Your New Life Starts Here

A little window into a future life

It’s not like I haven’t spent years going to the UK. First as a punkette wannabe, then living in London for a year as an art student. Touring, getting together with Eric when he lived near Norwich. Lots more touring, coming and going from France and the US. I guess you could say it’s been a second home.

But I haven’t really taken in the concept of moving there, of being a full-time resident and what it means. How the alien aspect enters in,  when suddenly you’re comparing and contrasting, wondering how and where you fit in.

We haven’t moved yet. Our house in New York went on the market a few days ago and that’s been more traumatic and exciting than I imagined it would be. After months of decluttering, cleaning and painting, I’d lost sight of what all that activity was for: the absolute point of my life was to stand sentry with a Mr. Clean Magic White Eraser and attack the tiniest dot, spot or smudge that any other time would’ve just blended into the background, not worth my time or attention. But once the process starts of cleaning, it’s like Eric and I were both replaced with the shells of our bodies inhabited by a couple of Stepford Wives: must. clean. now. Scrub floor. Wash window. We were tripping over each other to tidy up, except when we’d crawl off to our respective increasingly tiny corners of the house to make whatever brief creative mess we were able to so we could remind ourselves who we are and what the point of all this process was.

So we were in England when the house listing went live – our lovely realtor Shaina came in after I followed Eric over to the UK, took photos, wrote the description – things we would have previously micromanaged but just couldn’t keep control of any more. Time to move on – literally.

I had tried to put thoughts of strangers walking through our house, our home – the story of our lives – out of my mind. Hopefully we’d taken enough personality and personal effects out of the place that people could see their own possibilities. The realtor’s photos looked great, we shared to friends but suddenly another local realtor put it on his popular Instagram account and the strangers’ random comments came rolling in : “C-YUTE!” “Cottagecore vibes…” Love love LOOOOVEEE!” Mostly overwhelmingly positive, with a few callous “Love it – GUT IT.” and “perfect, except for that awful carpet in the downstairs bedroom.” Unexpectedly for a site like this, Eric entered the fray :” I’m the owner and there IS no carpet in the downstairs bedroom” and “Maybe we won’t sell it to you” – it was hilarious and frightening and felt like we were suddenly in the middle of one of the property shows we love.

It’s not too late to get your offers in!

While all the viewing and possible selling goes on back in the US we’re here in England looking at places to live in North Norfolk an area we love while Eric prepares for his book release and 70th birthday gigs next week and I work on making another video for my new album and booking shows for the fall. I was thrilled when our friend Karen asked me to work in her gallery on a Sunday afternoon. I remember coming to the Hudson Valley and seeing another friend named Karen (Schoemer) serving customers at a funny combination bookstore/bar in Hudson and how working there brought me so much joy and connection to the place, even though I’d never tended bar or had a job in a bookstore before. It just felt like “why not?” So here I’m going in to work in an art gallery in a seaside area full of visitors and daytrippers and country folk and posh people and I think “sounds fun!”

But as Eric drives me over to open up the place on the gorgeous sunny first Sunday of May— BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND proclaim all the local pubs and restaurants— I start to feel nervous. What do I know about bank holidays? I’m a foreigner. They’ll know—they’ll know I just dropped in from somewhere else.

Yes I’ve played many many gigs in the UK, but that’s coming in as an artist, an entertainer, not trying to pass myself off as one who belongs. What will I do if they ask something and I can’t help them? If they hear my accent and think “she’s not from around here”…or “who let her in?” or perhaps the harshest of all “what – is she Canadian?”

(Nothing against Canadians! It’s just that feeling of insecurity that you don’t even represent the home team well enough to be identifiable – although usually along with the Canadian remark comes the qualifier “Cause you’re so nice and soft-spoken.” This might also be the place to acknowledge my privilege as a white woman of a certain age, while the UK starts its incomprehensible scheme of deporting illegal asylum seekers to Rwanda)

Beneath a windswept sky, fields and spring blossoms above low stone walls roll by, I think of Straw Dogs, I think of Wicker Man. I don’t know these people, this ancient island, except for my husband and family and friends and some people who like my music here they don’t know me. I only have a passing knowledge of their ways. I picture the gallery filling up with local folk wanting me to help them while I sweat, running back and forth trying to calm the crowd. I’ve tried all my old bar tricks, played Roger Miller King Of The Road, soundtrack from Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, Curtis Mayfield Move On Up— then realize what felt so comforting back home only serves to highlight my other status. I shift gears: Shirley Bassey, Tricky, Nick Drake. It’s too late. They’re taking the art off the walls, the murmuring grows louder:

We need art! Kill her, kill her – Must have art – kill her now!

