Firstly, I regret nothing.

Sometimes I tell people I didn't learn to talk until I was 34.

It's a block off High Street where it used to be. Television and deadbeats out in front and free. Blowin’ down hallways of marching dust where the money never runs out and you don't know who to trust.

That glass ceiling 's so damned appealing. I don't recall feeling bloodlust in the coming down…you learn to fight a frown with a psychic bust of yourself and just and leave it undiscussed. That glass ceiling is so damned appealing. I don't recall feeling bloodlust in the coming down.

A lot of rock and roll and hip hop and country music and folk even is about fronting and flexing and showing off.

There's music edging all of those genres that touches me because it's people laying their errored souls out to be observed, to invite whatever part of humanity that is within earshot to see, and holding itself up as humane and identifyable and fine even if it's fucked up. Art is a safe place to be a freak or a fool or different or broken and for beauty to be observed there with or there from or therefore or therein- sad and sweet.

You get to sidle up to mistakes or tribulations without having to suffer the blows, like dreaming of falling from a great height.

Cocaine gets you really high, but the overwhelmingly time consuming and under reported effect is that it makes you sad or depressed or joy challenged or however you choose to describe it. I'm not a doctor. I was just around a bunch of cocaine for a number of years and I got to know what it smells like.

People I know have done way more and handled it better. I don't need to learn the kind of mental strength to be ok on that kind of hangover. I like waking up not devastated.

High Street is five or six blocks from here.

Cocaine won't kill you, but it helps.

Clever and sad is what I was after. I could feel my life slipping away from me and had to just keep getting up and going to work. The band was essentially done. It's dramatic, but really it's a normal part of a normal regular human world. I hope you don't find yourself clutching your pearls. I've been standing here the whole time, same as you.

Hard to hold onto, cuz it's a magic bus and it’s better to burn out than it is to rust. Heart of rock lost punching the clock to keep the dollar down; it's a bust. It's a bust. That glass ceiling 's so damned appealing. I don't recall feeling bloodlust in the coming down.

That glass ceiling is so damned appealing. I don't recall feeling bloodlust in the coming down.

It's inverted reality. The glass is in front of you, below you. The volumes are all distorted. You can't feel. It's dreamy and a little psychedelic and exhausted and dissonant. But it's human. It's humane like how people treat each other and I have never been told “I love you, man.” more heartfelt and often than by a room full of dudes doing coke.

I believed it every time. I still do.

Here's the video:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nh97l1aHbTA&list=RDnh97l1aHbTA&start_radio=1&pp=ygUZU2FtIGtudXRzb24gbWFyY2hpbmcgZHVzdKAHAQ%3D%3D

Here's the link to the record on Bandcamp

https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/splendor-3

I love you.

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Man, I have been broke. I grew up not poor, but not well to do. My dad's dad was a farmer and my mom's dad was a musician. I mention this because it creates a normalization of not being able to afford more than what is necessary to grow up without. It creates parents who tell their kids that love is more important than toys. It creates kids who grow up thrifty in a world that advertises flashy and new. It creates people who can't afford to give a f**k about trends or fashion or the latest thing, who stand by statements like, “if it ain't broke don't fix it.” because fixing it isn't in the budget, people who love an old shirt and each other.

Having to make your own way gives one the kind of undupeable quality that long consideration of the pros and cons of your expenditures bolsters.

I've generally always had enough money for drinks, or knew where there was a party. Being good company is an asset in the drinks economy. Often however you need a start-up amount, a little something to take the edge off as it were.

The world in which everyone is going out for drinks is a real place. It has everything that the real world has in it. Everything.

It has been the hugest transition in my life to go from that world to this one.

I wrote a prayer to it once: that world where the drinks economy is the focus.

The first thing I put on Bandcamp was a thing called Re-inventing the Wheel. It has this song on it, but almost no one bought it, so I made no bones about putting it on a later release, Donkey Island.

The recording here is the Donkey Island one, but I'll leave a link to both after the lyrics.

