Living on an island tends to work on you in different ways. I've been reflecting on the many Alameda-island specific events and projects I've created or been a part of in the years I’ve lived here while preparing for a tribute show to an expert in a different flavor of the island escapism genre, Jimmy Buffett. Songwriter pal and activist Pete Kronowitt rounded up a bunch of peers to play the show, a benefit for Singing for Change, a grant-making organization, which partners with “organizations that inspire personal growth, community integration and the enhanced awareness that collectively, people can bring about positive change.” Until Buffet’s passing, was funded by his concert tours, so it seems a fitting beneficiary.
But unlike Pete, Buffett’s oeuvre has served more as a background than foreground to my musical consciousness. While I grew up during the time his career flourished, and his Florida Keys musical ethos paralleled much of what prevailed on the West Coast, it wasn’t really my medicine. That said, as I’ve revisited his catalog this week, I’m struck by how much of his material is actually familiar to me, how dedicated he was to his travilin’, tropical lifestyle and his sound in general. His sound was his, which is admirable in any artist.
“When will we become ourselves?” David Rawlings sings on ‘Hashtag’ from the newRawlings/Gillian Welch record. Woodlanddropped last week, just after the DNC, which consumed me for several days, wrapped up . Amid all the show and recording prep with which I’ve otherwise been busy, I’ve been listening to the predictably stellar 10-song collection and reading some choice interviews1 with the duo, whose music this household routinely foregrounds. We even played ‘I Dream a Highway’ at our wedding reception!
Oh, I dream a highway back to you, love
A winding ribbon with a band of gold
A silver vision, come arrest my soul
I dream a highway back to you
Welch and Rawling’s music is as dreamy as it is earthy and just gets in. One of my favorite memories from attending many years of Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festivals, is beginning to walk my bike out of Golden Gate Park with the crowd after Welch and Rawlings’ mesmerizing end-of-day set and finding I was walking alongside Warren Hellman. The festival founder and ringmaster, who booked them at the festival many times, was in a similar reverie. “Amazing, huh,” we both kind of nodded at one another (Fortunately, I managed to thank Hellman before he headed backstage.)
In the New Yorker interview, Rawlings discusses how Robin Hitchcock had noted that their music, after so many records, had become “part of the cultural bloodstream.” As I’ve spent time with both their new record and Buffett’s music this week, I’d have to agree about both artists. Musical animals of very different stripes though they may be, they very definitely became themselves.
Art-making does that, for better or for worse. As does knowledge of actual place, which fuels so much of Buffett’s and Welch/Rawlings work, and is likley why I respect both.
Place, home or otherwise, is my jam, and I know that as I’ve resisted traveling for most of this summer, I can now recognize how much Alameda has entered my bloodstream. While I’ve yet to live here as long as I did in Corralitos, CA, which lives in my bones, it has gradually become the foreground for much of creative work. Next month, Bay Station Band, which began as an experiment, turns 10; the Bay Station Eagle 'zine, initially a pandemic project, has moved out of quarantine and will have its first in-person event, and Flight Lessons certainly wouldn’t exist if I didn’t live here.
We happen into ourselves when we’re doing, not thinking. And one of my favorite things about this happening business is the many selves we actually contain. Yesterday, I rode my recently refurbished, 30-year-old bike — which, as an artifact of my competitive cycling self, has still seen more miles in the Rocky Mountains than California — around the island, blue sky overhead, blue water in the distance, going over the lyrics to ‘Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes’ and had to laugh.
These changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes
Nothing remains quite the same
Through all of the islands and all of the highlands
If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane
Nothing remains the same but it never really goes away either. Change and time and somewhere in there becoming. We’re all working with it…and it’s always good to laugh!