I shut my eyes and clap my hands over my ears, it all swirls around me: “For Sale” signs and moving boxes, guitars stacked up in cases, Mom’s old Fiestaware on a shelf at the thrift store in Hudson New York; my daughter’s hiking boots and HeeHaw donkey…the gas-powered lawn mower and aluminum boat we’ll leave behind…fish & chips and “cask ale” signs and people wearing shorts on a fifty degree day; friends welcoming us, friends waving goodbye.

Coming to, the gallery is empty, all the art safely back on the walls. I hear Paul Simon, Train In The Distance, an old playlist resurfacing. People stroll by the gallery, stop in and greet me pleasantly. I decide I need to adapt, put on the gentle, subtly disquieting songs of Robert Wyatt.

This moving thing is going to be a process, a journey. No one wants to kill me. I can make it work here.

“Lovely weather,” says a nice lady who enters the gallery with a small dog under her arm. “Beautiful day,” I say back. A way in! I can talk about the weather with the best of them! I start to say more, about the glorious clouds in the sky and isn’t the green absolutely perfect but I restrain myself. Don’t want to try too hard. 

I backpedal on the music though. I love England and Robert Wyatt, but there’s no situation Roger Miller won’t improve.

Another Sunday in a different land

Blowing Up

Putting out new work — with help

I’d written a whole piece, another “what I think about as we pack up to move” story but then an important thing happened that doesn’t take place too often in my life so you know what, I want to tell you about it.

As a songwriter/artist and musician I used to work with record labels a lot —in the early days back in the eighties it really felt like there was no other way. True you’d get a lone cassette tape here and there from rogue DIY folks like Daniel Johnston, but the holy grail was finding a label who’d work with you and help release your music into the world. I was on some great labels: Rounder, Matador and Signature Sounds, and I’ll even put Koch in there not for their ethos or independent spirit but because they put out my first three solo albums thanks to a period where they had good people working there.

When Eric and I started performing together, we released our first duo album Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby on the revived Stiff Records label that was part of Trevor Horn and Jill Sinclair’s ZTT. I’d put out occasional discs myself to sell via my website and at shows, pre-streaming and digital music days, and that’s the approach Eric and I took for our second two albums, Two Way Family Favourites and A Working Museum. Things were changing so fast for musical artists, it was the dawn of Kickstarter /crowdfunding and social media and you could sell stuff directly to fans via mail order as well as get it up online yourself. I haven’t even tried to find somebody to put my music out for the last decade, partly because I’ve sold enough through playing lots of gigs and through my site and just keeping the official and unofficial releases and merch coming that I’ve made money (not tons, just a few different income streams that add up to something) and even had a good time filling orders and keeping in touch with people who’ve bought directly from me. Part of it is also lack of confidence and ability to sell myself except on a very small personal scale. Physical distribution hasn’t been huge, I don’t press a lot, runs of 300 or even 100, because records take up a lot of space and with CDs you can get another 100 in ten days if you need them. I guess I used the same approach to publishing my memoir Girl To City.

All this as a long-winded was to say —I’ve signed with record label Tapete for my next release, an LP called Hang In There With Me that’s coming out August 30. They’re based in Germany, did a great job with Eric’s last album Leisureland (he’d done his previous two albums himself through our Southern Domestic label) and are good people who have a nice thing going. They’ve given me a schedule for releasing singles and videos and it all feels exciting and also reassuring to have a partner in this crazy game. Bouncing ideas back and forth we came up with which single to release first and decided on Dylan In Dubuque. It came out Friday, along with a video for the song.

I wrote Dylan In Dubuque in 2021 when I was on an intense Bob jag, losing myself in learning and recording his songs that pandemic year of his 80th birthday: Not Dark Yet, I Believe In You, Foot Of Pride, My Back Pages, Long & Wasted Years. I remember I first played my new song live solo at Natalie’s in Columbus Ohio back in fall 2021—a rare gig in a year of stopping and starting due to Covid. Eric, Doug Wygal and I included it in a few of our live shows since then. We recorded a version back in late 2022 as I was intermittently going into Eric’s studio in our house to try to put together enough tracks for an album while dealing with my dad’s decline and his dementia and corresponding tumultuous living situation.