This is a prayer for the downtown, ‘cause it's someplace to be. I've got something I've been meaning to show you baby, and you've got something I've been meaning to see. I ain't seen much of it lately. I ain't had no money to burn, but tonight I've got two dimes to rub together and it seems like it must be my turn. So when you finish your cocktail, if you're in need of a ride, I'll be in the back seat of that great big yellow taxi that's just about to arrive outside. Me, I can talk to a cabbie or you and me can leave him alone, but my skinny ass taking up the whole of this back seat is just about as useful as a dime for the phone. So this is a prayer for the downtown sung to a rearview mirror, through a car window, through a bar window, because I can't tell whether you're settling up or ordering one more beer until you turn from the window and I say, “Fever, take me home.” And he says, “Awe man, this one is on me buddy cuz what's seven dollars worth of being alone.” And as the cab rounds the corner, you step out into the street, and you curse my name into the night wind and walk away from where we used to meet…toward someplace on the alley where nothing ever goes down, and you can sit there and stare into your cell phone and order round after round after round. My sweet love, where do you roam? If it wasn't just me up in this place, you and me we could call it a home. Oh my love, where have you gone? You left me here all tricked out and dirty tryin’ to raise some attention with this fifty cent song…. Which is a prayer for the downtown, because it's someplace to be. I've got something I've been meaning to show you, baby, and you've got something I've been meaning to see.

I wrote the lyrics while walking to the bar from the east side. I can feel the walking pace in ‘em still.

Here's the links:

https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/track/a-prayer-for-the-downtown

Aaand

https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/track/a-prayer-for-the-downtown-2

The first one is nsfw.

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I have been asked, How do you write? Sometimes, I have been asked in a journalistic way, sometimes a conversational, non chalant, how-do-you-do-that? way, sometimes by other writers. I have gone long periods of time without writing anything, nearly a decade quite recently and in those years I sometimes asked myself.

I have judged the songs I write as good or bad or worthy of keeping or throwing away. As I have in the last few years come back to the practice I am aware that songs I haven't played for a long time become inaccessible. I forget them. When I practice often it becomes easy to remember the ones I once knew and to learn songs. It becomes easier. Its a practice.

I think writing songs could be a practice, but when recently asked I have defaulted to saying, “I try to write from a stupid place.”

I think melodies and even ideas sort of exist around us not in a Victorian conciousness-floats-in-a-cloud-above-your-head kind of a way, more….

You can be aware of what is good without that thing already existing. It is recognizing what you have imagined to be a beautiful thing. It is as a practice perhaps more like catching fireflies than it is like shooting rabbits from the truck.

Things in your imagination are perhaps more like occurances and weather, or something flying through the night that is seemingly, at its own will occasionally alight, and only capturable then.

Sometimes I will hear people humming quietly to themselves at the grocery store, not a melody I recognize, just a rambling succession of notes for pleasure.

Words and melodies run through me like that all the time.

I don't find it hard to write words. It's easy but finding melodies and words that work can seem hard. It can seem important in a stifling way.

If I capture something that just occurs to me I can feel free of the responsibility of having invented it. The things I have put my name to and sung that I most like have felt accidental.

And this one captures that style of capture.

It had been nearly 80 degrees and then there was a cold snap and a bunch of snow. Spring in the midwest- full stop.

I had already started. I had the lines, ‘Song’s come out of the silence if you lend an ear. It’s when you go in after them that they become hart to hear.’

The rest of it was just describing my world.

I sleep by an open window year round and strong winds wake me. When it’s howling at night, I know I might not have the best sleep.

That's enough.

Songs come out of the silence if you lend an ear. It's when you go in after them that they become hard to hear. So don't you make a sound. Baby, don't you cry, and a song will sing you off to sleep, baby, right there where you lie. And when you close your eyes a song can be the light. Just breathe easy. Everything is gonna be all right. Just breathe easy. Everything is gonna be all right. The wind is gonna blow all night. Snow is gonna fly. The wind is gonna take the low ones, and the snow is gonna sing the high. And when the moon comes out the snow is gonna shine. Close your eyes and pull the blankets over as you imagine it in your mind. And when you close your eyes a song can be the light. Just breathe easy. Everything is gonna be all right. Just breathe easy. Everything is gonna be all right.

