forgive them…for they know not what to do

tomhampton 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about Steve Irwin lately.

Y’all remember Steve Irwin?

Steve Irwin was the affable Australian zoologist and TV star of the series “Crocodile Hunter” who regularly flirted with danger as part of his “brand”, risking life and limb over the course of a career that ground to a halt in 2006 when he died as a result of a Stingray attack while filming for a documentary.

It bears mentioning – in the present climate – that Steve was not murdered and no one, to my recollection, celebrated his death (much in the way the vast majority of folks aren’t celebrating the most recent one…stay with me, here), but there was a healthy degree of subdued, secondary reaction that centered around the notion that you can only come out ahead of the Law of Averages so many times before it catches up with you…especially if you consciously try to run up your numbers.

There were no “high fives”, there was no general sense of “he had it coming” – just an underlying swirl of – “yeah, I guess that checks out.”

One of my favorite movies is Miracle, the story of the 1980 Olympic Hockey team.  It stars Kurt Russell as coach Herb Brooks and it tells the story of how he built the team specifically for the contest at hand…and as the movie moves towards its climax, the team is playing towards victory in the third period and Herb looks at his assistant coach and says:

“They’re not pulling Mishkin….

…THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO!”

The insinuation being that the Soviets had never played from behind late in the game, they’d never been put in that position, so the notion of pulling their goalie to float another skater on offense wasn’t part of their vernacular.

This is directly relevant to current Conservative reaction to this past weeks’ events because they, like the 1980 Soviet Hockey Team, have never had to contend with the emotional trauma they find themselves facing now.

A Conservative PodcastBro was publicly executed, and THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

They don’t know what to do for a multitude of reasons, among them the fact that they willfully inhabit a Reich that values the Alpha Male above all else, and the Alpha Male never loses, the Alpha Male always comes out on top, and anyone who dares to engage in dialogue around compromise, who dares to allow themselves to feel anything other than fear and anger, who has the audacity to adhere to the ACTUAL Scripture that contains the Beatitudes and the Golden Rule and the other woke, liberal teachings of Jesus…well, they’re a beta cuck and their opinions and existence doesn’t matter.  Arrogance is celebrated and humility is mocked.

Which is all well and good until one of your PodcastBro heroes bleeds out in public and you find yourself all up in your feelings about it – at which point you have to take that unusual, foreign emotion that crept up on you (because your side has never had to contend with this) and you distill it into anger, because that’s one of the only two emotions you’re capable of processing.

AND – in an attempt to somehow elevate irony to heretofore unknown and unexpected heights, they become even MORE incensed at our failure to mourn, our failure to feel anything, our lack of sadness at his passing.

The one time that the left decides to look at empathy and give it a “nah, I’m good”, they LOSE THEIR SHIT.

“How can you celebrate another mans’ murder?” They ask.

Celebrating? I’m just over here driving the damn car, my dude. I’ve got rent and bills and legitimate shit to worry about, and if you want me to get in my feelings about a dude who wouldn’t piss on me if I were on fire, I can’t really help you with that. I’m happy to remind you that I saw those Paul Pelosi “hammer memes” on your Instagram, though. Hilarious, amirite? And that T-shirt that you love – the one that says “rope. tree. journalist. some assembly required“? CLASSIC.

(I’d wager that a lot of us haven’t forgotten how you were painting over the Pride crosswalks in Florida outside the Pulse nightclub the same week your tragedy took place, by the way.)

It’s delicious that the “Trump that Bitch/Lock Her up/Let’s Go Brandon” crowd wants to drag us for decorum.

Don’t confuse my sadness deficit with celebration. I’m not throwing a party, I’m just getting on with my life and letting PodcastBro inherit his eternal reward. I’ll be saving my empathy for more deserving situations, thanks.

The right has been perfecting the art of playing the victim when there’s no actual assailant for decades – this time is different, and THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

It’s completely new territory for them – you see, typically, when there’s public violence of this sort, the right usually rushes to defend the shooter and vilify the victim, but that playbook won’t work for them this time, because whoever ends up being THIS version of Kyle Rittenhouse or George Zimmerman actually took out one of their own, and this time fate had the gall to make the victim not only a CIS white male, but a high profile Conservative media figure.

In the face of evidence that the left had nothing to do with this, They’ll nonetheless scream that the left is violent, they’ll scream that we need to be fired, charged with…something (apparently, the Constitution is toilet paper now, anyway) and ostracized because they’ve been forced to confront feelings that aren’t part of their two item emotional menu, and they don’t like it.

The right has never had a George Floyd.

They’ve never had a Breonna Taylor.

They’ve never had a Trayvon Martin.

They’ve never had a Philando Castille.

They’ve never had an Eric Garner.

They’ve never had a Sandra Bland.

They’ve never had an Ahmad Aubery.

THEY’VE NEVER HAD A PARTY REPRESENTATIVE MURDERED IN THEIR OWN HOME ALONGSIDE THEIR HUSBAND AND DOG.

But now, they’ve got an unalived Right wing PodcastBro, and boy – are the rules ever different, all of a sudden.

In the past, they’ve stood by as the conga line of Dylann Roof, the Las Vegas Second Amendment absolutist with a suitcase full of bump stocks, the Louisville, KY police department, the rednecks in Georgia who self-declared jogging a capital offense, the overzealous “neighborhood watch” nutjob in Sanford, Florida, the endless spigot of manifesto-wielding “lone wolves” who always seems to be behind the mass shootings in schools, nightclubs, movie theaters and churches…they’ve stood by as they were paraded in front of the public and stepped up to make sure that we all understood that NOW WAS NOT THE TIME to have conversations around fixing this problem that only seems to exist in America – “we can’t politicize the lives of these innocent victims”, they’d say.

Whenever there IS a Trayvon Martin, they’re first in line to try to dig up dirt and find some way of convincing us how terrible they are and why this is just another unfortunate event in a chain of unfortunate events.

Meanwhile, they invite George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse to CPAC and host them on podcasts and talk shows, elevating murderers to hero status.  They call the parents of slain first graders at Sandy Hook “crisis actors” and paint the tragedy as a hoax. Zimmerman sells the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin for a quarter million dollars (no shit, that’s real – look it up.)

THAT’s who they are – and so be it.  They made that choice for themselves.

So when you see them flailing in this moment, saying outrageous shit, becoming unhinged when you use PodcastBro’s actual words to describe his life and legacy – take a deep breath and try to give them a little space, a little compassion…dare I even say, a little EMPATHY – because this whole thing that we’ve all gotten used to since Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City 30 years ago – we’ve had time to become accustomed to this particular flavor of loss.

You feel it, and you’re sadly used to it at this point.

For your MAGA Republican Uncle, though – this pain is something new, foreign and confusing.

HE DOESN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

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Summer’s Gone

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It’s almost as if he planned it this way.

Labor Day Weekend – the traditional “end of summer” – finds us saying goodbye to Delaware’s Nik Everett. Nik was an inductee into the Delaware Music Hall of Fame and a prolific recording artist with multiple albums under his belt going back to what he referred to as “The Cabaret Era”, when his band, The Nik Everett Group, were regulars on the Philadelphia “Cabaret” circuit (Ambler, Chestnut, 23 East…if you’re still reading this, you remember.)

Summer – and his beloved home state of Delaware – figured prominently in his songwriting narratives, and it was who he was. It took a while for me to get to know that part of him, as we first became acquainted in the waning days of the Cabaret era when he was hosting Monday night songwriters’ nights at the Grape Street Pub during the Tom Hill era, the years before the sale, the renovation…before air conditioning and an actual stage.