In other words, it was really hard to focus on creating an album during this period of my life, so things were a little piecemeal. But I don’t want to lay too much blame on my late Dad, because The Old Guys that came out in 2018 also took a couple of years of off and on recording. I did a lot of my own solo recording, having fun and blowing off steam on GarageBand alone in my room and that’s been invaluable. I rely on Eric to bring the sound for a full blown recording—he is brilliant at it—but it is a painstaking process and he is exacting and so very clear when things aren’t all the way there and so things can take a while. Not to the point of crippling perfectionism, but just able to say “no, we’ve got to try again” and I trust and respect him hugely for that. And that’s how it was with our first version of Dylan.

As for the song, here’s the little capsule description I wrote for Tapete to use: “Dylan In Dubuque” is inspired by a notorious nineties Bob Dylan concert in Iowa, where a lack of security led to chaos and a nonstop stage invasion that Bob simply took in his stride…If only we could all be so unfazed when things start to get weird!… Aren‘t things weird??

(I loved how when Tapete put the track up, someone had added the last line “Aren’t things weird??” and that just caps it off and makes it relevant – yes. )

I’d need to check some calendar notes to see when we went back in (or rather Doug came back over, because Eric and I are just y’know, in the house and that’s where the studio is). I believe it was March, 2023. We recorded pretty much live, Eric playing bass from his spot at the mixing desk, Doug in the room with him on drums and I stood on the other side of the door into the hallway playing electric rhythm guitar and singing a scratch vocal. A few months later, Eric had Leisureland finished and he and I were really pushing to stack up enough tracks so I could have a complete album finished before we dismantled our lives and the studio to make an overseas move. The pressure was on. I came up with a swampy guitar figure to approximate an early demo version I’d lost when my hard drive crashed, and Eric put in some brutal fuzz bass. I’d tried doing a low harmony all the way through the earlier version that had worked on the demo but sounded a little atonal over a more rocking track. Some vocals you have to work and some are better not labored over and this was one of those —don’t try to sell the song, let the words and music do the talking. Eric is a great vocal coach in the studio : “You need to be there, but resist the urge to join in,” is one of his koans that usually does the trick for me.

Self-portrait/collage from the studio—all packed up now

I told Tapete I could make a video for the track and knew it involved filming myself in a carwash. I just love going through the carwash, it feels like a safe space, very intimate and natural. I figured I could pop the phone in its usual dashboard stand , cue up the track on another device and lipsync along. I did the first verse easily enough but it was a little stressful when I realized the people in the next bay could actually see me doing my thing, and I got self-conscious. I decided to find another, more private car wash for verses two and three. I spotted one down in Saugerties, the next town south but as I pulled in I wondered if it was even still functioning, it was really run down and deserted looking. Which was actually perfect! It was completely unattended, took my money and had the really nice splashy red and blue brushes and some flashing lights. I cued up the second verse and put my dark glasses on.

Eric had the idea for the throwing of the Telecaster and I wanted to see how it would work, doubting whether it could!  It did work and I was amazed, so much that I grinned like a fool while we were doing it, instead of looking cool and nonchalant like I’d hoped to.

Part of the reason the song even exists is that a complete video of the Dylan show the lyrics refer to is available on YouTube – if you ever want a smile, just pick pretty much any moment from the show and you’ll be treated to random fans getting down with Bob. I’d hoped maybe I could animate a segment a la my single cover sketch, but things were getting down to the wire. I asked Emily Hubley for some tips and it sounded so fun to at least try but I froze up in my attempts to create more sketches, feeling the pressure. (Putting “learn simple animation” on my list of things to try in the future) I photographed some moments in the gig video and cut them together in CapCut, the app I’ve been using to make little clips for Instagram. In those Julia Cameron Artist Way quizes, I always put down film director in the list of things I wish I could be in another life and making clips briefly satisfies that dream. In the editing I was making things up as I went along and popped in some other images and video I had on my computer: gig photos by Scott Cornish and Don Ciccone; a live clip from City Winery NYC by Henry Laura. An abandoned video of me ironing I’d made to try and sell tea towels from my website.