It's me telling myself to just breathe easy, but I am saying it out loud. I have often said, Anyone who tries to tell you the future is after your money. I suppose I stand by that.

It's your present moment that is real. All the rest, all of it is in a sense imagined.

This song is not for sale.

Here's a video.

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Gentle on my Mind is a great song. I have loved it for a long time. It's notoriously challenging to play and it's one of those American classics like Paul Simon’s Graceland and Woody Guthrie’s This Land.

It repeats funny. It's irregularly regular.

I had learned the shapes and the changes and got part way through learning the words then quit.

The guy that plays the mandolin parts is great and he probly recognized the changes as some cropped and regularized version of Gentle on my Mind. But, as is my way after I'd quit trying to learn John Hartfords words I started some of my own.

Later, after the record this song appears on was out and I decided to learn Gentle on my Mind as a sort of consolation I had a conversation about the song itself with my girlfriend, who said, “That song has always struck me as one of those seventies chauvinistic, I-can-f**k-whoever-want, rambling man ballads” which before our conversation I hadn't realized was a category, but it is.

I know someone who spent part of a summer working on fiddle tunes with John Hartford on the Julie Belle. When I mentioned the conversation I had had with my girlfriend to the woman who spent a summer with him, she said, “Oh, that sounds about right. When I first met him he tried to kiss me on the mouth. I was 17 years old.”

I never did learn Gentle on My Mind, but I don't feel as bad about it as I used to.

When you're walkin’ on home, you think of me and you want to let me know, and you're touchin’ your phone, smile baby, I'm already gone three miles further down the road toward that place that I call home where all of my good things are stowed and the nights are always warm.

I'll be walking all night down roads where no one ever goes. I won't need nothin where I'm gone. It's a place that no one knows. So, if you sleeping by the road it's toward that place that I am bound. From you I will need nothing more and you know where I'll be found.

It might seem like it ain't time to go, but everybody leaves at the end of the show. At the end of the show I will be already gone.

Buy a download of Donkey Island

Here:

And there's a video with some trout fishing spots on it here:

https://youtu.be/GFlVMOBAmfU?si=jmx5UmTmYIZypqDD

I play tenor guitar on this one.

The mandolin player is Joe Peterson

Banjo is handled by Matthew Wilburn Skinner

Ryan Bernemann plays upright bass

Andrew Brockman was the recording boss and master of the tapes and boards.

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The way I remember it, and I have never found it, the first line is a smarmy cute thing David Bowie said in some TV interview, “pretenders borrow, artists steal.” After recalling that to a thousand strangers in small groups it came to light that it was Stravinski who said it.

There's a thing I do. I start to learn someone else's piece that's a little out of my skill set and I get partway there and then quit. Later I find the half completed sort-of cover and write new lyrics. This is one of those from trying to learn “Son of Sam” from Elliott Smith's record Figure 8. How appropriate for me to steal.

I did the same thing with John Hatford’s Gentle on My Mind with a song called, Already Gone that I will explain next week.

This one includes evidence of my free form Buddhist practice in it from ten years ago in the teenies. “Fight no battles. Fly no flags. Walk the earth with what you carry in your bag.”

There’s not much else I remember about how this one came to be.

People I know have had insights about what it means that have surprised me.

I called it Smith because of who I stole the first couple chord changes from.

Smith

Pretenders borrow; artists steal. Hipsters gather at that broken Ferris Wheel. True believers roll deep. And you've got promises to keep.

Fight no battles. Fly no flags. Walk the earth with what you carry in your bag. Freewill will provide if you're willing to let it slide.

You've got to feel it for someone else to feel it too. S**t is up to you. No one will fight you if it’s true.

Repeat first verse

Promises to keep x3.

-fin-

This was the first song I invited Justin LaDuc to play on. We played it live in the studio as a group for cohesion. While he was in he added a percussion part to the song Abandon (What? Music? 12 ) which I had given him to listen to a year or so before. It was a great session.

