Friday night: Seeing my son Gabriel’s band The Collies play at a bar in Mt. Lookout.
Saturday during the day: working on a basement clean-up project.
Saturday night: Maggie Rose/Molly Tuttle concert in Lexington, KY with Gabriel. (MP Gannon rules!)
Sunday morning: kayaking with my friend Matt. His wife passed away back in February. Friday would’ve been her 50th birthday. I’m making an concerted effort to catch up with him on a regular basis. (I also organized a happy hour with some of our old co-workers a few weeks back.)
Sunday night: Built to Spill/Wussy concert at Ludlow Garage, with Gabriel and my daughter Leah. (First concert that we’ve gone to together!)
I’m not retired (yet!) but when the topic comes up in casual conversation (as it often does for people in my age bracket), some folks interrogate me with variations on these questions:
“But what will you do all day when you’re retired?” and
“Aren’t you afraid of getting bored?”
My answer to #1 is “more of the above” – more concerts, more time with my family (hmm, I probably should reverse the order of those two…), more home projects, more kayaking (and yes, more pickleball), more travel, more time with friends, more reading, more writing, more podcasting, and more of whatever the heck I want to do. (And yes, probably more naps.)
And my answer to #2 is an emphatic NO! I have waay too many interests for that to happen.
Right now I’m working for the weekend. I am starting to look forward to a permanent weekend. Especially if they’re like this past one!
On Saturday, I drove down to Lexington, KY with my oldest kid Gabriel to see an outdoor show at The Burl. (Great place to see a show, btw.)
It was a co-headlining tour, Maggie Rose and Molly Tuttle. I’d just seen Molly Tuttle a few weeks prior. And yes, I’ve been known to double down on artists I enjoy seeing. (Looking at you, Gladie.) But the real reason for the road trip was the guitarist for Maggie Rose’s band. MP Gannon. The dude’s an amazing guitar player.
And he has a fantastic, soulful voice to boot.
And I’d say that even if he weren’t my first cousin once removed.
But he IS my first cousin once removed, and that makes it even cooler! (I know him better as Michael Patrick.)
This doesn’t exactly qualify as a news bulletin, but I love music. And seeing my cousin’s kid up on stage, in front of a rapt audience, doing his thing… goosebumps the entire time! (I can only imagine how my cousin Patty and her husband Paul feel when they see their son on stage.)
In her set, Maggie performed a cover of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” — a ballad made famous by Bonnie Raitt*. If you’re gonna do that classic (or any Bonnie Raitt song, really), you’d better have the voice to back it up.
And Maggie does, in spades.
*that song was co-written by former Cincinnati Bengal defensive tackle Mike Reid, a two-time Pro Bowler whose songwriting career has far eclipsed his gridiron greatness.
Maggie recorded a duet version of “I Can’t Make You Love Me” song with Vince Gill. Which means MP has some pretty big shoes to fill in concert. TBH, I prefer his voice to Vince’s. And I’m not just saying that because he’s my first cousin once removed. (But, as previously established, he IS!)
Speaking o’ big shoes to fill, for Molly Tuttle’s encore, Maggie Rose and MP joined Molly’s band for rousing renditions of “She’s a Rainbow” by the Rolling Stones and “Up on Cripple Creek” by The Band. MP sang a verse of the latter – meaning he was channeling Levon Helm… merely my favorite member of one of my favorite bands. (Because Levon, the only non-Canadian member of The Band, was from my old stomping grounds of Arkansas.)
MP is based in Nashville. And as the Lovin’ Spoonful famously told us in their song “Nashville Cats”:
Well, there’s thirteen hundred and fifty two Guitar pickers in Nashville And they can pick more notes than the number of ants On a Tennessee ant hill
To snag a gig as a touring “guitar picker” is a big hill to climb. To become an integral part of Maggie Rose’s band in just a year with them is a testament to his talent, and his dedication to the craft.
A rockin’ house concert, for our family and 25 other folks – some of whom were friends, but most of whom were just friendly strangers.
