This last week I...
...finished two good books, Richard Wright's Native Son (a long time catching up with that one!) and Etgar Keret's The Seven Good Years.
...attended a memorial service for my grandfather in the godforsaken middle of Pennsylvania.
...left Chicago out of one airport, parking my van in long-term, and returned absentmindedly to another.
Read MoreI play with Don Stiernberg.
I'm playing with Steve Dawson. We're doing songs by women, who, while slightly more than half of humanity, compose but a smallish fraction of the writers and singers of popular music.
This week it's the Scavengers. Robbie Gjersoe, K.C. McDonough, Gerald Dowd and I play a set of music, in all the styles that middle-aged guys seem to like.
Read MoreWith my boy Preston leaving for college next month, we're giving him a sendoff with a Monday night show starring himself. Musically, he and I are sort of co-curating. Preston picked the material and will be drumming and singing most of it, and I picked the players.
Read MoreI play country blues and one or two other things with Eric Noden. Lots of groovy guitar work!
Read MoreI welcome one of America's great (if not justly acclaimed) songwriters, John Sieger. I've been good friends with John, and an avid admirer and very occasional co-writer, since the early 1990s.
Read MoreAbout once a year I do a wordplay-generated mashup at my Monday residency. This Monday it's "Graham and Charlie Parker." I seem to recall, during previous mashup preparation bouts, which, by the way, are always extensive and call on a broad swath of the cerebrum, that subtle and surprising common threads have come to light. This time, not so much. The reason you can find an element here and there in, for instance, a Monk head, that can be made to correspond with something in, for example, oh, a Monkees melody, is that the world of harmony is finite. Narrowed down further yet by the subcategories "American" and "midcentury" (broadly speaking, of course) and "popular" (jazz used to be popular music, believe it or not), the project starts looking much less lunatic, and a Monk-Monkees or two-Parker set of music can come to be something other than an otiose comic exercise.
Read MoreI dish on his new record at Talkhouse:
http://thetalkhouse.com/music/talks/robbie-fulks-talks-freedy-johnstons/
I just took on another outdoor summer band show, Square Roots in Chicago, where I'll be sharing top-dog status and burdens with my old friends the Mekons and Urge Overkill:
http://www.squareroots.org/music/
Read MoreI won't be at the Hideout this Monday, but I will be in a bunch of almost equally eerie places -- Effingham IL, Springfield MO, and St Louis. More details on the tour page.
Read MoreMe + Gerald Dowd. His songs, my songs, other songs.
Well it's been a bad year for last-minute cancellations. This makes two so far, and this time it was a big festival in Arkansas, with weighty names such as Sara Evans. Is it something I said? "God isn't real"?
Read MoreI'll be playing old country songs with the Hoyle Brothers.
Tonight at 7P I'm kicking off the historic opening of Chicago's elevated park and trail system, called the 606, with a set of rocking summer music that I'm going to do with a 6-piece group. Co-fronting the band with me will be Tawny Newsome, former shining star of Second City and current hotshot of greater Los Angeles. In the band will be Scott Ligon of NRBQ, and several others not in NRBQ, so you really don't need either to like or dislike NRBQ to enjoy this show. Canny marketing!
Read MoreYou can see a well-recorded clip from a trio performance of "Georgia Hard" from last year's Pickathon festival in Oregon on the Bluegrass Situation website:
http://www.thebluegrasssituation.com/read/live-lucky-barn-robbie-fulks-georgia-hard
In the copy accompanying the footage I'm called "venerable" (which is probably worse than anything I've called Ryan Adams) and in the still shot, the three of us, Don Stiernberg and Chris Scruggs and I, look like some of the most unsavory life forms imaginable. I look like a transgendered copy of my mom. Don looks like he's orgasming. Chris is looking grimly into space. You shoulda been there!
If you like a crowded stage emitting many decibels, this is for you. This Monday I'll ring in the summer with a bunch of summer-themed pop covers (Sheryl Crow, hello! Coconut Records, high five! Astrud Gilberto, 'sup? Marvin Gaye, duck!) accompanied by Scott Stevenson, Scott Ligon, Alex Hall, and Liam Davis. They'll all be singing, I'll be singing, and singing more than probably anyone will be the high priestess of modern-day Second City, the divine Tawny Newsome. Come drink and dance with all of us.
I Heart Roger Miller. Me and three other weirdoes play 18 great tunes from Roger's catalog, leaving 35 other great tunes from his catalog unplayed. Emotional forecast: jittery highs, soul-smothering lows.
To replace Wendy Lewis, who was suddenly afflicted with a busted car, a few friends -- Gerald Dowd, Steve Dawson, and John Abbey -- are coming down Monday to do some music with me. Not sure what it'll be but sure it'll be something!
I just posted a slew of dates, from Friday into late June, on the tour page. I'll be in St. Paul this weekend with Don Stiernberg, then on to Rockford, and there are tickets available for each of those. The first several of my summer shows with Redd Volkaert are also listed; and you can see some upcoming Hideout programming.
Read MoreI'm back at my old haunt on Monday, with Cathy Fink, who I met once in Washington, and Marcy Marxer, who I will have met an hour or two before showtime. The duo of Cathy and Marcy is one ("the duo is one," wow, get Schrodinger on the phone) of the top children's acts in the U.S. They're also fantastic old-time country musicians. Guess which guise you'll see them in at the Hideout.