I avoided Philadelphia when I first started playing acoustic gigs after moving to Pennsylvania when I got out of the Navy…I wanted to take some time to get my shit together before making that leap (in retrospect, I’m not sure that ever happened), but the first place I went was to Nik’s Monday night open mic. I signed up and took a seat by myself, taking everyone else in…the Grape, in those days, was a horseshoe bar next to a tiny stage that was obscured by the foyer at the front door, so from the vantage point of standing on the stage, you could see the room and a few seats along the outside of the bar…which made the outside curve of the horseshoe perfect for socializing, as it was out of sight of the stage.

Monday nights were “hang nights” for most of the folks who were plying their trades in Philadelphia in those days, and a lot of folks who’d managed to gain a foothold in the Philly hierarchy would come on Monday nights and hang out – mostly in the back corner on the outside edge of the bar.

I was on close to the end of the night – it was largely empty with the exception of a small handful of folks, most of them people I’d heard on Cyndy Drue’s “Street Beat” show on WMMR or read about in City Paper or Welcomat, so while it wasn’t intimidating, there was some degree of implied pressure to bring it.

I got up, Nik introduced me, and halfway through my first song, several of the folks sitting in the back corner of the bar filed around the inside corner and lined up along the stage side of the bar to listen to me.

You don’t forget your first real taste of validation.

I can still see it as if it happened over the weekend.

Nik took me under his wing, so to speak – offering advice on places to play (and places not to play) and we’d often end up closing the place and finding a diner on City Line avenue before heading home for the night. I got to know a lot of the other folks who made up our branch of the tree there as well during those years, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that meeting Nik and the Grape Street folks knocked a solid five years off my formative grinding years as I tried to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be.

There’d be jam sessions after the list ran out, where anyone still there could get up and grab a guitar and plug in and play covers with whoever else might be there – so many memories, of Nik singing “Caravan” or “Spirit in the Night” or Todd Bartolo and I jumping up to sing harmonies with him on “Long May You Run”.

I’ve written about this before, here and elsewhere, but those Grape Street days are the closest I’ll ever come to the bucolic notion in my mind of what it must’ve been like to have been part of the Troubadour crowd in the late sixties and early seventies. But it was also what I used to think of as my own personal “Groundhog Day” – in a lot of ways, it was like walking into the same scene every week, with the same people talking TO the same people ABOUT the same people as the week before. That’s human nature creeping in, I suppose…but drama will flourish where it will.

It crept into this scene and ambushed me when the new owners, Bill and Barney, took me aside and told me that they had changes in mind and that one of those changes was to shift gears with Monday nights – Nik was perceived as staff from the prior administration, and they intended to let him go and they wanted me to take his place. Barney gave me a week to think about it, and my initial reaction was to turn it down out of loyalty to Nik, but a couple of conversations took place and I ended up taking the gig, as I couldn’t imagine anyone else staying as true to the old playbook as I tried to.

Nik never held it against me, gave me his blessing, and some years later – after the Grape Street had become a bullet point on both our resumes’ – he invited me to join his band to promote his latest release, “Summer’s Gone”.

Playing in Nik’s band was a heavy lift – we had a good run with some solid shows, but it was hard work for both of us, trying to make this circuit work. I think he needed someone a little more focused on filling the traditional “lead guitarist” role, and I was (then as now) more suited to being a utility guy, and we parted ways. Our friendship survived, though, and we remained in touch – often bumping into each other at the annual Bob Dylan Birthday Bash, including the night Danny was born, when I went straight to Rembrandt’s from Jefferson Hospital and Nik let me borrow his guitar to contribute Michael Tearson’s song to the evenings’ festivities.

We’d tried to put together a show in Lewes during a short tour I did earlier this year, but the venue fell through…we spoke in March, and again in May, when he’d gotten out of three months in a rehab that he felt was largely wasted…but he said “I’m feeling some songs coming…so I can’t wait to get cracking.”

I’d text him a photo of my dashboard whenever “Love Is Like A Dream” would come up on shuffle – I know it made him happy to know that his music was still playing somewhere.

The last time I saw him was 2021, when he surprised me at a show I was doing in Delaware with Sol Knopf and Craig Bickhardt – I had completed “Out To Pasture” and gave him a burned copy of what the album would eventually be, and I made sure he got copies of everything up through this last record – there’s a specific flavor of validation that only comes from people you look up to, who understand the work that goes into what we do, and knowing that Nik was proud of my work was priceless.

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Nik and I the last time I saw him, in 2021 during soundcheck at a show in Delaware

Thanks for your friendship, and for putting your finger on the scale for me, old friend.

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Outrage Fatigue

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For the past six weeks or so, the new, hip, trendy thing to do on social media in my circles seems to be crowing about going cold turkey with the “Mainstream News Media”. I mean, I get it – it’s not as if I’m not feeling the same cocktail of rage and hopelessness as almost everyone I know. Certainly, said MSM is making it ridiculously easy by…well, being shitty at their jobs. Even the lone network that the left looks to for some semblance of sanity – MSNBC – has advertisers to satiate and bosses to cower to, and has to maintain a degree of acceptable corporate-approved decorum (which is why Medhi Hasan is running Zeteo instead of sitting at a desk at 30 Rock).

Still, since the wee hours of that first Wednesday in November – when the reality was sinking in that America really is, at its core, one of the dumbest electoral bodies in the history of civilization, it feels like something is culminating that’s been creeping upon us for a long, long time now.

We’ve spent months up to this point hearing about the impending dangers of a second Trump term, about the codified rape-and-pillage plans laid out, literally for anyone to peruse, in Project 2025. We’ve watched him perched onstage at a rally for 30 minutes playing some demented boomer version of Dance Dance Revolution, swaying about like a dementia patient on Ambien…we’ve heard all the stories, we’ve seen all the footage, we’ve heard him on tape asking the Georgia Secretary of State to “find him 11,780 votes”, he’s proven to us time and time again that he actually IS who his most staunch detractors say he is…and knowing all that (perhaps even BECAUSE of all that) we sent him back to finish the job of finally sending a country that’s been swirling the toilet bowl for some time now into its final descent into the septic tank once and for all.

If there ever was a legitimate two party system in America, the corpse is beyond autopsy status at this point. The few remaining GOP folks of old are dead and dying, being marginalized by the “norms be damned, burn this shit down” MAGA operatives who’ve infiltrated the party and taken it over – largely aided by the forerunners of the movement like Mitch and Newt and holdovers from Bush II. (It could be argued that the seeds for the current moment were planted when Bush AG Alberto Gonzalez fired several football teams’ worth of federal prosecutors, but…well, that’s another story.)

Opposition is largely either delusional or inefficient or drowned out by white noise – a once-functioning Democratic party has declined into whatever this thing is we have now…a handful of octogenarian fantasy football players who still think that everyone is playing by long-abandoned rules that no one else gives a shit about anymore. They walk the halls of high school with “kick me” signs taped to their backs by the very bullies they’re trying to suck up to, all the while getting their asses booted ruthlessly between classes. The folks who’ve come to class ready to do the work (AOC, Jasmine Crockett, Liz Warren, etc.) are trivialized and dismissed as unserious at the very time when their voices are needed the most.

