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Isolation Week 7 - Hello Blainreaders one an all (and farewell to the one who unsubscribed). As a bona fide elder (a vulnerable elder, according to my son), I wish I had some great words of wisdom and hope in these dark times. We may have to stay 6 feet apart but at least we're not 6 feet under. The wonderful Dawn Tyler Watson had a great quote, "Mother Nature is giving us a time out."
Just when I was mentioning to a fellow septuagenarian how lucky we were to slip through this lifetime in a country with a social safety net, without ever being drafted into a war, or living through a natural disaster (until now). And now I'm confident that by the time I end up in a nursing home, there will be better care for seniors and better pay for the caregivers. Maybe some positive things will come out of this. Apparently there's people in India who can see the Himalayas for the first time in 30 years. And the air quality in Los Angeles is fine now. A small silver lining in a very dark cloud. In appreciation of my lifetime of good fortune, I hope I can keep making music, bringing good cheer and nourishing hungry ears.
This Mother's Day is a double whammy in the midst of all the other stuff going on. Double because for the first time I celebrate BOTH my mothers. For the last ten years or so, every Mother's Day I've put on a special show which I called my "Motherless Day Blues Concert". Had some great guests, Harrison Kennedy, Clayton Doley, Chris Caddell, Jesse O'Brien and I remember one "ladies night" with Roberta Hunt, Alison Young and Carrie Chesnutt. Of course I would always perform the song about my adoption, " Enfant Choisi" as well as my 1973 cult classic "Don't Forget Your Mother".
Well, since then, there's been a new development (and a new song). Through Ancestry DNA, I have come to know my birth mother, even though she is passed away, and I have even more reason to celebrate Mother's Day. Now I've got two mothers, and a couple more sisters and more cousins and nephews some of whom may be reading this and enjoying my tunes.
It will be a new world after this and perhaps a new collective consciousness that we are all in this together. I heard a young native woman from the far north talking in a "zoom circle" today and she said "The world needs to look to the indigenous people to guide us through these times" and I think that would be good advice for our world leaders. The First Nations people know a lot about survival in hard times and they have a world view that the rest of us could learn from.
Anyway, back to the album, it would have been released this Sunday, Mother's Day but since we can't get it out right now, I decided to put out another single for the occasion. "The Mother I Never Knew" is a brand new song, written after the album was recorded, but I stopped the presses to include it. I had just discovered my birth mother through Ancestry DNA (yes, I was adopted ) and my new relatives had so many wonderful stories about her that this song practically wrote itself.
I had put aside my "guilty pleasure", all that loopy electronica stuff, but with all this time on my hands, I've been sucked back in and just today I discovered a project called "Endless" which is a new paradigm for music making. It's an iPad app that you can make interesting music with but you can also jam with collaborators across the net in real time and those of you who know me will know that I'm all about jamming :-) I miss it.
I'll be doing more electronica under the moniker "Stringbuster" but for the moment I'm trying to stay focused on getting this album out before Judgement Day.
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