum cases and boxes (rather than normal drums) on the album by The Setters, and I'm paying homage to the great Vulgar Boatmen song "Mary Jane" by occasionally hitting the snare/can on the and-of-4, rather than right on the beat. And if you understand this reference, you're even a bigger nerd than me. The lead vocal was a first take, and we recorded the song the day after I wrote it.

In retrospect, the lyrics of that entire Recital album were about fame/celebrity/performing, and "...Fashion Show" is obviously about supermodels and VIP seating and dreams of success. Of course, it's all wrapped in the format of a love song for Dawn, and an anthem for road-tripping (my two most common themes). Little did I know when I wrote/recorded it that ten years later it would resurface in a magazine like this! Here's the lyrics, so sing along to the new Paste sampler:

it's a long drive to NYC
it's a lot closer than gay paree
we got a mazda with a sunroof and me and you
we got the best of the eurythmics to listen to
this is our shot baby, let's go
front row at the fashion show

the light from the flashbulbs never never ends
and we can talk about color and fabric and trends
and everyone there is so good looking
and everyone's rich and everyone's smoking
this is our chance baby, let's go
front row at the fashion show

maybe someday i'll have my own collection
maybe someday i'll design all our clothes
maybe someday we can fly off to paris
i guess we'll wait and see how it goes
they're saving our seats baby, let's go
front row at the fashion show

Back home, East Coast tour summary, etc.

I got home one week ago from my East Coast tour, and it's taken me this long to get re-stabilized. Finally, some free minutes to post a blog update! Thanks to everybody out East who booked me, hosted me, and came out to the shows. It was a very encouraging and fulfilling trip, and I really enjoyed sharing music with y'all for 10 days.

Thought I'd share some nice photos of some of the old and new friends I encountered on my trip. First of all, here's my pal Sarah Marshall of Baltimore, MD. Sarah's been listening to my music for years, has seen me perform a few times over the years, and even attended a songwriting workshop that I facilitated down in Virginia years ago. These days Sarah's dealing with some health concerns that prevent her from road-tripping to concerts, but I was very happy to visit her in her inner sanctum (and she even wore her Salt Lady Records tshirt for the occasion!). Sarah is a very wise and fiercely creative person, and I'm pleased to say I may have nagged her into starting her own blog! Check out Sarah's posts, and maybe you, too, will learn about Tanka poetry. Funnily enough, super-Hollywood-producer Jud Apatow will be releasing another comedy blockbuster in Spring 2008, and the movie is called "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"...but I don't think it's about the Sarah that I know. She is quite unforgettable.

This cute boy is Zachary Spahr, the son of my long-time friends Brian & Michelle who are finishing up their seminary years in Gettysburg. Little Zachary has also been facing some serious health concerns, but thankfully he's doing very well these days, attending rock concerts, and absorbing the world around him. My son Paavo has included Zachary in his evening prayers every night since Zachary's birth, so it was very special for me to meet Zachary in person for the first time. Here's Zachary's blog and message board.

This takes you, dear readers, up to Wednesday of the tour, where I blogged the last time from NYC. I woke up in the studio, and zipped down to 14th Street to meet my musical pal George Baum for a breakfast appointment. You may be familiar with George, thanks to his fine work as one-half of the acoustic duo Lost And Found. George is one of the finest instrumentalists and songwriters that I know, plus he has excellent musical taste...we've been known to play Annie Lennox and Paul Simon covers on the occasions that we perform together.
These fine looking young men are me and George in a torrential rainstorm outside of Madison Square Garden on 7th Avenue in New York City last week. Yup, the Garden, where Zeppelin performed, and where George and I enjoyed a bagel and vitamin water for breakfast. Thanks to George's guidance, I managed to buy a ticket and find the right outbound platform for my New Jersey Transit train ride back to my rental car, and I successfully resumed my tour that afternoon.

Played Thursday night in Huntingdon Valley, PA, and the musical highlights included a cover version of the song "All You Zombies" by legendary Philly rock band The Hooters, as well as a request for "Wide Awake" for an audience member that heard me play it on tour in Germany way back in 1991. Now that's a supportive fan (thanks Michael, you're awesome)! I also served as the guest musician that evening as well as Friday morning at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, and man, can those seminarians SING. I taught them the tones for "Psalm Tone Blues" and they hit it out of the park.