Smith Starts the album Donkey Island

Buy one here:

There's a video.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DFJImBI8dWc&t=2s

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It was 1999. In the 90s I’d made a bunch of cassette only records and tried to get booked at all the places that'd have a guy that played guitar and wrote his own songs. I recorded stuff at home on a 4-track. It was a heady time. I had long hair and I could drink.

I followed a girl I was into out to the west coast, Seattle and I wrote letters home. There were rock stars in the bars that were my same age.

One of the people I wrote home to got inspired and when my relationship ended and I came home with my tail between my legs, my friend was three days from moving out to Seattle to join me.

When he got there he was more successful than I was. He got a job booking shows at a big club and some bars and he invited me back out to play and make some money. I went. I did make money. I made one of my 4 track tapes into a CD. I partied and mingled.

My friend crashed his car a little onto one of those brick planter medians in the University district careening home from downtown. The car ground to a halt in front of the place he rented a room and never moved again. The bus from downtown to the U district at the time was the 44. He took to calling it the shame train. I named the band after what he called the bus.

I toyed with the whole idea. The success I came to and the attention that lead to me making a record with a band was all due to him in a certain respect.

He talked me into brewery gigs and hanging out with up and comers who were around on the scene- Pete Krebs, Elery Jett… I can't remember who else.

Anyhoo.

I wrote this song and it went on the first band album.

I didn't know how he felt about it until the night after having played my first show in nearly a decade. He drunkenly told me.

It felt to me like his deal was this, never expressed, parasocial, revering, like I’d written it for him. He was hammered.

It was a little weird for me. Years later, rather recently, I learned it and played it in a couple shows.

The audience told me it was good.

You're a Star

I'm the one who convinced you to buy my line. Though it seems cruel to say so señorita gave up the peso. Now baby here’s a gun. You can’t say you're afraid of flyin’. Check your watch and recall who’s buyin’. You're a Star baby say the line. And when you're taken with fits call in sick, and take the 44. You're lucky to be alive. Who gives a s**t about the car. Play your hits in some roadhouse bar. Tell yourself it's the way you are. It's a gift that you got this far. And when you're taken with fits call in sick and take the 44. You're lucky to be alive. Who gives a s**t about the car. Play your hits in some roadhouse bar. Tell yourself it's the way you are. Say the line baby, you're a Star. Baby you're a Star. Baby you're a Star.

I made a video.

You can by the whole album from Bandcamp here.

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There are so many debts of gratitude I owe. It can get hard to remember gratitude when the kind of compassion you have to practice involves forgiving things that have aspects like, they had no choice or they know not what they do. So today and in the context of this song, I’m drumming the gratitude drum. I have gratitude for inspiration and comfort and the ways I have defined home and community. It helps me see the whole thing differently.

Firstly, songwriters who have inspired me and from whom I have stolen choice lines in songs because, as a result of having listened to the songs and enjoyed them enough to listen enough to get the lines stuck in my head like words, sometimes my brain goes, Oh! The thing that goes right there is that one line from that one other song. I do that. I did it in this one. I am thankful for the music of Greg Brown and Paul Simon specifically within the bounds of this piece.

My mom’s brothers and probably her dad were all bar regulars. My parents drank every day. I think that’s normal. My dad’s dad’s dad died from drink when my grandpa was 11. That’s when grandpa Melvin took over general operation of a farm, his older male siblings having dispersed to escape the madness. I was a bar regular before I was old enough to drink. I have since quit, but during what is still the majority of my adult life I spent part of every day drinking in a bar. It's what grown-ups do, I thought. As it was the place I was, the evidence bore this theory out.

Bars are amazing. Going to the same bar every day is like being in a show. The actors are real if slightly removed from their responsibilities. And they become funnier and more attractive and loveable over the run of the show, each night. Bar regular life has all of the drama and reward and tragedy and ecstacy and agony that real life has. It’s a sub culture as old as time. It’s a real community. It's a common, enjoyable drug experience. I have theorized that the yeast that makes alcohol, uses the humans to favor carbohydrate baring plant species to feed itself and we drunkenly and hungoveredly oblige it all over the world with corn and wheat and rice and sugars from fruits and cacti, similarly to how house cats train their owners to rise and feed them in the morning. We are simple like that.

