Fairly articulate mammal

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Live from the Cactus Cafe


New song on the YouTube channel. It’s called “Ledger,” and it’s about the record-keeping we all do in our heads. 

The lyrical idea comes from a Kacy Crowley prompt: a hundred mistakes. The idea is that at the Cactus Cafe’s songwriters’ open mic, Kacy will toss out a phrase to stimulate song ideas. If you write a new song from that prompt by the next week’s open mic, you get a free drink at the bar, which is a fun incentive to write. “A hundred mistakes” led me to ponder the notion of taking internal inventory, all the wins and losses, and how to make sense of them.

I went to that open mic a bunch this last summer and had a great time. Kacy is, besides being an excellent writer and performer herself, a terrific host! 

The space is historic and legendary. It’s literally the stage where Townes, Lyle, Ruthie, and any number of great Texas songwriters used to regularly play in their early days. It’s a thrill to play on that stage, even in an open mic situation. No delusions of grandeur here, but it connects me, loops me in as a small part of a beautiful tradition. I recommend it.

Now that the school year has imposed earlier mornings on our family, it’ll be a rarer thing for me to go play, but I’ll be back. 

Meanwhile, here is “Ledger.”