My tour concluded with a weekend convention on the Jersey Shore called "Among the Wolves" (aaahhhoooooo!). 'Twas wonderful to witness the fantastic community of folks in New Jersey, and to be welcomed so warmly by them.

My flight home last Sunday night was uneventful, and I was thrilled to reunited with my family! It's been very very nice to be back with my sweetie after such a long tour. Here's a photo of Dawn, who occasionally gets told that she looks like author J. K. Rowling. Yeah, I can see it.

The inlaws visited last week, and were kind enough to watch the kiddos so I could get some work done. Thanksgiving was fun, the food was delicious, and I spent the long weekend updating my webpage and doing the not-so-glamorous business side of showbiz. Played mandolin in the church bluegrass band this morning, and did some more domestic stuff today. That's the news. I'm glad to be home! Oh, and my album of the week is Rising Sand by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, produced by T Bone Burnett.

Tour Update: free night in New York City!

You think I'd be over this by now, but I'm buzzing with excitement because:
right now I'm in New York City! Yes! As a kid from Ishpeming, MI, I still get overwhelmed by being here, no matter how often I visit. I feel like a 5th grader from Negaunee going to the Chuck E. Cheese in Green Bay for the first time.

Tonight I'm spending the night at the studio in the East Village where I recorded my Public Library album back in Summer 2003. The window is open a crack, and I can hear the rush of the city four stories below, cars zipping by, horns honking, and that low level NYC hum. What a day this has been!

Woke up in Gettysburg, PA. Got treated to breakfast by Professor Gil Waldkoenig from the seminary, who bought me a bagel and talked with me about the publication dates of various hymnals used by Lutherans in Pennsylvania. Then we did an interview about rock&roll and vocation, which will be used for an on-line course he's teaching next Spring.

At 11:35AM I sat in with the folk band for morning chapel at the seminary, and did a couple of my own songs. For the fifth day in a row I played my newest song "If You Have a Question..." and now that I've played it a bit, it feels reeeeealy good to deliver. And I'm doing it in the key of Gm, and there's something about singing the melody in that range that just rings like a dream. I also played "By Grace" (a song I cowrote with the brilliant Nate Houge), which I've been newly singing up in the key of G (rather than E, like on the album), and the new higher placement is making a world of difference for me.

By 1PM I was on the road with the iPod rocking on shuffle. I sailed down the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and it was an endless moving corridor of 18-wheelers and lovely Fall colors. Initially I planned on getting a hotel somewhere near Philly, hitting the hot tub, and going to a movie at some shopping mall multiplex, BUT instead I decided "Hey, how often do I get a shot at visiting New York City?"

So instead I drove to Princeton, NJ, parked my rental car, hopped a commuter train to NYC, got off at Penn Station, took the subway downtown to the East Village, and ascended the concrete steps to arrive on the surface of the Big Apple. I know it's just a big city, but man, when I came up those steps to the open air, it took my breath away. You can take the boy out of the UP, but you can't take the UP out of the boy.

So tonight I met some friends for dinner and visiting and they took me to a Thai restaurant where I ate the most delicious chicken-and-broccoli I've ever had. Wow. And then we swung by Eric Ambel's club the Lakeside Lounge for a little indie-twang band gig.

What a day! From the battlefield to NYC in five hours.

I'm very pleased and thankful to say that good reviews of my tour are popping up in the blogosphere. Check out what Catrina and Coach have to say. Thanks for the kind words!
Okay New York, time to sleep in the city that never sleeps.

East Coast Tour update: remind me to avoid TGI Friday's and Olive Garden

Howdy from the battlefield at Gettysburg, PA. Tonight I play here at the Lutheran Seminary, literally atop the battlefield where thousands and thousands of folks shot and bayoneted each other. It's a sobering town, and every time I'm here I get a slight case of the willies.