The third faction of the electorate – the one that no one seems to want to acknowledge in any way, shape or form – is the faction perhaps best represented by “The Adjustor” – people who feel not only as if they don’t have a voice or representation, but that the system itself is built to profit off them while implicitly ignoring their needs and their basic human rights. They feel not just left out, but tossed out. They feel that the country into which they pay taxes and social security dues is leeching off their life force and giving them nothing in return, and – as such, they feel like participating in the democratic process is bullshit, that no one they could possibly support will ever support them, and as such, it’s nearly impossible to convince them that something as pedantic as voting will provide even a cursory ROI – so why bother? What’s the point? They work two jobs, maybe have a side hustle in addition, they live with roommates/house mates as a matter of survival, They have constant electronic distractions in the palm of their hands to turn their gaze away from the creeping decay that makes their lives worse, so the day-to-day observation of their plight is manageable.

This “third faction” is currently the majority in America.

245 million people were eligible to vote in 2024.

89 million of them decided, “fuck it, it won’t fix my problems.”

More people voted for “none of the above” than for either political candidate by a margin of over ten million.

SOOOOOOO…

When you consider all this, perhaps it makes the public reaction to the news of the past week a little easier to wrap ones’ head around.

The basic circumstances aren’t really even newsworthy at all…someone walked up to another person on the street and shot them three times in the back.

It’s when the rest of the picture starts to become clearer that it draws the attention of the public.

We all know the story, we all have a grasp of the plot line – I won’t regurgitate it for you.

Still, I’ve been watching reactions to this event among folks I engage with in various circles, and I’ve been looking inward at what my own reactions have been, and I’m here to tell you today that I feel…

…nothing. Not a goddamn thing.

I’m not celebrating his death – there was no fist pump or anything of that nature, but I certainly don’t feel the least bit bad for him, or for his family, or for his company, and I doubt that I’d handle similar news of the murder of another like him any differently. I’m actually wondering at present – who would he have had to have been for me to feel something? Head of a supermarket chain? Hell no. Pharma company? Nope. Big Oil? Nuh-uh.

CEO’s exist solely to maximize shareholder profit at all costs – screw the product itself, and the customer can fuck ALL the way off…the only objective is profit. And I can live with that to an extent when the product is an iPhone or a refrigerator or something like that…but when that profit can only be maximized by letting people die, then no – I won’t give a shit when that same fate visits his doorstep. Sorry, not sorry.

I don’t think the world is worse off without him, and clearly – neither does his employer, as the fellow attendees carried on without him, business as usual – some stepping over his bloodstains on the sidewalk to get to the meeting he was to attend. They have a new CEO already, and show no signs of amending their predatory business practices in light of what happened.

If they didn’t give a shit about him, why ON EARTH should I? He was no more expendable than one of the headsetted folks at the bottom of the corporate ladder who suffer the ire of their customers every day.

The collective reaction of news media to public indifference about the event, though, is something else.

They’re shocked – shocked, I say – to discover that people would react in such a callous way to the death of a husband, father, productive member of society, blah blah blah…

If you want an explanation as to WHY, read slowly from here on out. Take notes.

We don’t feel ANYTHING anymore. Period.

Read that last point as many times as you need to.

It’s not just this specific dead guy we don’t feel anything about – although the circumstances of his existence make a collective “fuck that guy” a lot easier than for others whose passing might actually invoke some degree of tragedy.

It’s simply this: we’ve been collectively bludgeoned, overwhelmed, beaten down and fucked over to the point of absolute emotional numbness.

We watch people celebrate assholes and demonize “woke” – and it leaves a mark.

We watch a subset of law enforcement murder minorities in broad daylight with zero repercussions because the system is built to give them a “get out of jail free” card – and it leaves a mark.

We watch another subset of law enforcement see that and say “hold my beer” and actually force themselves into peoples’ homes and murder them in their beds – again with no repercussions – and it leaves a mark.

We watch politicians turn the law upside down for their own personal gain, profiting from the very government they’re supposed to lead and cozying up to enemies of the state – things that would’ve been national scandals a generation ago – AGAIN WITH NO REPERCUSSIONS other than a pointless impeachment trial (or two) – and it leaves a mark.

For me, the real inward shift started when we transitioned to the “not only will there be no accountability for shitty behavior – but we’ll actually reward and promote it!” chapter of this shitshow.

The laws that are already on the books are ignored to the extent that accountability is a farce, a joke – unless you’re one of the unwashed common folks for whom a minor infraction might escalate to a felony conviction that would inform every other aspect of your life. But hey – steal millions of dollars from Medicaid like Rick Scott of Florida? Here’s your Senate seat, Voldemort…can we get you anything?

Bob Dylan said it best…

“Steal a little and they throw you in jail…steal a lot and they make you King….”

I could keep going with examples, but you get the point. Over and over again, those of us who even marginally pay attention to shit are bombarded with story after story of how a certain class of people can wipe their ass with the rule of law and profit while doing so while another class of people live (and often die) by a completely different standard – and still, some people wonder how we can be so callous and uncaring when “a husband and father can be gunned down in cold blood in the street like that…”

Outrage Fatigue.

I don’t think I’m alone in this, and the current climate seems to prove me out.

We’re worn out. Exhausted. Unable to walk, chew gum, do math, take attendance, and grade homework at the same time.

There’s so much shit to be outraged about that it’s past the human ability to stay that mad for any significant period of time about anything specific, so we’ve all become scarred to the point of indifference.

Pure and simple, I have a finite amount of compassion and empathy left to issue to the world around me, and that greedy fuckwit is entitled to none of it. I’m saving it for family and friends and people who legitimately deserve it.

I’m saving it for the girl I don’t actually know personally who’s starting a business and playing sets of songs on Instagram to raise rent money for the month.

I’m saving it for my brother in law, who’s been fighting potentially terminal illness for over two years (AND STILL FIGHTING MAINECARE TO HAVE HIS COSTS COVERED) who I’m raising money for on BandCamp right now.

I’m saving it for the single mother/waitress who used to work at the Mexican restaurant in town whose son was raising money for a school fundraiser.

I’m saving it for friends who are struggling with the sands that are shifting under their feet on an almost daily basis and trying to figure out how to move forward when there are no maps anymore and there’s no way to know which direction is the “right” way.

Just like almost everyone I know, I’m just trying to create a bubble for myself and the people I love where we can exist (not thrive, heaven forbid – just exist) somewhat removed from the heat of the flames as the dumbest among us burn shit down for everyone else.

The need to survive displaces compassion and empathy. The harder I have to work just to stay alive, the less I give a shit about anyone or anything outside my bubble – and spending the majority of my life watching justice erode as people like the late whatever-his-fucking-name-is and Rick Scott and Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort and their ilk step all over people to line their pockets – that just reinforces the scar tissue that inspires detached and apathetic reactions to such events.

So, again – I’m not celebrating. I don’t have the energy for that shit, either.

But I’m 100% on Team Fuck That Guy.

If the other side can make a fucking hero of Kyle Rittenhouse, I refuse to be ashamed of feeling that way.

I’ve spent pretty much all the outrage I’m capable of.

Fern’s here…we can go on now.

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If you had a show anywhere in the Philadelphia area in the past thirty years and Fern showed up, you knew you’d arrived.

And chances are pretty good that you probably played a show with Fern in the audience at some point if the timelines were in sync. For a long time, it seemed like she was everywhere. And yeah, that sounds like hyperbole, but…it’s really not. I can say that almost every time I saw her for the past decade that (if she knew we were likely to cross paths) she was wearing her “Friends and Heroes” T-shirt from a decade ago.