So the single came out officially on Friday. As I was sharing the song and video, we were desperately trying to get our house ready for a potential buyer. I drank some THC seltzer, made a very short edited version and joined TikTok. I read Kim Gordon’s blowing up on there. I now have exactly one follower.

I’d love to sit on my laurels but I have a last window frame to paint. My daughter’s here for the weekend. And I need to come up with some visual ideas for the next single. Let’s see if we can get those numbers up —I don’t want to let the label down. It’s a pressure but also takes the pressure off a little, knowing they’re over there in Germany, six hours ahead of me.

Last Exit In New York

Arrive whenever, stay (for n)ever

I was thinking about this residency I did a few years back, at the Hi Fi bar in Manhattan. I played every Thursday for the month of May. It was scary and daunting, especially as I’d hardly played any solo shows in years. Eric and I got together in 2006 and started our duo thing and made albums and played dozens and dozens of gigs but to get up alone in front of an audience was suddenly new again.

A few years back? It was 2015— my friends that is almost ten years ago! How can it be that the last decade, the teens, is now firmly in the rearview? I still slip and say 199- when talking about things that happened in the last few decades. The HiFi bar, that had been Brownies, became another bar (closed now?) and those peak Covid years accelerated the passage of time.

All this went through my mind as I headed to New York City to play as Eszter Balint’s guest in her residency at Barbès in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Residencies are a cool thing, a way to create your own living room in a public space. I felt like we were going to have some tea or a drink together with songs, voices and instruments, in front of an audience. I was pleased she’d invited me—I knew Squat Theatre where she grew up and remembered seeing her out and about in the late 70s/early 80s when she was the youngest teen on the scene. Her acting is enticing and so is her songwriting and performing. So this was a nice chance to get to know her and her music a little more, and a good way to play a New York show without the pressure of relentless promoting to sell tickets and fill a club. Going through songs together a few weeks beforehand was a nice kind of homework, it worked muscles that can get flabby : listening, memory, jumping on board someone else’s train. What kind of musician are you without these basic skills? Playing completely solo as I’ve done often the last years, you become an island, good at chopping wood and building your own fire, you rely on the audience to supply the oxygen. Learning someone else’s songs changes your own writing DNA a little bit – ooh, you can put those words together like that? These images with those chords and a melody that slinks in here?

thanks Mary Lee Kortes for the photo of me with the lovely Eszter

Going in to play the gig reminded me “I do this — drive into cities, with my guitar in the trunk…find a place to park. Grab food. Walk into a room I’ve never been before. Set up my stuff. And even sometimes work with other people.” It was a welcome window into a world I’ve got just a glancing relationship with this new year, saving my resources for touring in the fall and meanwhile working on our house. When I’ve seen friends posting from gigs in California or England or fab festivals I think oh I want to be out there so BAD – but if we can just sell this house and get something more suitable it will set us up for the next decade (or more?) of continuing to write, record —work making art. I never ever thought about this kind of thing before except in an immediate “I need a place to live, that I can hopefully afford, now” way.

Things unfolded in their own organic time at Barbès and I loved hearing Eszter with her cool combo, and getting to play, and see some friends and family too. Then I was getting back in the car to drive upstate on a rainy night (could be worse, could be snow?) I’m so used to driving in and out of Manhattan, Williamsburg and now— incredibly— parts of Queens, but getting out of Park Slope was a little bit alien and I suddenly found myself heading towards the Verrazzano Bridge. Maybe the GPS had been trying to send me through the Brooklyn Battery tunnel (or whatever it’s called now) and I’d missed something, but here I was hurtling towards…Staten Island, the oddest NYC borough, AND over the most breathtaking of all the bridges around the city. Maybe it’s that terrifying, awful scene in Saturday Night Fever but this bridge freaks me out every time, and this of all weeks, after the awful collapse of the familiar old Key Bridge in Baltimore – well I practiced my well-honed deep breaths, perfected for childbirth over thirty five years ago and still relied on at the dentist, doctor, during panic attacks and…going over the Verrazzano Bridge.

