ELLE MACHO IS HERE

Elle Macho is the most powerful band of noise in the world today. Combining elements of the melody, aggression and sexiness, they triumphs each time and gains the multiple contests throughout the world. The members of It Macho are Butterfly Boucher, David Mead and Lindsay Jamieson. Their best songs are about the love at the 21st century. You will love the Elle Macho.

http://www.myspace.com/ellemacho

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UNGLUED IN PASTE

I have a piece in the 'Unglued' section of the September issue of Paste Magazine concerning some of my Summertime activities. Check it out on newsstands any day now or go to Paste's online home http://www.pastemagazine.com/.

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DAVID FEATURED ON NPR MUSIC

David's song 'Astronaut' was selected as one of the saddest road songs of all time by NPR's Stephen Thompson. Get the skinny here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93563053

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WELL, THAT WAS QUITE A WEEK

NYP, WUS, CHV, EWR, CDG, PND, DUB, JFK, BOS, ATL, LGA: This is not a list of abbreviations for communicable diseases, nor a kindergarten roll call from 17th-century Holland, nor even a prescription for migraine medication, but the call letters for all of the points of egress I have visited in the past week. Airports, train stations, one memorable encounter with the Greyhound corporation and several journeys on a private coach have nearly been smeared into one long blur but I, your unfaithful diarist, will attempt to sort it all out, for your pleasure.

The life one dreams of will become very real. Currently sedated in a nougahyde faux-moderne seat at the A-16 gate of the Delta terminal in Boston, 7:20 AM, I am still reeling from the spin of it all. In fact, as I was just attempting to explain to the shuttle driver on the way from the hotel, I am barely here. From the rearview mirror, he regarded me warily, as if examining a horse turd cured in a butter box.

Early one Autumn Friday, after two fine weeks spent in Brooklyn, I found myself in a car crossing the Manhattan Bridge, my tall and well-hung compatriot, Wijnand Jansveld (who, coincidentally, attended kindergarten in Holland) crammed into the seat beside me. Upon arriving at Penn Station, we executed our usual pre-train routine- I procuring tickets from the automated kiosk, he purchasing breakfast sandwiches and coffee from a diner on 33rd St.- with startling efficiency.

Once aboard Amtrak's Carolinian service, we began rolling toward Washington, DC. Without a doubt, luck and good fortune were on our side. That night, The Dutchman and I were to perform in the musical conflagration of our dear friend, Emerson Hart. As readers of these pages may recall, Wijnand plays a mean bass guitar, and I, for reasons that will be explained later, have begun tinkling ivories and singing background vocals. The profundity of it all washed over me in a wave of pure satisfaction as I chewed my sausage, egg and cheese sandwich. The beginning of another adventure was nigh. Like hot steel ejaculate seeking its fleshy purchase, The Carolinian rocketed forth from the Hudson River tunnel and onto New Jersey.

Upon attaining Union Station in DC, we carried our luggage and instruments to Emerson's tour bus and set off for Delaware. After spanning the Chesapeake Bay at a glorious height, the road from the capitol to Dewey Beach quickly narrowed to two cracked lanes. The meek cornfields of The First State provided a calm back drop for our ruminations and cigarette consumption, the latter helping to offset a questionable odor emanating from one of our party, a tour manager called Bridget. He, a toadish man-child given to long verbal exclamations about very little, would spend the duration of the trip plagued by malfunctions of the lower intestine and their pursuant consequences.

The bus rolled on. Soon, like a whore flashing her wares for all passerby's, Dewey Beach revealed itself. After a brief sound check at the decrepit beach club we were to perform in, we braved a slanting rain to reach a bayside eatery that specialized in rubbery tuna and and fried snails. Still hungry, we took the stage in front of a capacity crowd awash in crap beer and limited vocabulary. The set was electric, and the buffoons were suitably stunned.

After repairing to our Belgian coach for a restorative whiskey, The Dutchman and I wandered back into the pitiful throng in hopes of hearing quality rock music. Instead, we found ourselves assaulted by the unbearable caterwauling of Live, a four-piece modern rock outfit from rural Pennsylvania known for dancing half-naked around bonfires in promotional videos. For the maintenance of good standing in my current employ, I shall refrain from a full description beyond confirmation of the band's continued existence and its irrepressible penchant for shittery.

On Saturday, we awoke in the pleasant burg of Charlottesville, Virginia. In spite of an unexpectedly vicious hangover, I was able to participate in a long rehearsal and the consumption of Indian food and frozen custard. Sunday was similarly relaxed, its only down point being the denial of passage on an oversold bus meant to carry me back to Washington D.C., where my train to New York awaited. The emotions that accompany the refusal of service by the Greyhound corporation need not be detailed here. I humbly carried my luggage to the nearest tavern and waited for my compatriots to complete a suspiciously homoerotic tour of Monticello. Eventually, I was picked up and taken to a barbecue organized by our gracious host, Philip Bowen.


At 6:58 on Tuesday morning, I stood outside the Charlottesville train station, enjoying a steaming cup of Hardee's coffee and a cigarette. In the distance, a lone engine approached on the far track, eventually coming to idle directly opposite my position. As if on cue, a portly African-American fellow in a poncho waddled through the parking lot, across the tracks and straight up to the conductor's window. He made a few obscure hand gestures, to which the conductor replied with a thumbs-up sign. Then he calmly climbed the stairs and entered the cabin, settling into his perch with a kingly grin. The engine hummed back to life and continued in its original direction, patiently and with great deliberation.



That sunny afternoon, after the seven hour train journey, I spent three hours with my wife in Brooklyn. We sat in our garden and talked about things. I watched the afternoon sun play on her swannish neck and thought of Paris, a city that was once to be the location of our third date.

The train that connects the regular New Jersey Transit service with the Newark airport was not running that night. After waiting 45 minutes for a hapless shuttle bus to arrive, I was forced to break my preferred gentlemanly gait in order to make my Air India flight to Charles De Gaulle.

This was my first experience aboard Air India. I must admit that I was unprepared for the overpowering smell of curry wafting throughout the plane, not to mention the seats that appeared to have been last upholstered in 1978. Regardless, the flight was quite enjoyable. The friendly flight attendants (one of whom insisted that I sample three different Indian lagers) were all colorfully garbed in saris revealing the most enticing flashes of almond belly, and the lamb curry was the best airline meal I have ever tasted. (Exception: Before September 11, 2001, I was often bumped up to Business Class on American Airlines because of my Platinum status. These and other trappings of corporate bloat are behind me now, mostly unnoticed, but I do occasionally miss the warm nuts and poached salmon served high over the Atlantic on those lonely transatlantic journeys. I do, occasionally, sound like a complete bastard.)

After landing, I took the Metro from CDG to the 20th Arrondissement where my efficiency hotel awaited me. I was met by Raphael Gil, proprietor of Minimum, my French record label. While waiting for my hotel room to be cleaned, we had a coffee at a cafe down the street and reviewed my itinerary for the next day, the first activities of which were to begin in four hours. I was duly impressed by young Gil's ambition in scheduling promotional activities, although slightly glazed from jet lag and lack of Pain Chocolat. I soon retired to my hotel room for a few hours of restless half-sleep and unfocused masturbation.

Later that afternoon, I followed two French women, Delphine and Alise, up a small mountain in the middle of Parc des Buttes-Chaumont to a gazebo on which I performed two songs for an Internet show. Afterwards, I made it through two more thoroughly engaging interviews before beginning to wobble. On the way back to the hotel, I stopped at a grocery and purchased some brie, a small packet of ham, a baguette and a bottle of Bordeaux. And a chocolate bar. I stumbled into my hotel room, ate and fell asleep.

I awoke at 3:00 AM and finished a wonderful book about the Dutch colonization of Manhattan. At 8:30, I met Raphael in the hotel lobby to go and rehearse with my French band. After a bus ride and an uncomfortably long walk, we reached the studios, where Alex, Nicholas and Franxtois were waiting to get down to business. And they did.

Thus began a brief and beautiful period of nothing and nothing at all and everything, in a way. Well, I was in Paris, attempting to not particularly care about it but knowing that it should and could be significant. The pragmatic working man side of me continued to remind that it was only a job, that I had been before and would be again, but the ninny ninny side that seems to be responsible for most decisions was fully swept away in the dreamy abstract element. I was exhausted, sweetly, removed from the weight of responsibility that comes with being a fully-conscious adult. Nothing really mattered that much, and as such it was easy to execute the ridiculous task of rehearsing a band of strangers for a gig. To sit in a cafe full of people not speaking my language and almost feel, as if by intonation, the string of some sympathetic chord, that I understood everything perfectly. Because I did.

At the gig I felt unencumbered by the usual weight of expectation, shouldering it. Who were these people? They had all showed up to see if anything interesting was going on. I and we did it for them, the uncontested hit of the night. I drank beer and spoke pidgeon French afterward. Later, I was rewarded with a highly unsuccessful car ride back to the hotel by my new friend Fred. He managed to stretch a 10 minute drive into a 45 minute adventure. It was funny.

The next morning I was up at 6:00 to meet Mariette from Minimum, my escort to Inter Radio, the last performance of my trip. Mariette was a wispy thing, a bit of a string bean in American terms but decidedly more elegant, more like the neck of a crystal vase. We took the tube to the center of Paris, then boarded a bus for the rest of the ride. We cruised down the Rue de Rivoli in early Sunday morning overcastness and I laughed because it was the only time on my trip that I had managed to glimpse any of the touristy sites of Paris.

Which made me think of my wife. During our initial courting period, most of which had taken place during a month I spent in England, via the phone and the Internet, I had invited her to meet me in Paris. Just the type of trembling audacity that I would have attempted then, unsure of myself but in my motions, attempting to make things come true. She, in a manner that I have come to love and respect her for, gracefully declined. As the bus wobbled and swerved along the Seine I wondered what might have become of us if she accepted. Three days in Paris, versus a honeymoon in New Orleans. What will ever be said of the thin, gray air beyond the Eiffel Tower and the realm of possibilities.

We arrived at the Inter Radio building in plenty of time. There was an audition for the National Opera, a flurry of Frenchwomen in black gowns tittering up and down the deco-tiled corridors, all warm-up scales and hand gestures. The other musical guest on the show was a teenage harpist who also sang in French, an odd but endearing combination that ended up sounding like something between Sarah McLaughlin and Gillian Welch. I was accompanied by a famous pianist on "Human Nature." Unfortunately, his accomplished technique was not sufficient to save him from overplaying quite a bit and screwing up the ending.

Afterwards, Raphael's brother Frederick rushed me to the airport. He spoke little English but drove like a bat out of hell down the motorways in and around Paris, which was awfully fun. I had a layover in Dublin during which I temporarily misplaced my ticket and nearly had to purchase a new one. Upon arrival at JFK I went outside for a cigarette before boarding the Air Train back to Carroll Gardens.

I love that I can go from Paris to within three blocks of my front door without ever asking anyone for anything.

Natalie and I ate something somewhere that night. I can't remember, and it makes me wonder about how many homecomings and departures that have slipped my mind, and what, if anything, they mean. I have spent so much energy coming and going in a practical and deliberate manner at this point that I cannot be responsible for the delay in emotional registry. I wonder if, as an old man, all of these lost moments will hit me at once and cause a fatal heart attack, the sheer force of a life lived well and obtusely.

The next morning I left again, somewhere around 6:30, to catch a train to Boston, where I was to rejoin the Emerson Hart tour. I took a bus from the South Street station to the PNC pavilion, one of many faceless amphitheaters we would populate on the tour. I arrived several hours before the band's bus and passed the time in the catering tent, my oversize sunglasses and V-neck sweater drawing a few unwanted stares from the local crew.

That night we played a rather inconsequential performance to a crowd that could not have been woken up with a good dousing of battery acid, let alone some fine pop music. I proceeded to get rather liquored with Whynot, whom I had missed. I recall an altercation with an oversized audience member, the vast grayness of the Boston Harbor fog rolling in, blurring the lines of everything around everything. We stayed at a Doubletree Hotel that night.

Which brings me back to the beginning of this, Logan Airport and a flight I was not excited about getting on. The residual exhaustion had built up to the point of dementia, as I knew it would- none of this particularly grueling itinerary was set up without approval- and I was beyond the point of making sense to myself, although remarkably coherent to other people.

There is not much more to this story than nothing which never really seems to make much difference to anyone about anything.

1:28 PM - 1 Comments - 10 Kudos - Add Comment

MY LIFE AS A DOG: AUTUMN 2007

MY LIFE AS A DOG

This is not where I usually start from. Physically, emotionally. It seems that journaling has always come easiest to me whilst traveling and imbibing, so to address you from the bohemian confines of my home in Brooklyn, sober as a pedophilic priest, seems entirely unnatural.

But somehow appropriate. There has been a whole lot of this fairly sober home-bodying going on in 2007, a year of severe and fantastic fluxuation, full of fraudulent lease schemes and urban tomfoolery. David Mead, Inc., in case you hadn't noticed, has been in a bit of a holding pattern. I thought I might explain why.

I'm just going to grab a beer first.

This afternoon I went to the pet store to purchase wet and dry dog food. I took the industrial short cut by the peeling factories of the Gowanus Canal, up the little strip where Natalie's studio is located. The sunlight slanting off the buildings and the cool air, just a hint of moisture to it; Wow, I nearly wept. I love it here, I love it here so much. Most of my previous associations with New York were steeped in the volatile chemical compound known as Manhattan; I did not know that such an idyllic existence as this could exist a mere 20 minute train ride from that volcanic core. But it does, and it does well. We having fishing poles, not to mention a garden that we nurtured from a molding pile of construction rubble to an oasis that Whynot, upon his first visit, nearly mistook for some green-thumb bohemian enclave in New Orleans. This September, I walked outside and picked squishy orange orbs from our peach tree, cut them up, and ate them, right on my oatmeal. One day, the last peach fell to the ground and orgasmically ruptured right before my eyes.

I am not boasting here; I just feel very fortunate and surreal, fortunately surreal, surrealistically fortunate... and I want to share. Shit.

So it has not been quite as easy to hit the road and, um, take a few for the team as it was last year. This shit is expensive. And, truthfully, I am not entirely convinced that my artistic output of 2006, the rather elaborate Tangerine, was made for these times. I ended up working harder on it than anything I've ever done, not only running the record label it was released on but also attempting to establish myself as a dependable road act that could show up in any town, kick ass and take names without the slightest regard for the sanctity of the project. Like Gene Hackman in Hoosiers (or The Royal Tenenbaums, for that matter), I was not fully prepared for the enormity of the task.

It was a noble, if slightly misguided, aspiration; but somewhere along the way, cracks began to appear. I have recently begun to think of it as a tempestuous a flagging relationship; things begin hunky dory, but as you progress through life with a person, you inevitably change and morph. Sometimes the other person is into it, sometimes not. I had a grand idea and was hell-bent on making it work. I don't know when it became apparent that I might have made a premature move, that most people coming to the shows, probably just beginning to get familiar with Indiana, were not particularly interested in calliopes and one-man approximations of prog rock. My spiral went inward, and I began to resent the very people paying to see me perform for not wanting to hear what I wanted to play. My old friend whiskey reappeared, with jaw-dropping consistency. Intimacy can breed as much contempt as good will, when forced.

The music business is a service industry. Someone in my position can kid themselves into believing that the audience has a responsibility to accomodate them, but at the end of the day. the audience is a paying customer, and has no obligation except to demand and receive entertainment. It is a fortunate and rare air to be breathing when an artist can even pretend to be engaging in such a relationship, especially with their own material. An unflagging commitment to a particular piece of work gets you points for respect, but doesn't mean poop to someone who has showed up to have a particular and particularly different experience.

Back in February, my friend Emerson Hart called to see if I could fill on keyboards and background vocals for a few gigs he had coming up. I did, and enjoyed it quite a bit. We decided to extend the engagement and, as of this writing, I am still in his employ as an ivory tinkler and background vocalist. I could never have predicted that I might be doing this a year ago, but, like a milky German beer waitress, the opportunity presented itself, and I am very happy to have taken it. A lot of the gigs this year were radio shows. Going into the belly of the beast that is commercial radio can be a harrowing experience, one that I had encountered on promotional runs for my first album but not very much since. I am continually amazed at how much the business has changed, even since then. The goals of the individuals who work at these stations have very little if anything to do with 'breaking' music; they are generally under very stressful mandates from the corporate powers-that-be to produce high ratings, win market shares and, by doing so, sway advertisers to their bandwidth. To go into their offices and actually play good music for them seemed surprisingly novel; apparently, most artists don't do that sort of thing very much anymore.

More importantly, I have learned a lot from watching Emerson do the work. This is the kind of thing that involves shaking a lot of hands and laughing at many bad jokes. In my sorry attempts at it circa "World Of A King," I struggled with feelings of humiliation and futility, absolutely convinced that I was soiling the lily white underwear of my artistic integrity with every disingenuous handshake. Emerson, however, has an uncanny ability to remove his ego from the situation and communicate with people on their level. It is a skill I admire but have realized, once and for all, that I do not possess, at least on the level required to propel a single into the Top 20 of a radio chart (as Emerson has). I have enjoyed the comparably luxurious experience of watching from the wings while sharpening my skills on the keyboard.

And I get paid. It would be irresponsible to not mention that the fiduciary incentives of a salaried gig are quite helpful with supporting a New York lifestyle. Reflecting on my income stream over the past three years is precarious work. Truthfully, I am not quite sure how I have managed. Truthfully, I have not always managed. This fact was brought into sharp relief at the beginning of the year when Natalie and I were forced to drain most of the surplus accrued from the sale of our house in Nashville in order to pay for the inadequacies of our bastard landlord. I think I made around $4,000.00 dollars in the first four months of 2007. We were saved by Natalie's burgeoning business, but the Wall Street Journal profile I was counting on never came through. It was time to ante up and pay the piper.

That said, I am incredibly thankful to still be making a living playing music at all. In addition, I continue to write for Paste and American Songwriter magazines. This, while not exactly a financial boon, offers an outlet for heretofore superfluous skills that would otherwise be going to waste. (Side note: The November issue of Paste contains a fairly substantial article of mine in the Scrapbook section. I am pretty happy with it.) I also receive a lot of excellent new music for free.

Which, in a roundabout way, has begun to finally stoke the fires towards the completion of a new project. Right now, the opus in the works is a double album of sorts, not in the classical sense of a fold-out vinyl product but at least two albums worth of material. One will be quiet and one will be loud; all of the songs on one album will answer those on the other to some degree. (At this point, I am assuming that Liz Phair will probably not be completing the song-for-song 'response' album to Mine and Yours that she promised me back in 2000, so I had better get something cooking on my own.)

I am scheduled to be landing back in Brooklyn smack in the middle of December, at which point I shall commence putting my nose to the grindstone on the music while ignoring the holidays completely. Thankfully, the anonymous nature of New York City generally allows for this sort of thing to occur without too much recrimination or guilt regarding whatever fleeting moments of happiness might have been missed. And since 2007 brought about the end of my casual acknowledgement of divine offspring (of divinity in any form, actually) and a serious fucking dearth of excess resources to be spent on gifts, the boycott seems appropriate. For once, I am not even considering running off to Belize and the comfort of tanned hides and large insects. It's Brooklyn for me, baby: Brooklyn, you sultry bitch, you brownstone Bonita, you nougahyde tar pit. My kingdom come, my will be done, on earth in a tub of resin.

12:39 PM - 5 Comments - 12 Kudos - Add Comment

DAGBREEK SE EIFFELKOR TAKES "GIRL ON THE ROOF" OVER THE TOP

Please take a moment and view the video near the bottom of the page. Our one and only Craig Smith unearthed this nugget from the YouTube morass. Words fail me.

David

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TANGERINE RELEASED IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND

Tangerine was released in France and Switzerland by Minimum Music yesterday. To celebrate, I will be playing a show in Paris on September 19th and doing a more extensive tour early next year. I hope to see all of my new French en Swiss friends there....

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NATALIE COX MEAD ART OPENING @ CLARABELLA 8/23/07
Category: Art and Photography

Natalie's first art opening in New York, "Night Gardening," is on August 23rd. It is comprised of these amazing little pieces that she has been doing in charcoal on wood. I am very excited about them and would really like for you to be there. (Natalie has done the art for my last three album covers, amongst a lot of other stuff) The show will be up from Aug. 21 to Aug. 30th; the gallery is located at 279 E. Houston St. between Suffolk and Clinton Streets.

8:35 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

DES MOINES, PARTY OF ONE
Current mood: awake
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural

I have no good explanation for being awake at this hour. There was a business engagement this evening in Des Moines, Iowa, an unheralded city of greatness that was all too happy to accept and treasure the offerings of myself and my comrades. Upon returning to my hotel room I commenced to drinking three Heineken beers which, set against the adrenaline of the aforementioned engagement, failed to make a dent. By the time the consumption and its requisite internet trawling were complete, the clock read 1:27 AM. Knowing that a wake up call for my morning flight would be tinkling the digital ivories of my phone in two and a half hours, I decided to stick it out, to pull the 'all-nighter.'

Which leaves me here, falling asleep in a chair, finishing off a tiny pot of hotel room coffee, the effects of which are tingling in my nostrils, not unlike a bad line of cocaine. Fuck it. But I do not have the strength to raise that particular fist in the air anymore, Martha. I feel the heat of exhaustion delayed rising out of my skin like a feverish fever, the withering realization that I will probably forget to pack the belt that is currently tourniqueting a wet wash rag around the smoke detector, less my conservative right wing donor hosts at the Marriot discover, by way of a building wide fire alarm, that I have been clandestinely flaunting their 'no smoking' policy in the comfort of my pre-purchased hideaway.

The upright phallic might of Midwestern cities, the brunt of it all. This morning's flight between Des Moines and Minneapolis will be executed aboard the smallest plane I have ever flown on. I landed here 18 hours ago, I know. And in spite of an impressive number of frequent flyer miles logged over the past eight years, I will tell you, my hand on Gideon's Bible, that I thought I might throw up. As in 'puke in a bag.'

Tomorrow, my wife will look upon me with consternation and pity as I describe the mangled underbelly of this stupid decision. She will trace the dynamics of the story with her kind eyes, understanding the musical that I am auditioning for but having little desire to see it again. We have had this conversation before.

2:45. I can feel the rhythm of my thoughts and prose becoming fairly predictable at this point. Normally, I would stop, give it all up to another night that I have written about several times in other, more melodically sympathetic contexts.

Blogging is so stupid. Really. You would think that the opportunities afforded me in the realm of public display might have cleansed the need for this sort of thing from my system by now. Apparently not.

When I was 16, I worked at a Champ's Sporting Goods store at the Green Hills Mall in Nashville. I had a very kind manager named Brian, he was from Detroit. He used to talk about pulling all-nighters in the store, rearranging stock and racks of sport clothing. I think he did not ever invite me, probably because of my age. Perhaps these nights were just excuses to get the female employees drunk enough to fornicate on boxes of Reeboks. Probably not, but the mind does wander.

My father celebrated his 65th birthday today. Because of various distractions I was unable to call him before his bed time. He is on a cruise of the Eastern Atlantic Seaboard with his wife, and I don't know if his phone works, anyway. Here is a snippet from his last maritime report, dated yesterday, I believe:

"Ahoy Maties!
Wow! I wish you could all be sitting here with me this very moment! I am sitting here at the computer looking out on the harbor of St. Michaels, a quaint little village on the upper Chesapeake Bay. The sun is just beginning to rise. There are beautiful sail boats and fishing boats in the harbor, set against a tree lined shore with houses that were built probably 150 - 200 years ago! St. Michaels was settled sometime in the late 1600s. Can you imagine! The village main street through town is probably about two miles long and filled with quaint little stores. And these are not little tourist towns. They are "working" villages of trade as well as summer homes. We were told Vice President Cheney and Donald Rumsfield both own homes here. We are hoping to run into them today at the coffee shop (Vicki promised to be nice to them). One of the benefits of this ship is that its size allows it to pull into small ports like this that larger ships cannot fit into. That has been the case at Oxford, Cambridge, Tangier, Williamsburg - all small towns on the bay. They have all been small villages not hardly big enough to be on the map, yet so incredibly rich with history from the earliest days of our country. We spent the whole day in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia Tuesday. We toured the British governors mansion, walked through houses built in the early 1700s, took a carriage ride - just a beautiful day. Yesterday we spent the whole day sailing north up the Chesapeake. This bay is so huge, we often could not see any land. We spent yesterday afternoon flying kites on the upper deck as we sailed to St. Michaels. Lunch on board was my first experience shelling and eating (a little) of these four little crabs who sat on my plate staring at me. Not my favorite meal, but a new experience. The food continues to be awesome. So all is continuing to go great. We are having a wonderful time - full of food and activity, but restful as well. We are here the rest of the day, and sail tonight for Annapolis, then back into Baltimore tomorrow night. We depart the ship early Saturday morning and should be back in Nashville Saturday afternoon. We will be ready for that too. Look forward to seeing everyone and sharing the pictures and memories. Love to all. "

Last year he came out on tour with me in the Midwest. Oddly enough, we had a day off in Des Moines. I recall him being just as excited about it as he sounds regarding his current surroundings. He is an optimist. At meals, sometimes on he and his wife's beautiful screened-in porch in Nashville, we tend to steer the conversation towards emotional, as opposed to political, content. Happy Birthday, Pop.

3:05. Now that I have pimped out my father's semi-personal correspondence for public consumption, I see few honorable options left for this missive. Today I return to NYC to work with my friend Andrew on the music for a major coffee manufacturer's commercial. They have a new slogan that I am not allowed to reveal. I cannot remember it at the moment, anyway. I think that Natalie and I have some sort of engagement for the evening, the details of which have also slipped my mind. Along with the rest of the universe, I am pretty revved up about the Sopranos finale Sunday night. There is an Italian party at Will's house to celebrate, the details of which I must remember to impart to my wife.

3:07. Am copying and pasting this to the word processor to check for egregious spelling errors.

3:08. Allright, 100%, except for the usual conflicts regarding proper nouns and machinery.

I shall face down the rest of this morning alone. The sun rises early over these flat plains, anyway; I am reminded of certain Scandanavian adventures of years past. I suppose a shower and a good cleaning of this room are in order. Further inspection reveals that I have yet to unpack.

Thank you for all the kind comments regarding my facial hair. I suppose that it is a right of passage most males have to traverse at some point in their lives. I am in Viking territory, after all.

11:32 PM - 9 Comments - 18 Kudos - Add Comment

DAVID'S DYLAN FEATURED AT ROLLING STONE.COM

Check out a snippet of David's recent performance at the Rolling Stone Bob Dylan Birthday Party in NYC here.

4:42 AM - 3 Comments - 6 Kudos - Add Comment