THAT’S who she was.

Fern wasn’t a groupie, she didn’t have that aura AT ALL – Fern was a music nerd of the highest order, and if she took a liking to you, you had a fan for life.

Fern wasn’t tied to a specific genre or style – she loved June Rich, she loved Jim Boggia, but she also loved Adrian Belew, she loved Johnny A, she loved Frank Zappa, and she championed EVERYBODY she loved every chance she got.

Fern didn’t command your attention when she walked into a room…in fact, she often looked as if she’d just wandered into the venue from the bus stop looking for a place to get out of the weather when she’d come to a show, and I used to wonder how many people missed the boat with her as a result of dismissing her because of that. But if you took thirty seconds to talk to her, it didn’t take long to figure out that she was One Of Us.

When Fern got the chance to champion something she loved, her eyes would light up – it was a sight to behold. I first got to know her when I used to host the Monday nights at Grape Street Pub in Manayunk, and there were shows I played over the years where Fern was one of less than ten people in the audience. She was a fixture at Steel City Coffeehouse in Phoenixville during their best years, and she’d turn up at outdoor shows with her visor on all summer long.

There’s no shortage of Fern Stories, but this one is my favorite…it’s not much of a secret in the Philly music community as we were all there for it and we knew who was pulling the strings, but here goes:

In 2006, Garry Lee (bassist for damn near everybody in Philadelphia for a solid 40+ year run) had his car broken into and he’d left his gear in the car – of course, it was gone before anything could be done about it. Fern organized a benefit show and galvanized a ton of folks in the musical community to raise money to not only replace Garry’s gear, but to buy back a Music Man Stingray that he’d had to pawn in order to raise money himself and we gave it back to him at the show. She also was the driving force behind a compilation album that was released by Dean Sciarra’s label called “Six Degrees of Garry Lee” that featured a laundry list of tracks that Garry had played on (including a tune from “Our Mutual Angels”), and she was the driving force that made ALL of that happen.

Our little world has changed a LOT in the last twenty years – touring has never been easy, but forces have conspired to make it damn near impossible these days unless you’re on the Eras Tour…it’s arrived at a place where the only reason…the ONLY reason…to do it at all is because of the Family Reunion aspect of making music in places where you have friends and fans who you can count on to come to the show, who you consider to be part of your extended family and who’ve supported you so you can have some realistic expectation that you can continue for another summer or another record. People like Fern made this road a little smoother.

I don’t know that Fern ever made any attempt to pick up an instrument and learn to play, or to what degree she understood the complexities of it – her musical tastes would tell me that she understood it better than many, based on some of the artists whose work she championed…but at her core, she just loved music that moved her, and she loved it enough that it became a cornerstone of who she was.

I never miss an opportunity to tie a life event to Almost Famous, and this is no different…but if you’ve only seen the theatrical release, this stuff may miss the mark…

There’s a scene in the Directors’ Cut near the end where Russell Hammond is sitting (alone) in catering and one of the Band Aids reluctantly sits down next to him and starts complaining about “the new girls”…

“…They don’t know what it means to BE A FAN…to love some band or some silly little piece of music so much it hurts….”

Earlier in the movie, Russell is confronting Penny Lane about her “retirement” ruse when he says:

“…let me tell you what rock and roll will miss on the day you truly retire.

…the way you pick up strays wherever you go…the way you know the words to every song – EVERY song.

especially the bad ones…MOSTLY the bad ones.

I could keep going, but my glass is full….”

Fern was neither a groupie nor a band-aid, but she was a gentle force who loved music with all her being, and she’s going to leave a HUGE hole that nobody else will ever fill.

But right now, tonight – if there is a hereafter, Lee Shusterman is walking around the room, gathering the boys…he’s sauntering over and tapping Tom Walling and Jef Lee Johnson and Joel Bryant and Daoud Shaw on the shoulder to let them know:

“Fern’s here. We can go on now.”

WTF happened to Rick Beato?

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Soooo…yeah, I saw the Beato “WTF” video, and I gotta admit, it’s a little weird to see so many folks high-fiving over it. now, this isn’t to say that he doesn’t have some absolutely valid points over streaming and the devaluing of music as intellectual property, but music isn’t alone in that regard – same thing is happening to film, TV, books…all of it.

when EVERYBODY is a filmmaker, author, musician…then whatever made those talents, those creative pursuits special or unique – well, they’re not quite so special or unique anymore, are they? (especially in a town like this where everyone shows up on moving day with a “skill set”) – being a great guitarist, singer, writer, author…these things don’t carry the same level of respect when they’re thrown into the bucket with other general descriptors like “father”, “jogger”, “sports fan”, “history buff”, or other more general and common titles.

Still, it’s where we live now, and we can either adapt or…well, not.

The thing that legitimately gave me the creeps about the video was his whole “get off my lawn” trip about how Sinatra used to make records and how it’s too easy for these darned kids nowadays to churn out music on their iPads at home, and – I mean, dude…are you OK?

That whole bit had an awkward level of “fuck these kids, I paid off MY student loans” energy, and it was weird to watch. Here’s a dude whose ONLY claim to notoriety is based on his YouTube channel, suddenly lecturing all of us on the evils of internet-based notoriety – and that level of irony causes cancer in laboratory animals.

I’m old enough to remember when the popular “yelling at clouds” bit was how synthesizers and drum machines were putting musicians out of work, and someone made a very salient point at that time as to how the choices often made themselves based on budget and circumstances. Most people, when offered an apples-to-apples choice between a string section made up of humans playing actual instruments versus using a synthesizer, they’d choose the latter if space, budget, and other constraints weren’t an issue. In other words, the choice wasn’t between having a drummer or a drum machine…the choice was between having a drum machine or no drums at all.

I feel like it’s important to note that having access to the tools doesn’t make someone a woodworker.

But – having said that, that doesn’t mean that we squirrel the tools away from the kids and slap their hands if they reach for them.

Is it easier to learn an instrument now than it was 45 years ago when I was begging for scraps to learn to play?

You’re damned right, it is.

Does that mean that kids who are learning to play from absolute shredders on YouTube should be forced to sit next to the radio with their index finger on “record” to tape a song they’re trying to learn, so they can sit on their bed for four hours trying to figure out the chords? Does the rite of passage to get access to the woodworking tools HAVE to be a grind, just because it was a grind for me? Should my kids, your kids, ANY kids…have to suffer in frustration and bang their heads against the wall just because they have better tools and access to more information than we did?

This is just one arena where that mindset baffles me.

Didn’t we all grow up feeling – at SOME point in our lives – that we wanted our kids to have it better than we did? That we wanted to spare our kids from some of the struggles we had? Is that notion a dead, romantic dream at this point?

What the hell happened to us?

If a kid (Finneas comes to mind) can make compelling music with a laptop, a budget vocal mic, and the tools he downloads from the internet, does that devalue the music he creates? Is it somehow “less than” because he didn’t make his sister’s records at Abbey Road or Sunset Sound?

One of Beato’s complaints is the homogenization, the “sameness” of music that’s created using the same set of crayons (drum samples, synth patches, and the like)…and yet, some of the records that we’ve collectively elevated to legendary status were made with the same four or five players, playing in the same room on the same instruments, recording tracks for different artists as they paraded in and out of the studio. MANY of the records from “yesteryear” have a “sameness” to them (the Sinatra records he holds up as an ideal are actually a great example of that) – sonically, the constraints imposed on producers and musicians of yesteryear were VERY limiting, as opposed to the present day when there are hundreds of thousands of options.