That’s Jason Narducy playing to the crowd. He releases music as Split Single. He’s also the touring bassist for Superchunk, one of my favorite bands. Also bassist in the Bob Mould band (Bob’s another fave). And Jason teamed up with actor Michael Shannon to organize the R.E.M. tribute supergroup that I posted about a couple of months ago. Oh, and he wrote a book filled with some fun stories from his life on the road as a musician.
When he’s not touring as a “band guy” he does solo house concerts.
It’s not a glamorous existence, cramming all your gear into a rental car (in Jason’s case, a rental car with the “lane assist” function that he can’t figure out how to turn off) and driving hours upon hours to get to the next stop. And when you get there, setting up all that gear, hoping the host is a decent human being, and that your voice isn’t shot, and that the crowd isn’t dead.
It’s also not a lucrative endeavor. On a good night, you move the people with your music, and you move some merchandise too. Enough to pay the bills, and may put a few bills in your pocket.
From my biased perspective, I think last night was a great night. Jason’s a gifted musician, and a natural storyteller. And he’s a heck of a nice guy. As much as I love hearing music in an intimate setting, I probably enjoy the dead time before the show just as much. It was just Jason and I, hanging out in our kitchen. I won’t delude myself that we’re now besties. But it was good to get to know a bit more about him as a person, not just a performer.
Live music is my thing, but every house concert is a family affair. Peter helped me rearrange the furniture. Tina cleaned after my “cleaning” efforts fell short. Gabriel grabbed the pizza for Jason’s pre-show meal. Leah and Andrew kept the dogs upstairs when guests started arriving.
The show was stellar – mostly originals, with a few tasty covers (The Kinks, Superchunk, R.E.M… on mandolin!) in the mix. Great stories in-between.
We live on Wilaray Terrace and Jason jokingly called it “Wilaray Arena.” I love that. As long as I’m living, our living room will be open for business as Wilaray Arena. Because I’ll take a rockin’ living room over arena rock 100% of the time. Or in Jason’s case “95 Percent.”
Better late than never, I suppose. Good thing I didn’t have “stop procrastinating” on my resolution list.
Although this great article from The Guardian that was published… well, the start of the year… is also giving all of us permission to ease off the self-improvement resolutions.
The intro paragraph from Oliver Burkeman’s piece sums up the concept quite nicely:
The older I get, the more “finite hours on the planet” really resonates. But no matter our age, all of us have limited spins on the big blue marble. And rather than putting off the things we like until a “someday” that may never come, why not do more of them today?
It’s waaay too easy to get caught up in the “I’ve got to be better at _____” cycle. It’s much tougher to give yourself permission to indulge in stuff you enjoy. But it’s not indulging, it’s nourishing your heart and soul.
The concepts of “keep grinding” and “hustle” have been elevated to virtue status.
But if you’re always grinding and never savoring, what’s the point?
That sort of heartless profiteering from the prediction markets (namely Kalshi and Polymarket) has continued pretty much unabated. Those companies have become unregulated casinos in our pockets, with scary consequence. So much so that John Oliver devoted an episode of his Last Week Tonight show to it a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a four-minute clip from it:
What Oliver says at the end is especially poignant:
If you’re considering using these markets to gamble, try and remember that you’re statistically likely to lose money. And while I’m not against gambling per se, there’s something so grim about these sites turning every aspect of our lives into a bet. Because sure, money can be won on them. But in that happening, something also gets lost. Specifically a society where things aren’t only weighed in financial terms, and where people engage in news for what it means to human beings – not just because they have $50 riding on it.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Scott Galloway’s post from last November about the prediction markets. He’s the one who put this emerging issue on my radar. His post is titled “The Next Opioid Crisis” – which may seem like hyperbole. But it’s a clear-eyed, fact-based and somber assessment of the dangers of gambling disguised as prediction markets, especially to young men.
As Oliver points out in his show, with Donald Trump Jr. on the payroll for both Kalshi and Polymarket, there won’t be any changes at the federal level. (The only sure bet is that the Trump family will always look for ways to cash in, no matter the costs to others.)
Are prediction markets making our society poorer in multiple ways? You bet!
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