This tour is going very well. A quick rundown:

SATURDAY NIGHT, concert in Baltimore, MD: about 60 people came out to hear me play the first concert since the removal of my tonsils. My voice held up well, everybody had fun, and I truly enjoyed meeting the locals. Musical highlights were the first-ever public performance of my new song "If You Have a Question..." and an audience request for "Forgiveness Waltz."

SUNDAY NIGHT, concert in Lanham, MD (Washington DC area): 30 folks this evening at the show, and another great day spent visiting with new friends in the area. Another successful delivery of "If You Have a Question...", a cover of "Message in a Bottle" by The Police, and a somewhat rare performance of "747s."

LAST NIGHT (MONDAY), concert in West Milton, PA: after a beautiful drive up the Susquehanna River, I got to hang out with Catrina who I'd met in Minnesota. Very fun. About 40 people came to the concert, and highlights included the return of "Bright Funeral" to the setlist, as well as an unearthed version of "Smart Girls."

Tonight I play here in Gettysburg, where I've had some of my favorite concerts of my whole career. And I know folks in town, so it'll be fun to reunite.

Regarding restaurants: when I'm touring I like to go to comfy sit-down places with free refills of ice tea for my lunch. I enjoy some of the mall-area chain places that you see everywhere, but I usually try to avoid Applebee's and such, 'cause they can be kinda lame, and if Dawn is with me, she will not tolerate it. On Friday I had lunch at Macaroni Grill, one of my favorite big-box-restaurants. It was delicious, with excellent service. And on Saturday I tried a new place called Bertucci's Brick Oven Pizza Kitchen or something like that. I had a calzone that RULED, and the service was also excellent. BUT, then these past few days I really struck out:
Yesterday for lunch I was hoping for a decent food experience, but the only place I could find was TGI Friday's...so I gave it a try. I ordered the Caesar salad. The food was LAME and the service was LAME. Dawn, you're right, I just should avoid that place at all costs. PLUS, my lunch cost $18 (including the tip). Sucked! AND, today I felt Italiany, and the only place I found was Olive Garden. I haven't been there in years, 'cause Dawn won't put up with it, but I decided to give it a try. The service was LAME, and the food was okay there in the moment, but after the fact I just felt GROSS. So that's it...no more OG.

Here ends tour and mall-area chain restaurant review. Wish me luck for my gig tonight!

Celebrity encounter, and day of rest to start the tour

So yesterday (Thursday, actually) I had a lunch appointment in downtown Minneapolis with my Aunt and another woman from the UP who's a prominent Finnish-American. I brought Paavo and Svea with me, and we met with the ladies to enjoy some food and shoot the breeze about our Ishpeming upbringing and our common Finnishness.

As me and the kiddos waited in the hotel lobby, who do we see entering the lounge area but singer/songwriter Mike Doughty and his touring multi-instrumentalist, Scrap! I'd never met Mike before, or seen him in concert, but I'm an avid reader of his excellent blog (Mike had his Mac laptop out, and was tapping away like a good blogger should), and I totally love his album Haughty Melodic, so it was cool to see him. I walked up and introduced myself and exchanged a few words, but I was very pleased to introduce Mike to my son Paavo. In early 2006 I got Mike's album, and way back then Paavo loved the songs, especially "Busting Up a Starbucks" and "I hear the bells." Pretty funny to see a then-2-year-old singing along to those tunes. Paavo thinks that every musician we listen to is somebody that we know, or could meet whenever we'd like to, and this just serves to confirm his suspicion (He always asks when we can hang out with Avril Lavigne). Mike Doughty was polite and nice, but seemed a bit confused to meet this preschooler who knew his songs. I enjoyed meeting/seeing him in person, 'cause he's one of the few musicians that people say that I look like.

Here ends the celebrity report.

