Category: my photos, videos, drawings, art

Our neighbors across the street are serious about Halloween. They’re pulling all the boxes out into the yard and installing the inflatables, the lights, and – my personal favorite – the cauldron that blows smoke-filled bubbles.

Meanwhile, Maile and Anais have been working on our display: a Grease-themed pair of skeletons named Bone Travolta and Tibia Newton-John. Around them will be a bunch of tombstones reading things like “R.I.P Sandra Dee” and “You’re the One That I Haunt” (a play on the song “You’re the One That I Want”). We’re putting the finishing touches on our costumes and still need to carve the pumpkins.

But I did find time to write a short Halloween song. Here it is.

Whatcha Gonna Be For Halloween?

Glowing from bushes across the street
A pair of red eyes starin’ out at me
An alien spacecraft hovers by the house
and it’s pickin’ up a cow in its tractor-beam

Two skeletons are standing on the lawn
Bone Travolta and Tibia Newton-John
On a tombstone at their feet
It reads, “You’re the one that I haunt”

Whatcha gonna be? Whatcha gonna be?
Gotta dress up if you wanna get the candy
Whatcha gonna be? Make it really scary
Just a few days ’til Halloween

I was gonna be a robot but now I’m thinkin’
I’m gonna be a Zombie Abraham Lincoln
I got the right hat but I need the jacket
Gotta hit the Goodwill to see if I can snag it

We still gotta spray paint another tombstone
We got three pumpkins that we still need to carve
Don’t forget to get a big bag of candy
And put up the lights to decorate the yard

Whatcha gonna be? Whatcha gonna be?
Gotta dress up if you wanna get the candy
Whatcha gonna be? Make it really scary
Just a few days ’til Halloween

Whatcha gonna be? Whatcha gonna be?
Gotta dress up if you wanna get the candy
Whatcha gonna be? Make it really scary
Just a few days ’til Halloween
Just a few days ’til Halloween

Maile planned the whole trip so I got to get way out of town and gratefully go along for our drive out west into the Texas desert for five days. We camped two nights in the divine Davis mountains, attended a stellar start-party at the magical McDonald Observatory, swam in beautiful Balmorhea and explored big Big Bend while staying La Posada Milagro in Terlingua.

I particularly appreciated the decompression from work during the busiest time of the year. Entering the Santa Elena Canyon cathedral, cooling in the Rio Grande for the first time between the 1500 foot rock walls, was an amazing experience.

But when we pulled out of Terlingua Tuesday morning I wasn’t feeling well. It was probably the chilly and the beer from last night. And the arid altitude. And the prospect of reentry. From the passenger seat with my travel guitar, I sang, “Adios, Terlingua” and wrote this song as we headed home across the many desert landscapes, smiling and sad.

Adios, Terlingua

Adios, Terlingua. The crew, we got to fly.
I wish we didn’t have to go but we got all day to drive.
We’re headed back to Austin through the Chisos one more time.
I’ll try to hold your vistas in my mind.

Adios, Terlingua. Wish I was feelin’ fine.
It’s probably all that chili and the beer I drank last night
Or maybe it’s the altitude, not used to living so high
I’m comin’ down the mountainside.

Adios, Terlingua, where the ocotillo bloom
And mist covers the mountains till it all burns off by noon
In the baking midday sun we holed up in our dark cool room
And woke to desert lit up by the moon.

Adios, Terlingua, and the old Starlight Cafe
Dogs and locals on the porch, guitars and a fiddle play
For all the drinkin’ tourists with an hour and a half to wait
The starry music ends for us today.

Adios, Terlingua, and the beautiful Big Bend
Sweet Santa Elena, crossing the Rio Grande
I’m deep inside your canyon walled cathedral of rock and sand
I’m grateful for your humbling expanse.

Adios, Terlingua, and all your hippie refugees
Who left the crazy world behind for desert harmonies
I wish I could stay longer and hear a few more stories
I tip my hat to all your rugged glory.

Hasta la vista, Terlingua, vultures circling overhead
Gathered by the roadside or some dried up creek bed
So long sweet roadrunner crossin’ up ahead
A ghost town is rising from the dead.

I got to attend the Interactive conference at South by Southwest this year and was often reminded of how poor a substitute digital connections are for the real thing and what an epidemic of isolation and loneliness is taking place.

One presenter pointed out what a totally different experience it is when music is shared in the room as opposed to isolated in our headphones.

The best thing I heard at SXSW was a bold keynote from musician/producer T Bone Burnett, who talked about the "growing understanding that the internet has morphed into an insidious surveillance and propaganda machine," calling for radical accountability for our tech giants and asserting that “the artists are our only hope.”

All of this made me think of my song called Be My TV who's chorus goes, "I think my TV has been watching me, it cuts up my dreams to sell ads for jeans."

The youtube video has been taken down, but you can listen to it above (he starts at 2:28) and read the full text of his SXSW keynote at Tbone's site.

Here is a short interview which references it and gives you a few of the main points.

I got to open Outside Voice Fest 2019 on Saturday thanks to my fast new friend Ron who put the fantastic fest on at an urban farm on the East side.

The weather was perfect and a bunch of friends and families came out and hung out with us away from the SXSW madness.

I opened with some improvisational songwriting with the kids, a few of my songs, and a few singalong songs.

The Pauses indie rocked.

Grupo Rebolu made got us all dancing with their fantastic Colombian dance music.

Along with the release of MANTRAS, I am proud to premiere the video for Not Gonna Try, the last and longest track on the album and certainly my most involved video production to date.

The wisdom I sing about in this song is probably the hardest piece of advice I give to myself: stop trying to change other people and work on yourself. It's akin to "Be the change you wish to see in the world" and the serenity prayer, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

I take it one step further to actively denying my impulse to change others. It's a tough extra-step, but one I've come to believe as a practical truth, that our influence on others increases along with our own personal integrity and decreases the more we try to get people to be like us (or at least do as we say). It is also totally aspirational. I find my belief that I can change others is a core assumption that I have to actively suppress in order to prevent all sorts of frustration and misery that goes along with trying to get people to be different.

The video features psychedelic backgrounds while I go through many wardrobe changes and time-lapse footage of me slowly going through a speeding world. The changes of clothes are meant to refer to my changing myself. The time-lapse illustrates the idea of going at your own, slower, more methodical pace in an ever faster world.

This shoot began a few years ago when I volunteered as a free subject for a video class. In exchange for spending the day in front of their cameras, I got a bunch of footage. The first half of the shoot was all in a studio in front of a green screen, me changing outfits between lip-syncing to my song. For the second half of the shoot, we went down to town lake and shot footage on the Lamar St. footbridge and Doug Sahm hill. I'm happy to have captured two iconic Austin spots along with the skyline.

Last year I met Grey Gamboa, then a new RTF student at UT, and finally found someone to edit the footage together. Grey did a perfectly trippy job editing and creating pulsing psychedelic colors (using oil and water dyes between curved glass). His visuals nicely complement the dub horns that echo as they take turns soloing (through a delay pedal) for the last half of the song. I'm a big fan of such extended instrumentals, and very pleased with how Grey visually represented the dub jazz that the horn section improvised so beautifully.