The “sameness” is often a result of the person holding the coloring book – you can have a foot locker full of Crayola options, but if you stick with red, blue and green – well, that’s a result of the choices made, not the tools at hand.

I’m a huge fan of the “Classic Albums” documentaries, and part of that fandom comes from learning about the lengths that people would go to in order to achieve a particular sound, a particular effect (there are too many great stories to single out one particular instance). The common denominator in that pursuit was creativity, and that creativity bred innovation, and those guys pushed the envelope to the point of inspiring a lot of the tools we have now.

But again…having the tools isn’t the end of the flow chart. It’s the beginning of it.

Let the kids play, Rick. Not everything they draw will be worthy of hanging on the refrigerator, and that’s ok – a healthy amount of cream still rises to the top, and not all of us deserve (or WANT) to be Sinatra or Taylor Swift, but the age we’re living in means we all have an opportunity to find our own tribe, without the assistance OR interference of gatekeepers, and I’m good with that.

See you on YouTube, my ironic friend.

the crossing of blurred lines

tomhampton Leave a comment

“…I got a picture of us back when we were close
Before we had somebody picking out our clothes
But you always dressed in your Sunday best
Even when we didn’t have nowhere to go…

…I got a picture of us playing in a bar
And your shirt cost more than your guitar
But you played so heavy, and you always let me sing a couple
Even though you were the star…”

Jason Isbell doesn’t need me to defend him…so I won’t.

In fact, I’m not defending, condemning, rationalizing anyone involved in this dustup that’s emerged of late – like most things we read about on the internet, it’s none of my business…but as a songwriter for 40 years or so (as well as someone who’s struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts on and off for most of my life), the whole situation resonates on an emotional level no matter how I look at it.

So – no judgements here. None. I’m just collecting my thoughts in one place and sharing them for the sake of discussion. Nothing more, nothing less.

But some of you have read this far and have no idea what I’m talking about…so, let’s recap a bit.

“…I saw a picture of you laughing with your child
And I hope she will remember how you smiled
But she probably wasn’t old enough, the night somebody sold your stuff
That left you on the bathroom tiles…

…Got a picture of you dying in my mind
With some ghosts you couldn’t bear to leave behind
But I can hear your voice ring, as you snap another B-string
And you finish off the set with only five
And for a minute there, you’re still alive…”

These lyrics are from Isbell’s song When We Were Close from his latest album, Weathervanes – the song is a remembrance of fellow singer/songwriter Justin Townes Earle, whose demons claimed him as a result of an accidental fentanyl overdose a few years ago. He was 38 when he died, leaving behind a wife and three year old daughter.

The record came out ten months ago. But a few days ago, JTE’s widow took to social media to voice her displeasure with the song – apparently spurred on by a characterization of the song that emerged during an interview where Isbell said, “…that song was one of those where I had to say, how many victims [will there be] if I tell the truth, how many victims if I don’t. And then you make that choice…usually if you tell the truth, you make less victims than if you don’t.”

“…It’s not up to me to forgive you
For the nights that your love had to live through
Now you’ll never need to look me in the eye…

…I am the last of the two of us
But the Fort Worth blues isn’t through with us
You’ve travelled beyond the Great Divide
Oh, but why haven’t I?”

I understand that Jason and Justin had become estranged some time before JTE’s passing – having been in similar situations with people I’ve known who passed while a wall still existed between us, I’ve found that losing someone with whom there might’ve still been unfinished business lands in a different way. If the ties are severed completely, it’s one thing, but if there’s still a tension surrounding the ties, it manifests itself within the layers of grief in a way that makes the loss harder to come to terms with. The title of the song itself, “When We Were Close”, insinuates all by itself that the notion of being close is past tense…and yet, the song doesn’t seem to paint JTE as a self-destructive villain – and it’s not until the final stanza of the song that Isbell sidesteps judgement by saying, “it’s not up to me to forgive you, for the nights your love had to live through…“.

I remember being impressed by his restraint during my first few listens to the song when I was absorbing the album as a whole – loss and grief are often accompanied by anger, whether rational or not, and I thought he did a really good job of avoiding taking the usual shots at the subject of the song that some songwriters find so hard to resist. It’s framed as if he’s looking at old photographs and remembering a wayward friend and the thoughts the photos conjured…and asking questions as to how he managed to survive as one of two people who were arguably headed down similar paths of self-destruction. In fact, if anyone had wondered aloud fifteen years ago which of the two would be “found on the bathroom tiles”, it could well have been a toss-up.

Having said ALL of that, though – I do believe that if my partner died in a similarly self-destructive manner…giving over to demons that had plagued her since puberty – and then someone committed some of the details to words and music, and that song became the #1 most played song on Sirius XM’s Outlaw Country channel for all of 2023…

…well, I’m gonna have thoughts on the matter.

And – well, if you’ve read this far, or if you’ve followed me on social media, you likely already know I wouldn’t be inclined to remain silent about said thoughts, either.

So I completely understand why she needs to voice her frustrations with some of the circumstances around how this whole thing has unfolded over the course of the time between the album coming out, having to manage the feelings of Justin’s daughter upon hearing the song, having to hear him say things in the press that she construed as dismissive of her victim status – and her position seems to be that the song shouldn’t exist in the first place.

For me, that part gets complicated.

Contentious as it might’ve been, Isbell did have a relationship with JTE – he’s not writing the song from the vantage point of a rando internet fanboy (that would’ve been my job) – and while the song does mention his “child” and his “love”, it’s not revelatory in doing so, save to indicate that he did, in fact, leave a partner and a child behind.

Could Isbell have handled it differently? Could he have reached out to JTE’s family prior to releasing the album? Could he have backburnered the song until everyone was older and there were more miles on the odometer?

Yeah. He could’ve done any one of those things, or a combination of them, even. Why didn’t he? I wouldn’t pretend to know.

I’ll say that in my own life as a writer, I let my self-censorship talk me off the ledge A LOT at various times in my life, and I couldn’t even venture to guess how many songs went unwritten because I was fearful on some level of the consequences of saying difficult things out loud in a song and committing it to some degree of permanence by putting it out into the world.

I still remember how naked I felt standing in front of a crowd that included my first wife, singing songs from my debut album that chronicled the deterioration of our relationship…and I’d have been more at ease standing at the entrance of the Holland Tunnel wearing nothing but a pair of socks.

Isbell appears to have vanquished such fears a long time ago.

This isn’t the only emotionally uncomfortable song he’s ever written – in fact, his reputation as a wordsmith was largely earned by his willingness to open a vein and let it spill onto the paper, and he’s better at it than the vast majority of folks plying their trade in his own or any genre right now.

I don’t think having that kind of talent gives us a blank check, but I think that there has to be some degree of fearlessness to rise to the level that Isbell has, and this isn’t the only song on Weathervanes that opens a door into some uncomfortable rooms. “If You Insist” comes to mind.

I hate that this rift has become a thing. Considering Isbell’s non-relationship with JTE when he died, I can’t imagine that the circuit with his widow was any less strained or awkward, and I won’t speculate as to any of the details that exist on that timeline at all.