I felt like the GPS was putting me through my NYC paces — does it know I’m leaving? A road sign flashed by as I headed towards the Goethals Bridge, conduit to New Jersey: LAST EXIT IN NEW YORK. It was like a scene card in the movie of my life. This great big mess of a city and state will always add up to home in my mind, at the same time I’m perfectly capable of —not exactly turning my back but…sidestepping away. I knew ya and I loved ya and I still do but you’re different and I’m different and can we just meet every year or so for a big lovefest? That feels nice to me, cause just hanging out, in the city at least, doesn’t compel me so much anymore. I think it all changed when my daughter moved to L.A.  I only have so many hanging out units available and I admit I save a lot of those for her, and I’m lucky – I love L.A.

But shhh – don’t tell New York, I thought, as I made my way back home up Route 17 in New Jersey. I consider every place I’ve ever lived my home forever even if I’m no longer there. When people say goodbye to me as if they’ll never see me again cause I’m moving I just think “I never really leave all the way!”

It was after midnight when I hit the Thruway and the O’Jays Love Train came up—I pictured the whole world joining hands and felt tearful: “Why can’t we all get along? Why is it always war and fighting?” There’s no fleeing to another country to get away from trouble and strife, I know this.

I felt like I was the only car on the road. Kept seeing ominous light-up signs that suggested or maybe implored: “Arrive Early, Stay Late!” I remembered there’s a total eclipse headed this way in a little over a week. I pulled over to the old Platekill rest area that was closed last year and the year before, now it’s all spruced up. There was only one other car in the parking lot and I felt a little nervous, being alone. Did I used to worry and feel vulnerable like this? It was fine in what is now called “Applegreen” (I have a song by that name! Maybe I should get in touch and they could pipe it through the PA?) I was glad to get in and out and keep driving on up the road.

Between Saugerties and Catskill on 9W, a two lane road, I ended up driving behind two fuel trucks. They were going slower than I wanted to go but I was listening to music and tried to just be calm and go with the flow. There was a sticky moment when they approached an underpass with twelve feet of clearance. At a stoplight the driver in front of me got out, came around and looked at his back tires, maybe thinking of letting a little air out just in case he didn’t fit. I really hoped they wouldn’t get stuck, for their sake and mine. I wanted to get home. It had been a nice night, and a welcome change from painting the house. The band Nazareth came up on shuffle and i made a note to ask Eric if he knew their work – I remembered they always seemed to be playing in Pittsburgh when I was a teenager, I’d hear the ads for them on WDVE the FM radio station: DiCesare Engler Presents!

This is where I start feeling nostalgia in advance of being gone. Nothing will ever feel as familiar as right now, I thought. Me in my Subaru, after a gig, on roads I have imprinted in my limbs, the turns, the braking. The at-homeness as familiar as the fretboard of my guitar, me behind the trucks, uneasily at ease. I didn’t know who was driving them but we felt strangely connected in the night and when they turned off to the plant down the road from our house I almost wanted to honk or flash my lights to say goodnight. “You guys! You don’t know what this meant to me!”

My ease goes back to childhood, it’s being an American in America. The comfort and the shame of it.  I remember living in France and feeling essentially alien, even as I got to grips with the language: they’ll never know what it was like to watch OJ in his Bronco being chased by the police. Of course I’ll drive in England and do gigs and just keep on keeping on. I’ve loved the place since I was a teenager and feel at home there in a different way. Relaxed but also with my senses on alert. Different greens, but the same dreams: peace, home. Work. A spot of gardening?

“The next stop that we make—will be England.”

Factory of Dreams

It’s almost like being in show biz…

This isn’t a glamorous story and it probably won’t tug at your heartstrings – it’s just the reality of getting an album cover together and the first of some photos taken for promotional purposes that concerns me this month, along with trying to paint, pack and prepare our house for selling.

Selling! It used to feel like that was the point of photos—get someone to look and they might buy. I enjoyed doing photos back in art school days. Call me pretentious; call me a poser. It was almost like being in show biz! One of my roommates at Parsons, Julia Gorton, is a brilliant photographer and I always felt like I could become something in her pictures that I couldn’t live up to in real life. I was lucky being in New York City back then and knowing so many talented photographers: George duBose, Stephanie Chernikowski, Robert Sietsema. Ted Barron, my downstairs neighbor in Williamsburg.

It didn’t hurt that I was young. Even when I felt /was given the message that I was over the hill and too old to amount to anything in music, I was young. And I was effortlessly slender, could wear any item of clothing I felt like wearing. Many that I probably shouldn’t have but again— in the grand scheme of a hopefully long-enough life, I was still kinda new. But we can’t understand that until we’re many years down the road looking back.

