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The Secret Shopkeeper

If you order a Chaise Lounge CD from Amazon or another big retailer, you’ll receive it from a warehouse somewhere. But people who don’t make and sell records for a living are often surprised to learn that the CDs and merch they order via the band’s online store are packed and shipped by yours truly, from a “warehouse” that doubles as my basement. If you also sell your group’s recordings, you can probably picture the shelves and boxes.
Selling CDs is a joy for me. It’s my favorite chore. I love filling orders for fans we have known for years, but I also love it when the buyer has an unfamiliar name. How did they hear of us? Are we in heavy rotation in Muncie this week? I always write a note on the outside of the padded envelope. We jokingly call our fans “Chaise Lounge Nation” and say it’s a small nation, but mighty. Each time I send off a note to a new CD owner, the nation feels just a little bit larger.

A Flurry of Spec Spots

For five years or so, I have been affiliated with a company called Score a Score that provides music for TV commercials and indie film projects. I sporadically send them tracks to add to their catalog. It’s done “on spec,” meaning I don’t get paid unless the track is selected for use by one of their filmmaker or advertising agency clients.
Lately, though, in my downtime, I’ve been writing daily pieces for Score a Score — more than 50 in the past two months — and recording the songs in my home studio. Of necessity, the tracks feature me on every instrument…even, occasionally, drums, which I barely play. I’ve discovered that it’s a great way to start my day. If I feel like a rhumba, I write a rhumba. Or if I feel like a lonesome cowboy, I go with that. Most of these pieces will stay in the Score a Score catalog, untouched and un-monetized, but a few have been chosen for use. There’s a fast food chain in New England that is featuring a piece of mine in their commercials this month. A few bright-blue political candidates used my work in their campaign ads in the fall, which I was happy about. I won’t claim that this is the most artistic thing I do, but it has been a great exercise — and it’s the only way my drum skills will ever earn me a penny.

What to Do With Downtime

I think about my mother a lot these days. She was a farm girl from Maine with a very no-nonsense approach to life. Once, when I was just starting out in music, I complained to her that I didn’t have enough work. She thought a bit and responded, “When we had downtime on the farm, we would go out to the shed and sharpen all the tools.”
I know that for a lot of people, especially those with small children, there has been precious little downtime since the pandemic began. Others, though, have had the opposite challenge: not enough work to fill the days. For me, it helps to keep my mom’s story in mind. When there’s no work to do, I practice piano. I practice guitar. I write music that nobody asked for. It doesn’t solve every problem, but it helps keep my creative tools sharp.
Hopefully sometime in 2021, after everyone has been vaccinated, we musicians can emerge, blinking, from our woodsheds and get back to the business of making music together. I wish you strength and health as you sharpen your tools until then.
Coming Soon: My Solo Show!

Coming Soon: My Solo Show!

It has been ages since I stepped onstage alone—literally decades—but when a colleague invited me to put together a singer-songwriter act for a venue he books, for some reason I said yes. I’m not sure I was fully aware until I started putting together the show what a gift it has been to work with so many talented players and singers over the years. These musicians consistently take the burden of performance away from me, or at least share the load. That lone spotlight can be awfully hot, I am coming to recall. So I have been shedding like crazy. Come January 16, I’ll be playing and singing 16 songs on piano, guitar and five-string banjo at the BlackRock Center for the Arts in Germantown, Maryland. I’m a little nervous, but I’m trying to experience that nervousness as excitement, and as an opportunity to revisit a lot of songs that I wrote and tucked away for some future date. That date is nigh. If you’re in the area, you can find tickets at blackrockcenter.org.

The Sports Page

This is a really special day. The sports page in the Post was as good as it has been in 25 years. The Wizards beat the Heat last night. The Nats got their fifth starter, Dan Haren and it looks like they are going to retain LaRoche. The Skins are on a roll with a true star in RG3. The Hoyas won. The Terps look good. I always wanted to live in a good sports town. Maybe now I do!