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Making Music

It’s been a long few months since Collin and I returned from our time on the road. Don’t worry, we aren’t dead. Instead, we’ve been cooped up in the studio. Now, I’m so proud and honored to release this first single from my upcoming EP, Suitcase and Guitar in Hand. Each song on this new album attempts to capture a facet of life on the road. This one is about driving West. If you like it, check out the free download in the description. Thank you all for following us on our journey-- I can’t wait to share this next chapter with you.

The full EP will be out September 25!

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42. Back to the Garden

In the summer of 1969 nearly half a million young people gathered for the Woodstock Music and Art Fair in the unassuming little farm town of Bethel, New York. Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Santana, Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead, The Who, The Band, Jimi Hendrix–to name a few– all took to the stage over the course of that rainy August weekend. The drove of young concertgoers were witnesses to, and participants in, cultural history; one of those young people was my mother.

“So, what was it like being at Woodstock?” everyone asks her.

“It was so rainy! I lost my shoes in the mud and after that I just wanted to go home.”

 My mother assures me she was the only person at Woodstock not on drugs. Then again, while hippies were bathing naked in the water nearby, she was overwhelmed at going barefoot–maybe she really was the only one.

I’ve always teased her for this, but I won’t anymore; when I finally set my feet on that hallowed ground in the Catskills I sank into the porous hillside. Collin and I didn’t mind that it had just drizzled before we reached Bethel, New York. We knew that it had rained hard at Woodstock in ‘69, and it seemed right that it should rain when we visited. But I didn’t think about the mud:

“Oh, crap!” I shouted as my feet were swallowed by the muck.

Collin, whose Eagle Scout preparedness can be absolutely insufferable from time to time, pointed at his all-terrain hiking boots and said “no problem for me!” and kept walking jauntily down the hill. My canvas Tom’s didn’t stand a chance. I took them off and kept walking towards the outline of the stage. I was peeved for a minute until I thought back to the story my mother always tells, and about her young, bare footprints that I was walking in nearly half a century later.

It’s unimaginable that anything so loud as a rock festival ever happened on this pastoral farmland. The only hint is the rectangular footprint of the stage that remains at the bottom of the hill. Birds provide the only interludes now. Collin and I stood where Hendrix had performed his legendary, searing electric guitar rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner.” Every 8th grade kid who’s ever picked up a guitar knows it. Even after six weeks of practice, I’m not any better at this sort of thing– my mind shoots back an error message when I try to comprehend the history made in places like this.

There were few people here, but they were pilgrims, too. A man in his 60s pointed across the field to where he had stood in the crowd; his daughter, older than me, followed the line shooting from his finger towards the empty grass. There was a sad aura about this place. I thought back to the hope that the young people here had had–hope that humanity had finally found the secret to cooperation in rock music and love beads. It was a hope that had gone back to the Transcendentalists, to Blithedale, and further back to early civilization, even. Yet, the concert ended, everyone went home, most cut their shaggy hair and abandoned communes for houses in the suburbs. Now the birds sing over this pasture that, for a few rainy days, felt the weight of 400,000 feet, with all the lofty idealism they’d carried there. It’s no wonder the ground sinks when you step on it.

Collin and I, like all those young hippies, left Bethel. We drove for a little under five hours towards New Hampshire. On the way, we passed Holy Cross. We sat around the dinner table with my parents and Collin’s sister, Emily, telling stories we’d gathered on the road. We talked well into the night, and I’d have stayed up until dawn– arriving home, the fatigue I’d felt on the road had vanished. Finally, I fell asleep in a warm bed, holding on as tight as I could to what had just happened the past six weeks– imagining, foolishly, it might not be like a remembered dream when I woke back up.

Thankfully, this is not the end. In fact, this is just the beginning of the second half of this project– now, I hit the studio to compose an original album based on our experiences traversing more than 30 American states. As we transition, I want to thank all who have shown such rapt interest in our adventures, so far. I’m especially grateful to Nico Zottos, the photo editor and web designer for the project, and Rachel Cole, who oversees the Instagram account. Check back soon for updates on the collection of songs, Suitcase and Guitar in Hand!

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July 4, 2015- Looking down on the site of the 1969 Woodstock Festival in Bethel, New York

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July 4, 2015- Standing on the foundation of the Woodstock stage where Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Grateful Dead and many more performed in 1969 in Bethel, NY.

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July 4, 2015- An empty wooden building near the site of Woodstock in the Catskills

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40. & 41. A Lot to Laugh, A Train to Cry

Three days without a shower; four days without reliable internet; Dollar Menu three meals a day; 8-10 hours a day on the road-- it's a recipe for madness, but we're almost home. This past week we have driven straight across the country. We have spoken to no one for more than five minutes but each other. Somehow, we have not fought, never even raised our voices, really. Instead, this Hyundai Santa Fe has become a little two-man ascetic community. We know without asking when the other needs a break from driving. We have an unspoken mutual understanding that both of us get edgy when we're tired and hungry-- we always let it go. Professor Klinghard, the head of the Summer Research Program that funded this trip, half-joked that I should be careful talking this long trip with a good friend-- we might not be friends by the time we got back.

