Ok, I’m sick of rain. Sick of it. We are averaging a quarter inch of rain an hour and it has been raining for the past, oh, 28 hours or so streight and, looking at the weather radar, it won’t be ending anytime soon enough. I have spent the past two days digging new trenches along the road and carrying bags of concrete down an ever more slippery slope to the mouth of the conduit pipes to fortify the road against an ever more raging creek. The battle with the county about the damage they did to the runoff field from the hills to the creek has started again (they get a long email from me every time we get a good rain. I’m better than the weather man at letting them know when flooding is happening).
I’m very tired of being cold and wet and changing my socks three or four times a day. I feel I might be courting the flu, as well. Anyone out there got some sun for us?
So, I did a couple of recordings. On the rosewood Larrivee this time.
Won’t Miss This Place: A happy little tune about drink and an abusive parent. It was somewhat inspired by Gibbon’s “Sunset Song,” the first novel in “A Scots Quair.” It doesn’t really tell the same story, it’s not set in the same place, there is little character resemblance, really – but it was written with the vibe of Chris Guthrie’s father in mind, I suppose.
Grab My Heart. This is already pretty well established as a standard live tune of mine. I usually introduce it with something like: “Songs like this are always a bit of a danger – I’m standing up here all intimate with a guitar and that singer songwriter kinda pose and it tends to be taken for granted that I’m singing about myself. I very seldom am, most everything is a story song. With this song, well, the girl in it is pale, which my wife is not, the guy in it has a gift of gab, which I do not… But I’m pretty sure that my wife can make the frogs in the trees to sing.”
I admit it, I have a thing for the singing of Virginia frogs. I’ve never heard anything like it. It can be this amazing kind of Euro Hardcore Techno when they really get going. Amazing loops and sounds that don’t sound like they could possibly come from a living creature. And then you find one of the frogs and this amazing synthetic music that sounds like it is pumped through a fairly powerful PA is coming from this little, tiny green frog. Cracks me up to no end. In town, I used to walk the canal path and go out to the swamps just to sit and listen to these amazing little things. On summer nights, it sounds like they surround us here.
And, besides the frogs, there is one more life connection for the song… we do have a lovely, ancient looking white dogwood in the yard, as well.
They are up at Folk Alley and Facebook and will be up at Indieheart as soon as I can make some room for them.