The broadsides to Isbell’s internal fortress over the past couple of years – the release of Running With Our Eyes Closed that shed some unflattering light into his relationship with his wife and then-bandmate, Amanda Shires (from whom he’s now divorced) and losing a charter member of his band, the 400 Unit (bassist Jimbo Hart) had to have been sobering in the time since the new record came out. Not trying to make excuses for him, but things like that have a way of becoming…preoccupying.

But even when I try to sit in the bleachers on the widow’s side of the field – when I consider having to try to tread the minefield of navigating my daughter’s feelings around the song or the confusion around the whys and hows of how Jason’s camp handled (or didn’t handle) the sensitivity of the songs’ release…when I put it all on the table and weigh everything that’s happened and everything that didn’t happen…

…I keep coming back to one central thought.

Hearing the song may be painful to me in the same situation…but I don’t know that Isbell’s actions have nearly the power to inflict the kind of pain and hurt into my life that JTE’s had, and will continue to have.

If not for that fatal miscalculation on his final night, the song wouldn’t exist, after all.

There are losses that every one of us will suffer – personal losses that stem from varying circumstances, whether natural causes or otherwise – that will become part of our identity. All of us are the sum total of our experiences, our circumstances, the chances we’ve taken, the losses we’ve suffered, being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time – and the people who’ve gone on before us become part of the fabric of who we are, if we choose to carry them with us…and in many cases, we should.

My wish for everyone involved would be peace – I don’t know if that’s possible, honestly, but I wish it were.

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a month of somedays

tomhampton 4 Comments
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I carry a notebook around most of the time – I mean, I also carry a smartphone, but the vast majority of the time I’m too set in my ways to use it for songwriting, for the most part. (The one exception is a song called Fade Away that I dictated into my phone in its entirety while driving to Philadelphia for a show in 2021, during a COVID respite – and it’s a great thing to have in my pocket when the notebook is out of reach, when I’m driving, or otherwise unable to commit to pen and paper.)

I’ve been jotting down titles for this record that I’ve been working on over the past few weeks – trying to come up with something that reflected the spirit of the content of the songs on the record. It’s not a concept record, but there are some themes that reoccur throughout the body of music, so it felt bigger than just slapping a few words together to take up space on the cover.

I went over all the songs on the record looking for a snippet from a line of a song, and there were a few titles that presented themselves, but I wasn’t in love with any of them. But at one point, I wrote “running out of somedays” in there and that felt like a good match for the material – but I didn’t like the finality of it.

So, ultimately, the title that I landed on sprang out of that one, and while I wasn’t head over heels with it out of the gate, the more I thought about it, the better I felt. When you arrive at the place in one’s life that I find myself in now, the folly of putting things off for some indeterminable amount of time while you deal with life’s other priorities and distractions becomes pretty apparent – when large chunks of your contacts in your cellphone can’t come to the phone because they’re deceased, the line from Bonnie Raitt’s Nick of Time starts to sound like an alarm….life becomes more precious when there’s less of it to waste. These themes surface a lot in this record, and the title works on a level that I didn’t really anticipate when I initially considered it as a possibility – so we now have a title and a mockup of the cover.

As of this weekend, I’ve set a rough release date within a few days in the last week of July, I’ve gotten a mix engineer onboard, and I’m wrapping up the last few overdubs on the tracks that have made the track listing – I’ve set a few personal deadlines and have narrowed down the track listing and we’re moving forward with this thing, FINALLY.

I’m currently brainstorming what “releasing an album of original music in 2024” actually looks like…but here’s the plan as it currently stands:

There’ll be a vinyl release of the record on the release date, and it’ll go live on the streaming services the same day.

Anyone who buys the album on vinyl will get a free digital download of the record on release day.

There will be multiple packages available – and price points will either include a maxi-EP of acoustic versions of some of the songs from the record, or the deluxe CD version of the album which will contain ALL the songs from the vinyl release PLUS either three or four bonus songs as well. There’ll be a few online preview shows and a couple of videos and likely a “making of” long form video of sorts – and it’ll be the first project I’ve done during the entirety of my career that’ll also be available on the streaming services.

And yeah, I feel like I need to take a shower just typing that in a place where other people will read it, but…this is where we live now. I’ve accepted the notion that physical product is dead and that the number of people who embrace the notion of actually OWNING music is dwindling and will continue to do so – but there are still enough folks who care about having something to hold in their hands while they listen to the music, who want to ensure that they can listen to it without a wifi connection, who want to experience album art and liner notes and the actual process of listening to an entire body of work in sequence – and I want to believe that a substantial chunk of my potential audience will be among those numbers.

But – you gotta be on Spotify. In this day and age, you just do. People on my rung of the food chain almost never see any actual revenue from it, but it’s the only channel that a lot of people utilize for music, and I guess I’ve been absent from it long enough.

There’s a LOT of work to do, and it’s a little overwhelming – especially since I’m going it alone on this project.

(and when I say “alone”, I’m saying that I played every instrument on the record, all of them actual non-virtual versions save for the B3 and keyboard stuff, sang all the parts no matter how painful, and with the exception of mixing and mastering, I’ll be overseeing everything else from the album art to DSP placement to video creation to posting and responding on social media platforms. it’s gonna be a handful.)

But it’s also the first album of strictly original material that I’ve put out since Our Mutual Angels in 1997, and I don’t know that I felt as strongly about those songs as I do this batch.

There’s enough songs in the can for a second album, plus the David Lindley tribute record I’m currently working on – so when I add in the companion acoustic record that I haven’t recorded a note for yet, the plate is pretty full.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

If you’ve read this far – I sent out an email to everyone on my email list last night asking for feedback about what they’d like to see in terms of a release strategy…do they care about vinyl? Do they prefer to just listen to music on Spotify, or do they want to be able to buy product and invest in the success of the record (making music isn’t cheap, even if you do it in the least expensive manner possible as I’ve done)? It’s helpful to know what people are interested in, and if you have thoughts on the matter, feel free to either leave them in the comments or drop me a note and let me know what you’re thinking.

Thanks – gonna get back to thinking about merch designs now. 🙂

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music and mattresses

tomhampton Leave a comment

“Do any of your kids have the same musical talent you do?”


It comes up from time to time, and the answer is always yes – Jayda, my oldest daughter, was picking out and singing harmony lines before she was old enough to go to public school, and Dylan started noodling on bass and guitar at an early age…but, aside from Jayda singing with several bands in her late teens and guesting on my records and Dylan’s brief flirtation with drums in junior high jazz band, neither of them chose to fling themselves into it in the manner their wayward father did.


I usually qualify my answer to that question with the notion that – while neither of them ever expressed it to me in so many words – that they probably spent much of their childhood watching me pound my head against the same proverbial wall long enough that they just decided for themselves (whether consciously or otherwise) that it just wasn’t worth it.


That’s a valid choice, based on the evidence presented to them, for sure.


But there’s an argument to be made for exploring musical aspirations without the added, self-imposed weight of tying them to commerce in some form or fashion – of singing or playing for the pure joy of singing or playing. The great thing about that mindset is that it’s never too late to start, and whether they do or not – or whether I’m here to see it – is their call, to be certain.


Danny, my youngest, has started going down the rabbit hole and exploring his own tastes, which tend to lean towards 80’s pop (Oingo Boingo, Duran Duran, OMD, etc.) and obscure Soviet Bloc bands like KINO. I’ve told him a couple of times while listening to music in the car that if he ever wanted to explore the mechanics of how those tracks were made, that he couldn’t be in a better place to do so (unless he were the son of Howard Jones or Thomas Dolby, etc.) and that I’d be happy to set him up with a controller and an interface and show him how to use them, the whole bit – but he’s shown no interest in the notion up to this point.