Collin and I are still friends because we laughed-- a lot. We've probably lowered our comic standards; that, or our lowest senses of humor have been drawn out by seclusion. We've kept our spirits up by: listening to NPR and taking turns imitating Robert Siegel's voice, finding music to make each other laugh (Collin came across a recording of Ozzie Osbourne singing "Stayin' Alive"-- it was pure gold); plumbing our memories from college and even high school.

Brian, the drummer for our band back home called Black Agnes, helped us make it through the squashed green flatness of Iowa with a collection of mix CDs. The first two CDs were pretty straight forward: "CD 1: Classics," "CD 2: Modern." The third CD, however, was ominously labeled "Have Fun." Each track was more ridiculous than the last: Thousand Miles, Barbie Girl, that "nooma nooma" song from ten years ago, Party in the USA, Friday. We belly laughed our way through the expansive cornfields as we imagined Brian pulling our legs, musically, from far away in New England. I didn't have siblings growing up; this might be the longest I've spent in uninterrupted isolation with a single person. Like most twenty-somethings, I've wondered what marriage must be like. How do two people spend five years living together, never mind fifty? It's pretty astounding when you stop and think about it. Married people have told me the various "secrets": find someone who believes what you do, someone with common interests. Assuming hanging out with Collin for five weeks is a general analogue for human relationships, I think I'm going to start looking for a woman who, above all else, makes me laugh. Without laughter, we'd have been sunk before we'd hit New Jersey. Adrenaline is in our veins now-- we are getting close. Maybe that's why the driving gets easier every day. It's sad to know this part of the project is almost over, but I can't wait to start writing music inspired by this trip over the coming month. Collin and I got the treat of staying in a hotel for a night. Homeward bound!

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July 2, 2015- A horse hitched in a K Mart parking lot in Michigan...

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July 2, 2015- A tractor drives by in Illinois

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July 2, 2015-Joliet Prison in Illinois, where Jake is incarcerated in the movie The Blues Brothers

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July 1, 2015-Bison at Scout’s Rest Ranch, the ranch established by Buffalo Bill in the late 19th century

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July 1, 2015- Buffalo Bill’s house (Second Empire Style) at Scout’s Rest Ranch in North Platte, Nebraska, built in 1886

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July 1, 2015- Buffalo Bill’s ranch in North Platte, Nebraska

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June 30, 2015- Horse and rider at the Buffalo Bill State Recreation Center in North Platte, Nebraska

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June 30, 2015- Morning at the KOA Campground in Rock Springs, Wyoming

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38 & 39. And Grace Will Lead Me Home

Fireflies sparked in the open field. I watched them from my folding chair near our tent in North Platte, Nebraska. Collin was in bed and I was on the phone with a friend back in Eastern Standard Time. I got up and started rifling through the trunk of the car with the phone still pressed against my ear. What’s that noise?“ my friend asked, hearing the car door clunk shut. “There are all these fireflies out here! I’m trying to find my tripod so I get get a good picture of them in the dark. It needs a long exposure and it will be blurry if I take it by hand,” I explained, excited to frame the shot. “Will you stop for a second and just watch the damned lightning bugs, please?” I laughed as I extended the collapsable legs from the base of the tripod. I was helping prove her point from earlier in our conversation. I’d been talking to her about how my post-summer future was encroaching every day like an iceberg towards my bow. It was something that had been on my mind all day. Steinbeck warns in Travels with Charley that interstate driving is dangerous because there’s nothing to see and it leaves you too much time to think. That day I’d done a lot of driving, a lot of introspecting. Where’s a winding country road when you need one? “Here I am in Western Nebraska and all I can think about is what I’ll do next once I get home. I keep wanting to plan my next five years and I wind up hitting this wall. I don’t have any answers and it’s killing me,” I complained, feeling bratty for having even one care in the world while out on this tremendous journey. “Mike, everybody is living vicariously through you with this blog. Why don’t you start living vicariously through yourself?” Out past the lightning bugs and the open field I could almost see a forest emerge from the trees. When it got late, we hung up and I sat for a while, staring out at the luminescent bugs. You couldn’t track one with your eye for more than a moment without it disappearing into blackness; seeing them meant looking off into the distance and letting the splashes of green continuously surprise you.

I thought about my dad’s life– he became a world-renowned Windsor chairmaker all because he saw an old wooden chair sitting at a yardsale one day and fell in love with it. He couldn’t have planned it even if he’d driven a thousand miles on Interstate 80. So, I tried to park my mind for the night and absorb the Nebraska heat, the buggy quiet, and the pregnant moon draped in clouds. Somehow, life brought me here to North Platte, Nebraska. The next adventure will come in due time; now, the little green bulbs are darting across my field of vision and I’m right where I need to be. Collin and I drive East.

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June 29, 2015 - heading east on I-80 through Utah

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June 29, 2015 - photos from the car of our journey east through Utah