So there I was recently, getting ready to go down to the city and take photos with a photographer friend I’ve enjoyed working with before. I dressed as if I was going to play a gig. That seemed the most comfortable way to go. Makeup on, black jeans and one of the only shirts in my closet I love which I’ve probably already mentioned before. Black velvet jacket – black black black and a little bit of color. It was a warm day for early to mid March, going to be in the seventies. Oh please don’t let me sweat too much. Don’t let the sun be too punishing. (Here’s the point where it feels necessary to mention the difficult things going on in the world and isn’t it a privilege to get to do any fun creative thing that may be hard-won but not that hard by comparison to pretty much everything a large part of the world is contending with. We all have our trials but I feel lucky – I hope this doesn’t make me sound smug. Anyway, on with the tale)

I know now from lots of experience the key is to relax. Be yourself. Have fun. It felt like years since I’d had new pictures taken. By someone else. In the days since the pandemic started I’ve taken and posted dozens of pics of myself. But that’s different. Those are like postcards, little notes scrawled from favorite locations. I do my own seeing and presenting, just grab a shot where I think I look okay and share a vibe. But seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes and lens, a more formal arrangement —it’s scarier. The stakes are higher. And being in my mid-sixties now, it wouldn’t hurt to declare “I’m older than I was and I’m okay with that” at the same time as saying “getting older isn’t something to fear – in fact it’s pretty fucking great.” Without saying any of those things too obviously.

It seems to be a theme lately, for other artists and writers I follow. I heard Jenn and Kim on my fave podcast Everything Is Fine talking about Jenn doing an author photo shoot that had me shouting “I know – oh my god yes!” I was going to say I yelled back at the radio but I had airpods in and was cooking dinner so I guess I just kind of shouted at the stove. Last week they had guest Lucy Sante talking about her new memoir of transitioning and the reality of presenting yourself to the world as an older woman and even with all the accoutrements available to women that most men won’t avail themselves of (a wider variety of clothing choices and hairstyles, makeup etc) it’s still all a little bit of a rude awakening. But necessary. I’ll add here Lucy’s book I Heard Her Call My Name is astounding. She is one of the most honest and perceptive writers I’ve read, as well as so humble and funny and I’m honored to know her just a little bit as a neighbor here in the Hudson Valley.

The album I have coming out in August with some singles in advance of that has been a few years in the making. I’m actually working with the German label Tapete for the release and so I feel like I almost have a regular job in giving them the stuff they need to get the word out: album artwork for LP, CD and digital versions, a variety of different photos, video, press releases and bio.  It’s exciting and scary. I’ve put out my own releases through me and Eric’s Southern Domestic label the last fourteen years and have done all these same things plenty but knowing other people are involved and counting on me makes me take it all more seriously. But I want to enjoy it too because how often does this happen, putting out new work? And how wonderful someone else wants to be involved!

Along with making this new album I’ve been writing a second memoir called Girl To Country I’m close to finishing (“yes, I know,” you’re probably saying — “you’ve already mentioned it several times…”) These things take a while. This book focuses on the time after my first solo album and before Eric and I got together, when I moved down to Nashville and kind of lost my way but kept going too. I remembered a part in the story where I’m getting ready for an album cover photo shoot and thought I’d share that work in progress here. I was forty-one which now feels while not exactly young like very much a long-ago era. As I’ve gone through the process of writing about that productive, awkward, often misguided middle part of my life, I keep thinking “you should’ve known better!” but I’m hoping/finding…and um hoping that writing through it all helps to excise a good deal of regret. Anyway, here’s the short excerpt. And I’ll let you know how the photos go, single and video releases as they happen and also when and where you can find the new record Hang In There With Me that’s coming out August 30 on Tapete.

The Sugar Tree

I come up with the album title on a Midwest run of dates when a road sign flashes by somewhere in Missouri: Sugar Tree. I envision the cover as one of those 60s countrypolitan records with a soft color portrait in a natural setting, like an LP you’d find in a thrift shop. Photographer Jim Herrington lives just down the street from East Nashville’s Shelby Park, and a little research tells me this bucolic setting only minutes from the liquor stores and hot chicken places of Gallatin Pike was often used for country album cover shoots in the past.