It raised me in its hearth -the bar, alcohol did. Like a town raises a baseball player. It rewarded me for being a good steward of it’s consumption and for that, I am truly thankful.

I think being hung over every day at work for more than 20 years may have been a hinderance, but today that is beside the point.

I experienced all of the joy and love and community and inspiration that lead up to the last 12 ish years of my life in bars and I am thankful to be the alive person I am. If I had a drink in my hand I would pour some of it out on the ground because there are people who were loves of mine who are in the ground and likely would prefer to be having a drink.

This Town, The Bar

I’m rough around the edges, and I’m fat on the inside, and I could light up a baseball park just walking around without my pride. There’s angel’s floatin’ over the north side black as the night and railroad tracks got the south side sewn down tight. Travelling companions and lovers and high water marks are stacking up like rainwater in a champaign glass in the dark. And the radio’s blasting me into obscurity. Every one knows my name and no one knows that it’s me. This town’s given me all that I’ve had so far and I beleive that I could love you. Won’t you join me at the bar? The bar, that’s where all my people are. Where my music always plays. It’s where everybody stays all night long.

When I have had my fill of this place you can have my stool. I’m gonna take my crack at living by the golden rule and when I’ve had my fill of holding onto strangers in the night, I’ll be cracking one on the front porch at my place playing guitar in the fading light. This town's given me all that I’ve had, so far. I believe that I could love you. Won’t you join me at the bar? The bar, that’s where all my people are. Where my music always plays. It’s where everybody stays all night long.

The bar.

Its got quasi paraphrasing from Greg Brown’s song Small Dark Movie. There’s champaign and deception. When I wrote it, the albums a band and I made were in the juke boxes in the bars. Sometimes I would walk in and a song I sang would be playing. There’s that Paul Simon song called Homeward Bound - “Home, where my thoughts are sleeping. Home, where my music’s playing…” etc. It’s more homage than theft in both cases. And then Iris Dement’s Our Town, I mean…

There's probably more I absorbed and passed off.

Anyhoo here's a video which includes the song:

And here’s a link to purchase the track on Bandcamp, please do:

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Man, I could get philosophical on this one, but I don't think it’s the right move.

If you are willing to overlook things like eating meat and not really having studied Buddhism per se, I am a secular Buddhist. I like the ideas in it that I have come across and I don't have to go to any meetings or throw money at it. I like the idea of trying to be present, because I struggle with it, and that’s where this one started. The neighbor’s chickens were in my front yard and as is common, some deer were napping between my back porch and a hank of raspberries that is sufficient to obscure their kids from the neighbors. I’m reminded of that scene in the movie Anchorman where the dim whitted weather man just starts naming things around the office. I love lamp. There was a bowl of apples on the counter and a 20 pound bag of basmati. It spins off into a fantasy of my life from there.

I have this romantic notion of what it must be like to be a touring singer songwriter lifted from road songs by Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell and Greg Brown, songs that pull back the veil from the rock star myth and humanize the thing.

At one point in time the whole rockstar lifestyle appealed to me, but my interests and needs have become simpler. Maybe it’s buddhism. I can see the notions I hold with a certain remove. I can accept their transient nature, their impermanence… sometimes easily.

And I don’t feel odd about putting a premium on talking about my dreams out loud, like they might be already real. I imagine myself to be. It’s like praying a little, to examine ones notions in unromantic relief and out loud.

It came out very quickly, this one. The rhymes are easy. The images logically follow. Once I had placed myself I could run into the images and go where they took me.

In a real way, the image of me that I have as a guy with a guitar is a crutch.

It is a crutch I intend to keep.

Crutches

Neighbor’s chickens in the front yard, deer in the back, apples in a bowl on the counter, rice in a sack, low and outside the sun is making it’s winter way. It’s laying down on the kitchen floor in the middle of the day.

