Updates? What updates??

So I said in my last post that I was going to get caught up on all of the CDs I've been sent during the last few weeks while I was on the road. Well, you've heard about what happens to the best laid plans, right? A few days into the trip, my 4 year-old daughter put a CD (Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang, one of her current favorites other than the usual "daddy songs") into the CD player. No problem with that, right? There wouldn't have been, except that there was already another CD in the player at the time... and it's not a multiple disc player. So we ended up being without tunes for a while there, and I was too busy with shows to stop anywhere to get it fixed until a few days ago.

But in the first few days of the trip and over the last few days I was able to listen to some discs, so there will be some new updates arriving shortly, including features on John Hadfield, Mr. Billy, Little Nashville and Barry Louis Polisar. And I still have a big stack of CDs to get to, so there should be more coming soon, though I'm not going to make any promises this time!

As for the Colorado trip, it was a really great time. There were so many incredibly enthusiastic audiences, and I can't wait to go back as soon as I can. I will be sure not to schedule so many shows together like that, though. It had been a few years since I've been to Colorado and I forgot how the altitude can affect your energy. I was halfway through my first song on the first day when I thought to myself, "Uh oh." But thankfully, I was well stocked with Powerbars and made it through okay.

I think that there is some kind of magical "show must go on" power that invigorates performers. There have been times in the past when I've been really sick or exhausted and felt like I could barely move, and I had to really force myself to make it to the show at all, but once I got out to actually perform, I felt fine, or at least, fine enough to do the show alright. And then, once the show is over, the tired sickness comes right back, but there's some kind of adrenalin thing that makes it work out for the show itself. I know other performers have told me the same thing. Knock on wood, but I can only recall one time in my life when I had to cancel a show for being sick, when my voice was completely lost from laryngitis and hadn't come back at all the day before the show. I hated to cancel, but I felt like I needed to give the venue enough warning to find someone else. And as it turned out, there was a rockslide on the interstate the next morning when I would have driven out there, so I probably wouldn't have made it anyway. Perhaps my body somehow knew that and said, "Ah, forget the show-must-go-on thing... you're staying in bed, dude."

Anyway, stay tuned for some new posts, and also Part 2 of The Idea Tree, which I've been working on here and there.