I'm on the tail end of a very very nice Friday. It's the start of my big East Coast tour, and for scheduling reasons I came out here today and had no gig, and nothing to do. SO, I was able to orchestrate a nearly ideal day for myself. This has been the schedule:
Morning: hop a plane from Minneapolis to Philly...read the last few weeks' worth of The Onion newspaper during the flight
1:30PM Land in Philly, get my bags, get my rental car (a Dodge Charger!), plug in the iPod, and cruise down I-95 listening to Philadelphia band The Hooters.
3PM cross the Delaware border, and enjoy a late lunch at Macaroni Grill while reading the new issue of Paste Magazine (good feature on rockstar rehab by David Mead)
4PM check into this hotel, get settled
5PM hit the mall, shop at H&M, visit with Israeli vendors selling Dead Sea Salts...they asked my name, I told them, and mentioned that I knew that my name means "God's Gift" in Hebrew, and they asked me if I was Jewish! Pretty cool. Nope, not Jewish, but Finnish. Pretty close!
6PM visit Barnes & Noble and page through the new book "Lyrics by Sting." He just got voted one of the worst lyricists of all time, but I love his lyrics! Especially "Wrapped around your finger" and "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da."
7PM see the movie "Gone Baby Gone"...what a great movie, with killer performances from Casey Affleck, and everybody else, too. Nice direction, Ben.
9PM back to the hotel, hot tub and swimming pool
10PM watch "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on HBO. Pretty funny.
11PM watch "Real Time with Bill Maher" on HBO. Great, but featuring scary hecklers in the audience!
Midnight: watch some HBO original show called "Tell Me You Love Me"...pretty good, like "Desperate Housewives" with men, too. Horrible character behavior, though. Who could stand these people in real life?
1AM Post this blog.

Okay, tomorrow's my first show on the tour. Gotta get to bed.

How far would you drive for songwriting?

I'm really short on new songs. I haven't really written anything new since the Public Library album, and that came out 3 years ago! Now, since then I guess I did complete the Heartland Liturgy, write a few tunes for Augsburg Fortress, and finalize some old ideas, but as far as new pop/rock/folk songs, I got not-much.

So this past weekend I had a chance to drive up to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, bring the kiddos along to see their Grandparents, and spend a few days doing my own thing. It was a great trip, and we even managed to avoid the huge snow storm that hit right after we came home. Anyway...I used my time to meet with a couple of my favorite musicians and collaborate on songwriting!

Last Friday night I cruised to Marquette to write with the brilliant Jeff Krebs, someone who I've been listening to since my teenage years. Jeff's the real deal, and it was a blast to collaborate. We came up with a nice twangy tune called "New Eyes" that has kind of a 70s southern-rock feel...like the Allman Bros meets CSN or something. Jeff had a cool stereo mic (made by Belken I think) that plugged right into an iPod and made a darn good recording. Gotta get me one of those babies. We demoed the song using our Gibson LG guitars...Jeff's is a '48 (I think) and mind is a '52. And in addition to a fine musical project, we enjoyed some tasty take-out fish fry from Vango's. Mmmmmm....
Then on Saturday morning I drove up to the land of my birth, the Keweenaw Peninsula, where I spent the day hanging out with my always entertaining cousin Bruce. After some pancakes and sausages, we retired to Bruce's newly built basement studio (pictured here, along with Bruce's daughter Hannah, my godchild. And yes, I'm wearing the same clothes two days in a row. Showering is overrated.), revved up his ProTools rig for the first time, and sat down to co-write together for the first time in a decade. (By the way, the first song I ever attempted was written with Bruce back in 1987, twenty years ago this year!) Bruce has been suggesting for years that I develop a musical idea that I wrote back in the '90s...a weird instrumental tune called "Pale Green Balalaika." We strummed through that old progression, and found a cool way to play with with dual guitars, and it became our musical structure. Then we took a lyric concept I had left over from Chicago days called "Key to a House" and re-worked it, added to it, and fit it to our guitar arrangement. It worked perfectly, and we ended up with a cool pop song...maybe like the Rembrandts or something. And we whipped up a quick full-band demo of the tune using Bruce's drums, guitars, and mini-keyboard, pumped into ProTools. Turned out good!

Two days of work resulted in two totally great little songs. Hopefully this will prime the creative pump, and I can write a pile of new tunes from the perspective of a mid-30s, suburban Dad with inclinations for prog rock, bluegrass, and organized religion. Sounds like a killer rock record to me!