The hillbillies all went home once the barn was up, sawdust swept into the corner, whiskey in an old tin cup, I thank gor I’ve got a place to keep my too danmed much. Throw a bag of clothes over my shoulder, and pick up my crutch.

Two lane blacktop in the morning, diner lunch at noon, I show my crutch to strangers and I tell the truth too soon. Birds are circlin’. Maybe I should not go. I think the worst thing I ever did was to believe I did not know.

Pick a little. Talk a little. Pick a little bit more. Take a handful of twenty dollar bills. Turn down a chance to score. Sneak off to a hotel and lie down by myself. Fall asleep with the TV on and contemplate my wealth.

I just do what the birds do. I do like the sun. Come back to the same place next year claiming to be on the run. Same people in the front, same twenty dollar bills. If I want to feel my spirit rise, I just crutch up into the hills. Throw my crutches down and run, cuz that’s how good it feels.

I recorded this within a couple days of having written it.

It's on the record called Where the Cover's Deep you can buy on Bandcamp

Here:

https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/where-the-covers-deep

Also there is a video:

https://youtu.be/tcFPbI7K9qU?si=2WmQLqXMeYi6ZYde

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

It's been good to try to remember what was going on in my life at the times this one was written and then when it was recorded. The Iowa Opera House Project was just a twinkle in my saucey, bloodshot eye. It had begun, I suppose the IOHP, but was not yet under full sail.

I am listening to it now for the first time in a long time..

I finished it at Helmer’s house on his gear during the pandy shutdown. Me and Dave did little EQ fixes and some subtle averaging FET compression. He was hands off, but it was his toys and his time.

Andrew Brockman and I started almost all the songs on what became Donkey Island with just me and a tenor guitar, singing and playing, then added everything else.

Bob Black picks banjo. I picked him up and drove him to the studio from a gravel lot at a crossroads near Kolona where is wife drove him. He told me a story about the guy who replaced him in Bill Munoe’s band playing Jimmy Carter’s inauguration on acid.

It was the beginning to what is now a beautiful friendship with Alma Drake who's work I knew from long ago and recently. It was 2010 or 11 or 12- right in there.

I wrote it sitting on the porch where I live now, downing cans and smelling the restaurant smoke blowing into my neighborhood and hearing the summer frogs and bugs and stumbling.

Sometimes you can't tell how good you have it. You assess at the end of a rough trip and it might seem to have all gone wrong. But we are walking a path. We are all approaching, knowingly looking down in and then getting back into the ground from which we all have sprung by whatever means you believe are true. It's all true, what you believe.

You don't always get to, but when you get to, make it nice. Everyone else is coming.

Denison is a real place. Donna Reed is from there. I had lunch with her daughter once. But I have never been.

Denison is beerese for “a den of sin”.

*clears throat*

Inna gotta davida baby…

Denison

As night begins to fall, smells of town are on the wind. Hello, goodye cicadas call. We fly so life begins again.

I start to walk along the road toward where lights shine up on the clouds. Denison, I have been told, there's more than gods law will allow.

I hear the frogs up in the trees..smell the dust up in my clothes. Below me I see lights and streets. My bride awaits me there I know.

You can treat me like fool. I’m told that is what you do. Just love me like them girls from school, and I will stay in love with you.

As night begins to fall smells of town are on the wind. Hello, goodbye cicadas call. We fly so life begins again.

We fly so life begins again.

Nothing makes me more confidently poetiphylisophiclish than being alone and in the bag. Here is some evidence that it occasionally can bear a little weight.. maybe helped me attain a long clear vision of a metaphore made up of the things in the air around me.

Ryan Bernemann plays lovely, rooted well-spaced upright bass.

Bob Black plays banjo great. Every time I listen to it I remember us confessing to each other about acid on the drive to town.

Alma Drake sings her fiddle over top, just right, right in the fiddle holes.

I plunk a harmony tenor revisiting the bag on the porch from the bag in the studio. adeno’sin.

Thank you Andrew Brockman, for putting up with my bad dance-dad attitude. It turned out great.

Buy one:

https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/track/denison-2

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com