I haven’t pounded it into his brain, and I haven’t nagged him about it – in fact, it probably hasn’t been brought up more than four or five times – but the other night in the car, we were listening to something and I remarked about how easy it was to program some of the older drum machines to come up with sounds and such, and an analogy crept out that flipped a switch for me:


I love naps. But would I love naps any more than I already do if I stuffed my own mattress?


Applying that same analogy to food, I usually appreciate food more when it’s made by someone else, so that underscores the original point even more.


And the fact is, it’s not at all important to know how it’s made in order to enjoy it.


I’ll go one further and say that once you know what’s in the recipe, the food doesn’t taste quite the same anymore.


I’ve written about that before – about how I used to hear music with a sense of fascination and wonder as a kid listening to my clock radio, and about how that mystique faded as I got repeated glimpses behind the curtain. Now, to be clear, I certainly don’t love it any less – I still get excited when I hear something great or unique or clever and there’s still a period that lasts anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes where I’ll marvel at how awesome something is when I hear it for the first time…but the other side of my brain will eventually kick in. I’ll hear the intro to Jason Isbell’s “When We Were Close” and soak it in and revel in what a great riff it is, how the chorus lifts the song, his obvious skill as a songwriter…but in a few minutes, I’ve got the clipboard and the magnifying glass: “I don’t think either he or Sadler are capo’ed or tuned differently, the riff is too locked in – but the separation…they’ve gotta be playing pretty different guitars – maybe one has a drier signal than the other…”


It’s neither voluntary nor involuntary, and it’s not a bad thing – it’s the sense of curiosity that’s been the force that led me to the place I’m at in my life that takes over and asks those questions, but I do know this: that sense of wonder and curiosity and the mystique that exists when you don’t even know to ask those questions, much less have any of the answers has been replaced by something else. Not better, not worse, just…different.


And I have to confess that I miss it sometimes.


Now, would I trade away everything I’ve learned over the course of the majority of my life to reset the counter to zero just to experience music that way again?


Naw…that’s just crazy talk.


But there is something to be cherished in experiencing music without the filter that accompanies all those glimpses behind the curtain, and I don’t see any point in ruining that for my youngest – so I’m gonna shut up and let him revel in listening to the music that he loves without trying to screw it up for him.


It’s perfectly OK to enjoy sailing down the road with the wind in your hair without lifting the hood, after all.

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The Intersection of Advice and Experience

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It’s story time, friends…make yourselves comfortable.  

So I’ve always said that where instruments are concerned, that I could unquestionably hear the difference between a $149 guitar and a $500 guitar, and the difference between a $500 and maybe a $2k guitar…but after that, the differences were all but inaudible because the factors that affect cost past that price point usually have little to do with the sound – it starts to speak to collectibility or scarcity of materials (or some level of ornamentation that goes above and beyond the boundaries of good taste, usually).  While hearing the difference past that point becomes a matter of debate, there’s definitely some stark differences in sound quality between the classes of instrument at the bottom of the budgetary food chain.

That has nothing to do with the moral of our story, but there’s a parallel that comes into play later, so I had to get that outta the way.  🙂

Another lifetime ago, I used to be a part of a thriving little clan of like-minded folks who called themselves the Philadelphia Recording Community – it was a great little collection of highly opinionated engineers and enthusiasts from all walks of professional life in the Philly studio community, and there would be meetings – usually in a studio somewhere in town – on a regular basis where everyone would get together, tour whatever studio we were meeting in, there’d occasionally be reps from manufacturers who’d stop in to show off new gear – of course, there was a Facebook group – it was an invaluable exchange of information for someone who’d  been floundering and absorbing input from online forums full of armchair quarterbacks.  These folks were legitimately hands-on and there were some heavy hitters who’d worked on significant records in the ranks…so you could show up and ask questions and get legitimate advice and feedback from folks who actually showed up to work every day and did this for a living.

But when you get advice from people you look up to, there’s a tendency to take that as gospel and file it away as infallible – and I’ve recently learned that there are benefits to keeping an open mind about such things.

(if you’re not a practicing musician or involved in recording, you could be forgiven for moving on from this particular missive at this point – no offense taken.)

Most folks know that the vast majority of music is recorded onto computers now, with hard disks replacing the old analog multitrack tape machines that were once the center of studio operations, along with the console…the console accepted signal from microphones and routed it to the appropriate tracks on the tape recorder until all the parts were recorded, at which time the individual tracks were routed back into the console for mixing.

Now, though, as computers have taken over the job of storing the recorded audio, consoles have become extinct in almost ALL home studios, and a large number of professional rooms as well – with mixing taking place “in the box” (inside the computer itself) with the recording software taking the place of the console that once took up the entire control room.

With the evolution of this new landscape, two new elements of the signal chain have emerged as the focus of attention for people recording off the grid:  

* Converters – the tool that converts analog audio signal to digital information to be stored on the computer

* Standalone Microphone preamps – devices that were once integrated into the console that have been moved into standalone status so that musicians and engineers can have anywhere from one to four preamps for recording, rather than an entire console.  

The tradeoff in space and expense has been a game changer.  Rather than spend tens of thousands of dollars for a full-size console or a tape machine the size of a dishwasher, someone can outfit a home recording space with a laptop, a converter, and a couple of professional grade mic preamps and they’ll have the same quality in their signal chain as most full service studios, and the entire rig can fit in a case that would qualify as a carry-on at the airport.

The caveat, of course, is that there still has to be a level of quality to rival traditional full service, professional studios.  Then, as now, this varies greatly.  You can’t buy a $100 microphone and a $79 USB converter and expect to get sound quality to rival Alison Krauss’ “Paper Airplanes” – there are a lot of variables that add up to the difference between cheap recording gear and gear used to make records with that kind of fidelity, and I don’t pretend to know shit about them, but they’re certainly quantifiable via price tag.

So with that thought in mind, here’s where I went off the rails for a decade.

I vividly remember more than one conversation during my days of haunting PRC meetings where these hardware topics were hotly debated – especially because the advent of 500 series preamps was in full blossom, and there were a ton of boutique brands making their own flavor of these modular preamps at the time (this hasn’t changed, it’s just not quite as new and evolving as it felt like it was at the time…and maybe that was just my newbieness that made it feel that way, who knows?) – but everybody had their favorite manufacturer, their favorite op amp (GAR vs. Red Dot…oh, the memories), and the great thing to me was that there really were no wrong answers.  Everything in this pursuit is results-driven – if you make a great record on a cassette portastudio (as Bruce Springsteen did with “Nebraska“), the method doesn’t matter as much.  Great records have been made on shitty gear, but generally speaking, no one wants to start from that vantage point if they can help it.

We all want to assemble the best gear we can, because it eliminates obstacles.

So the evolving mindset in some of these conversations was that the best way to set yourself up for success was to assemble the best gear you can in the analog chain – get the best mics you can afford, and the best mic pres you can afford…because the converters have risen to a level of quality where the difference at the converter level was negligible.  Now, nobody ever straight up told me that converters didn’t matter – just that they didn’t matter as much as they might have at one time.  These are engineers, after all – EVERYTHING matters to them. 

The PRC even did a converter shootout at one point back in 2010 – there’s video from the session that’s still on YouTube. 

Still, this mindset that converters were less important in the signal chain became my modus operandi.  I’ve gone through gear since then – had to sell off gear for the Nashville move, reassembled gear in the time since, but I’ve used the same converter (a Focusrite Saffire PRO 40) for almost that entire time.  I made Friends and Heroes with that unit, I made Out To Pasture with that unit, and used it for countless remote sessions over the course of over a decade.

BUT – it’s a FireWire unit, and FireWire is slowly going the way of the two dollar bill.  I had a desktop computer with a dedicated FireWire card in it, ultimately replaced with a Dell Precision laptop with integrated FireWire, but – the clock is always ticking in a scenario like this, and recently…the ticking stopped.

I don’t know if it was the laptop or the Focusrite unit, but that circuit stopped working…and it became apparent to me (after first wiping and reinstalling Windows AND ProTools on the laptop) that I couldn’t really put off the inevitable any longer.  Especially since I was beginning work on a new solo record – maybe it was time to go ahead and look at replacement options.

Replacing the laptop meant replacing the converter, but I’d accepted by this point that they were likely a package deal in my situation…so I got a new laptop with Thunderbolt capability, assuming that I’d likely go the Universal Audio Apollo route (I’d talked to a couple of folks who were Apollo users who spoke highly of them), but the more layers of the onion I peeled back, the more options there were…plus conversations about the future viability of Thunderbolt versus USB 3.0, so more information only bred more confusion.

But as I was dipping my toes into the water, a buddy loaned me a converter to use as a stopgap while I got everything else squared away…it was a unit he’d inherited at one point and had since parked it at another now-defunct studio a couple hours south of Nashville, so we took a road trip one afternoon to go retrieve it and I brought it home and set about scouring FB Marketplace to get the necessary cables to integrate it into my studio.  So everything had to come out from the wall, wires pulled, new wiring and patchbay diagrams, the whole nine yards…and then once that was done, well…

…don’t forget – you get to reinstall ProTools for a third time.

So finally, after not having had a note of music pass through anything in the Overdub Nook for weeks, I finally got the laptop finished and ready to work – got a few templates created for I/O (input/output) in ProTools, and imported tracks from one of my previous sessions into a new session on the new laptop.  I had exported everything, minus any plugins, just raw audio – as I knew any sessions I’d open on the new computer would be dependent on old plugin directories, old I/O settings, and this way just felt…cleaner.

I hit the spacebar to start playback, and…

…holy shit.

Remember that anecdote from the beginning of this missive, where we talked about hearing the difference between a $149 guitar and a $2k guitar?

I’m here to tell you, folks – the same damn thing is true about A/D-D/A converters.

Maybe what the boys at PRC told me all those years ago was true…maybe they have gotten better over the years…but the difference between what I was hearing through this 10 year old Antelope Orion that I’d borrowed and my old Focusrite unit was – shocking.

Clarity, separation, fidelity – I mean, I was listening to a mix of raw audio that was barely altered (save for a few level changes) and the quality was head and shoulders over mixes I’d agonized over when listening through the old unit.  The lows were tighter and more focused, the highs less sibilant – in short, it sounded like the sum of its parts, rather than a stew.

I really hadn’t been prepared for the difference that one piece of gear made in the way my songs sounded…but I am grateful for other parts of that advice that I’d heeded all this time:  get the best microphones and mic pres that you can.  If I hadn’t heeded that advice, chances are I wouldn’t have heard what I heard from that playback in such stark terms. There had to be some degree of fidelity in the raw tracks, or there wouldn’t have been any detail there to reveal through the new converter. Still, I can’t help but wonder how much of a difference it would have made if I’d had that same quality of converters going INTO the computer…

(Now, the one thing I’m NOT retroactively obsessing over is the fact that the converter I’m using right now would’ve cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $3k if I’d bought it new off the shelf, and I’m not one to spend that kind of money on gear. They’re showing up used on Reverb right now for roughly a third of that – but I digress. No, I never would’ve spent that kind of money on something like this at the time. Now, though – the difference it makes sure as hell ain’t lost on me.)

Right now, I’m still chest-deep in the “I want to re-record every single thing I’ve ever touched” phase – I don’t know where that fits on the grand scale…probably between bargaining and acceptance, but I’ll tell you this much:  this one piece of gear has fundamentally changed the degree to which I hear the details of the work I do in my little studio space.  I can’t help but wonder how much different prior projects might’ve turned out if I’d put a little more emphasis on that link in the signal chain before now, but – I’m gonna try to be grateful for the lesson learned, rather than resentful of the time that’s passed prior to the point at which I learned it.

That lesson being – advice is great, but don’t allow it to rob you of experience.

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…know when to hold ’em – know when to fold ’em…

tomhampton 3 Comments

For as long as I can remember…for as long as I’ve had a choice in the matter, anyway – I’ve had a particular intuition for when to walk away from something right before the wheels came off.

Forty years ago, I joined the Navy out of high school a mere month before the radio station I worked for was sold and everyone lost their jobs.

Six years ago, I took a random phone call from a recruiter that landed me at my current day gig just as the company I worked for was being sold off – the building I was working in when I took that fateful call doesn’t even exist anymore.

There are tons of other examples I could cite, but it all constitutes a thread that’s run through my life for as long as I can remember…I’m sure there’s tons of stuff that’s happened that I could blame on shifts in my life, too, but that’s a whole ‘nother train of thought.

I don’t always listen to my gut in every instance that I probably should, but I’ve always known when to walk away.

Walking away from this latest musical endeavor feels like another example of that.

I’m not really inclined to recount specifics or point fingers…the fact is, once it became apparent early this year that I was likely headed in this direction, it was almost a relief when I made it official a couple months ago. Everyone deserves the chance to be on a team where everyone is on the same page, and this was an important step in that direction.

I’m not entirely sure what lies ahead for the band – that’s their call, but they’ve replaced me with an alumnus of a prior joint venture and they’re giving every impression that they plan to soldier on. So – for folks who had high hopes for what lies ahead for the band, stand fast…it ain’t over yet. For me, though, I find a certain amount of peace in having freed myself from either the credit or the blame for whatever ultimately comes next, there…and I’m not suggesting in any way, shape or form that my exit will have any bearing on their future – good, bad or otherwise. They’ll take this thing as far as they see fit…I just need to be free and clear of all of it. It’s really that simple.

I honored a few obligations over the summer, but my musical calendar is now clear – as it’ll remain until such time as the Grantham Situation reaches closure. I’ve got two projects in the works at the moment – I’ve already met with and chosen a co-producer whose work I’ve admired for a long time, and I’m continuing to jot down notes on scraps of paper and assembling song ideas for a long, LONG overdue album of original material…it’s just a matter of how and where I’ll fit those efforts in between outings involving neurologists, waffles and enchiladas (not to mention continuing to hold down the aforementioned day gig).

The extended family here at The Brokedown Palace have shouldered a ton of shit that they never asked for over the course of this past seven months, and there’s no way we’d have gotten through all this if we weren’t all on the same page. Thanks to all of you, truly.

I’ve started getting the ball rolling here by retooling this page this evening, and there’s plenty of heavy lifting I can do while our domestic situation coasts to its inevitable transition point – it’s not as sexy as making a record, but it’s all necessary work, and I’ll do the best I can to keep y’all updated.

It may continue to appear quiet around these parts, and some days – that’s all it’ll be.

But I’ve got just a little more noise to make before I’m done.