DATE: June 9, 2023
LOCATION: Ram's Head Onstage, Annapolis, MD
LINEUP: Karin, Linford
REVIEW BY:
Linford:
On the road again. You can see we go pretty hard after the shows these days: I’m pounding a banana, Karin is having some potato chips (some great singers swear they keep the vocal cords greased up) and Bill Ivester is waving a full bottle of ice water around like a madman. Myron Detweiler was inside settling the show (working) and our sound engineer extraordinaire, Robert Fugate, snapped the photo.
One of our favorite songwriters, Jane Siberry, has a beautiful song called, The Valley. In it, she offers a simple blessing: You will walk in good company. It’s really the best a songwriter can hope for. Do your work, keep going and walk in good company.
Good company starts with the people you work with, and we’ve been blessed over the years by so many worthy traveling companions. There are five of us traveling together these days, and it’s a joy to wake up knowing we get to make music with such dependable, kind, open-hearted brothers. (Grateful also for the promoters, staff and crew at the venues, who welcome us back year after year and work to ensure everything goes smoothly.)
Then good company broadens to the extended musical family who finds the music and gives the songs a good life, playing the songs on road trips, spinning them on a record player in the late evenings as the kids are falling asleep, and perhaps most notably, holding the songs close during inevitable difficult seasons when life can get brutal. That’s what we hear so often: when the days went dark, the songs kept me company. May every songwriter be blessed as we have, with an audience that seems to embrace the music deeply through every season of life.
Finally, good company includes the artists whose music sustained us and inspired us in some way to join the ever-flowing river of song, sing a little harmony part, get swept downstream, keep going. Good company includes the other rhymers who can’t resist the lure of the road, what Robbie Robertson described as a “goddam impossible way of life.” Leaving home, leaving behind family and loved ones simply to offer songs on a stage, never knowing exactly who will walk in the door to receive them. We’ve been at it for over 30 years now, and that feels like a small miracle of some kind.
So big thanks to everyone who found us at the Virginia Arts Festival in Norfolk on Thursday. And to everyone who packed out Rams Head in Annapolis last night. We’re rolling into NYC this evening to headline the new City Winery and we can’t wait to do it all again.
And whatever calling you answer, we’ll echo Jane’s blessing here: May you walk in good company