Jim recommends a makeup artist and she meets me at his house on a hot afternoon to help me prepare for the shoot. The humidity makes my face pour oil and frizzes my hair. I’m okay in Nashville when it isn’t the sticky season, but since spring down south starts in late February and summer lasts until about the beginning of November, I find there aren’t many weeks out of the year when looking well-groomed is a possibility.

“Don’t worry, we’ll fix you right up,” the gorgeous young woman says as I settle into one of Jim’s dining chairs. I’d picked up a fitted dress on sale at the mall, not realizing until I put it on outside of the air-conditioned store that it’s 100% polyester, causing me to sweat and practically break out in a rash.

I’ve been happy with hair and makeup people’s work in the past, making me look like myself only better. I relax as the makeup artist sponges, brushes, curls and pencils me. She applies lip liner and lipstick, the final touches, and stands back to assess her handiwork. Then she holds up a mirror for me to admire the results.

I take a deep breath, then wonder why Joan Crawford in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? is staring back at me. My brows are double their usual width, my mouth looks like those wax lips kids used to fool around with before someone figured out that stuff is toxic. I think my eyes look pretty sultry but am too horrified to keep looking at myself.

I murmur words of appreciation, hand her a check and as soon as she’s driven away I go into the bathroom to scrub everything off and start over again with whatever’s in my makeup bag. Maybe it’ll be dark enough by the time we get to Shelby Park that my face won’t really have to show in the photo?

The sun’s going down as Jim and I drive into the park and there’s no time to look around for a suitable spot. We find a wooded area above the Little League field where there’s a game in full swing, the lights just coming on. I hear shouts and cheers from the young players and their parents as I sit down next to a tree. I just want to look pretty. Do all other female artists go through this? I wonder. I imagine the successful ones have the perfect attributes of womanhood—the obvious boobs and beauty— to show off, while I’m stuck with the flawed human parts like greasy skin and limp hair. Why couldn’t I have just been a guy?

“Your legs look great,” says Jim. I hitch up my dress a little. The field lights shine on the gold platform shoes a friend gave me years ago, swearing they’d belonged to a Hollywood screen goddess. I gaze off into the distance like I’m searching for love, success, acclaim; anything that will lift me out of playing for fifteen people after grubbily pawing the clearance rack at TJ Maxx. I pray for that magical combination of luck and timing that will send my songs like a Little League home run, up through the air into the ears and hearts of folks like me, who’ll relate and see themselves. If I wish hard enough, it almost feels possible.

photo by Jim Herrington, this is the one used for The Sugar Tree album cover, free of the awful font used in the design. Talk about regret! I learned it’s worth it to agonize over every album cover detail cause these things live forever, even if it’s just on my own website or Discogs…

I Got You

A catalogue of everyday moments

I know this process is going to go on for a while. It’s hard to take in the enormity of moving to another place, which Eric and I will do…sometime this year. Maybe we’ve already moved to England, in our minds. But we’re here in Catskill, working on our house, and that’s a good focus for now. Meanwhile, every encounter, lunch date, walk or festive happening feels momentous, touchingly vivid. When you know you’re moving on (yes, I’ve done this before) life is cast in amber as it’s happening. Even the most mundane situations say “Remember this!”

It’s sort of reverse culture shock – call them comfort moments. Knowing the substantial learning curve of settling into a new place, comfort moments embrace me in their poignant familiarity, the warmth of being so completely at ease I’m almost playing the role of myself in a movie of my life, the dialogue honed, the roles well-cast enough you just know this show would be a feel-good hit that would remind everyone of their own life, the things that are dear to them but that are also, like everything in life, achingly transient. We’re all changing every minute, saying goodbye even as we’re living.  Just like when you travel and everything is so new your senses are on high alert, moving on ramps up the familiarity. Stable points appear epic in their stalwartness, so much that we file them away “yes I will refer back to you when I need to remember who I am…or was. Can you hold this thing called me so I can get back to it if I lose my way?”

That place called home

At Sherwin Williams

The guy who works at our local paint store says “Your husband dresses so well. We get people in here in their pajamas, underwear even. So to see someone make an effort to look nice, every day, well it’s appreciated.” He’s so impressed by Eric’s elegance and Britishness and goes on to ask if I’ve ever been to England, and says he really wants to go one day. I think how lucky I am, that I’ve gone to England so many times, starting when I was a teenager and you could fly there for $29 on Laker or even go free as a courier. I can’t bear to tell him we’re moving there, that all this paint we’ve been buying is because we’re just fixing our house up to sell it. I tell him I hope he gets to go to England some day, that he’ll love it.

