This song could be good at some point, but - it ain't now. The story of how it's made is an interesting one though.  And this is the first episode of the podcast that has been made 100% on the road :-)

My song Muscle Shoals tells the story of the legendary Rolling Stones session in the town of the same name.  In just 3 days, the band produced "You Gotta Move", "Brown Sugar", and "Wild Horses" - it's an amazing story, and I really like the song that came out of it.

I have a privileged set of things I've been able to run away from in my life.  I remember, as a kid, if I felt like a person was going to ultimately be toxic in my life, I’d wholly cut them out.  On the surface, they would cease to exist to me (even if, in my head they still did).  I wouldn’t mention them, wouldn’t talk to them, wouldn’t even look at them.  And after a while, the act of avoiding that person would let me gradually stop thinking about them.  It was like a magic trick I performed on myself - make your problems disappear!

Our lived environments are to me purpose-built extensions of our bodies.  The proportions of a steering wheel, or the way you palm fits against a doorknob - these objects are all constructed to parallel their creators.  And cities!  Cities are bodies, seemingly infinitely long, running in place.  The roads and train tracks, veins and arteries, the commuters the red blood cells, delivering oxygen into the beating heart.  That heart relaxes and fills with travelers during the day, scurrying around sidewalks and office buildings. And in the evening it contracts, pumping the people back into the suburbs, leaving their emptied buildings dreaming of their occupants, and awaiting their safe return.

Our lived environments are to me purpose-built extensions of our bodies.  The proportions of a steering wheel, or the way you palm fits against a doorknob - these objects are all constructed to parallel their creators.  And cities!  Cities are bodies, seemingly infinitely long, running in place.  The roads and train tracks, veins and arteries, the commuters the red blood cells, delivering oxygen into the beating heart.  That heart relaxes and fills with travelers during the day, scurrying around sidewalks and office buildings. And in the evening it contracts, pumping the people back into the suburbs, leaving their emptied buildings dreaming of their occupants, and awaiting their safe return.

I think that you can ultimately boil a person's life into seven people.  Those seven people stand at an inflection point in the arc of that person's journey - signposts directing that person's fate.  Sometimes it's the people you think it is - a partner, a child - other times it's someone like Philip.

There are a few types of people who are attracted to classes on dead languages:

I only included that third category because of Jason, because to me, he never seemed particularly interested in anything else.  In another time, in another place, Jason would have been some kind of monastic theologian having whispered conversations with other monks over desks littered with parchment paper.  But instead, he grew up 15 miles from Alabama like the rest of us, so he ended up in Ms. McAfferty’s Latin class.

I moved to New York in 2011, and ended up straight in Williamsburg, a neighborhood in the northern end of Brooklyn.  The area had been Italian, then Polish, and was then colonized by artists in the early aughts, who opened a seemingly endless string of independent art spaces and music venues.  As is so often the case, after the artists did the grunt work of occupying decaying warehouses and scratching their brand of culture into a dingy industrial sector, the developers swarmed. The area began filling slowly with professionals, lured by the waterfront views of the Manhattan skyline, reasonable commutes, and bohemian ethos.  And, as is so often the case, the very thing that drew them there got squeezed out by more expensive rent.  Venues began shuttering, first Zebulon, then Death by Audio, then Glasslands.  Hugged to death by yuppies.

I moved to New York in 2011, and ended up straight in Williamsburg, a neighborhood in the northern end of Brooklyn.  The area had been Italian, then Polish, and was then colonized by artists in the early aughts, who opened a seemingly endless string of independent art spaces and music venues.  As is so often the case, after the artists did the grunt work of occupying decaying warehouses and scratching their brand of culture into a dingy industrial sector, the developers swarmed. The area began filling slowly with professionals, lured by the waterfront views of the Manhattan skyline, reasonable commutes, and bohemian ethos.  And, as is so often the case, the very thing that drew them there got squeezed out by more expensive rent.  Venues began shuttering, first Zebulon, then Death by Audio, then Glasslands.  Hugged to death by yuppies.

I loved my friend Lisa for her west Texas drawl and for how dashing she looked in a fitted suit, like some tomboy Virginia Slim.  We grew up in different parts of the country, and while her youth of armadillos and Shiner Bock differed greatly from mine of manta rays and Budweiser, we shared a few things in common: