"A Space Filled with Moving"
Many of you may not know about this element of my life, but in addition to writing music without words, I occasionally also write words without music. For the last few years, I’ve been kicking around a long essay called “A Space Filled with Moving," about birds, earthquakes, water, home, loneliness, wind, identity, and what it feels like to be driving around the country all the time. It’s one of the strangest and most personal things I’ve written, and I couldn’t be more psyched that the wonderful people at Literary North have decided to publish a limited, hand-bound, letterpressed run of it as part of their Little Dipper chapbook series this fall.
Each one of these little books is handmade: they're hand-stitched, the covers are letterpressed, and the interior has been beautifully designed and illustrated by an artist in Ireland. The presales sold out within a couple of hours(!), but Literary North gamely committed to making another batch in time for a release event in Thetford, Vermont on December 6th, where I'll be reading from the essay and playing some songs and about which you can learn more and RSVP here. I hope you can make it!
In the meantime, here's an interview I did with a writer at Junction Magazine this week, in which I talked a lot about the essay and what's inside it. They asked some really great, thoughtful questions, and the page is also spangled with a bunch of my landscape photos, in case you're into that. That link is here.
- -
We're coming around to the end of fall in New England, which is pretty much my favorite time to be here, but I also spent part of the season on an extremely gratifying tour around the Midwest, which looked like this, this, and this. In September, I also played my last shows for a while with my dear pals in the Ghost of Paul Revere (a few pictures from that here) after spending a wildly fun year running around the world making lots of noise with them. I'm going to miss their songs and their company, but I'm also very excited to be able to focus completely on solo and freelance projects again.
On that note, please consider following me on Spotify if you don’t already—there is going to be some new music showing up there relatively soon, and that’s the best way to ensure that you’ll know about it when it happens.
- -
I have a few more shows coming up to round out 2019, starting this weekend in New Hampshire and Vermont:
12/1 COLEBROOK, NH -- Tillotson Center
12/2 BRATTLEBORO, VT -- House Concert
12/6 THETFORD, VT -- Thetford Community Center (A Space Filled with Moving release event -- RSVP here)
12/7 DENVER, CO -- Private Concert
12/9 DENVER, CO -- Denver House
12/16 NEW YORK, NY -- Rockwood Music Hall, accompanying Steph Jenkins
12/17 BOSTON, MA -- Sofar Boston
12/29 PORTLAND, ME -- One Longfellow Square (supporting GoldenOak)
Details for these December shows (and all my others -- there's some interesting international stuff happening in January, for instance!) are always available at my site.
- - -
Finally, here's a great new book by my friend Nick, here's a record I've recently been obsessed with, here's an essay about Thoreau by my friend Ben (in which I make a brief cameo appearance as the "traveling musician friend on his way to Maine" who exasperatedly tells the obviously sick narrator to go see a doctor instead of climbing Katahdin), and here's another book I read recently and really liked.
Thanks, as always, for all your support, everybody. I hope you had great Thanksgivings and that late fall is settling into early winter pleasantly for all of you. And again! My essay releases on December 6th and you are encouraged to read that interview where I ramble at length about it here.
Hope to see you somewhere out there.
Thanks again, and all best from New England,
Ben