Michael’s Couch

“Where do you sleep, when you stay over at your brother’s apartment?” friends ask. I tell them I feel comfortable on Michael’s couch, which he’s had for the forty-some years he’s lived in his East Village place. Michael’s couch is dark red vinyl. Once I’m nestled across the cushions, there’s something so familiar about it that the impossible happens and I can rest easy—on a vinyl couch. Michael’s apartment decor is circa 1920s-50s, except for a big flat screen tv on the original tenement brick wall. Hee Haw plays on the screen as Michael and I talk and eventually I fall deep asleep. When I wake up the next morning, my limbs are stiff and sore. “I’m not sure I can do this again” I tell myself, but I know I’ll forget and do it again.

Hi Amy

We have the nicest neighbors just next door. When we first moved here, there was an old lady Roberta who’d grown up in the house. I asked her about the giant trees in the yard, imagining they must be hundreds of years old. She said she remembered them being planted back in the sixties.

That’s how fast things change. When she died her kids sold the house to Jason who was the local electrician and a great guy. He gutted the place and fixed it up and the young family that moved in after him have been a delight. When they first arrived their daughter was a baby, now she’s almost four. We see them in our local cafe sometimes and it was a thrill to hear her say in her kid voice, out in public “Hi Amy.” In the parlance of today, I felt seen, like when we’re gone she might even remember Eric and Amy those neighbors that saw her go from one to four.

Ladies Who Lunch

Connie and Holly and I meet for lunch in Woodstock. We’ve known each other since the eighties, through music and New York and they were both well-installed up here well before Eric and I arrived. They’ve been supportive neighbors even though we’re all in separate towns—there are so many small planets in the Hudson Valley/Catskill Mountains area, all about a half hour apart. We share gossip and the hours fly by. It being Woodstock on a weekday we’re practically the only people in the restaurant. If I weren’t leaving I don’t think I’d make time for lunch and its a shame – “we should have done this more often!” I like to think I never leave anywhere all the way, and imagine we’ll meet up again before too long.

When The Student Is Ready, the Teacher Will Appear

I’m heading into the Catskill Liquor Store and one of my favorite yoga teachers is heading out. “Great minds think alike” she says, shouldering a box of wine and holding the door open for me. She lets me know she has a Sunday morning class now. I’ve been doing yoga alone at home since her outdoor Friday morning class ended with the cold weather, but I really do like practicing with a real teacher when its not too inconvenient. I remember the saying “When The Student Is Ready The Teacher Will Appear” but didn’t think it meant “at the liquor store.” But that’s just the way things are around here.

Once A Steelers Fan…

I’m in the aisle of the liquor store when a guy comes in wearing full Pittsburgh Steelers regalia – jersey, knit cap. Not an everyday sight in New York. “Yay Steelers!” I say and he smiles. “I grew up there,” I say, unable to keep myself from sharing. “The 1970s!” he says and I say “The best!” He tells me he’s kept the faith ever since, through the ups and downs. We smile and might even high five if we weren’t holding bottles of booze.

I Got You

I’ve given up my shifts at the bookstore/bar, and I miss it but just have too much to do right now with the house and getting the parts together for my new album to come out at the end of the summer (and revising my book too). But every few weeks I cover for somebody, and it almost feels like taking a break, putting on clothes that aren’t paint-spattered to serve people. It’s very hard to leave the place that’s been a big part of my identity for twelve years, but moving on seems like the natural order of things. Except I just feel so at home behind the bar and helping customers find their books and art supplies. I’ll also really miss my co-workers, I’ve seen a huge cast of them come and go, I’m the last lady standing aside from Kelley the owner of the store. I imagine if we weren’t moving, people would come to Hudson ten years from now and say “Oh my god, that woman’s still working here – what is she, approaching eighty now?” The bookstore has connected me to so many people, to the world of books (and beer) and the conviviality of a wonderful local spot where anyone feels comfortable gathering.  It really has been a pleasure, and an honor. When my co-worker double-checks via text that I’m filling in for him on Monday, it gives me a warm feeling to be able to text back: I got you