Well. More jarring news this week. The governor ('govnah,' as we call him) has said that the earliest restaurants will open is June 26th.  I was certain we would be announcing to the public that my restaurant would reopen on June 2nd.  But here we go again: change of plans.  Rather than panic about it, I'm trying to evolve a bit emotionally and take it in stride.

So I've started to think about my next record.  

I've got 36 tunes that I've written since my last album.  Most of them aren't going to see the light of day...they're just rubbish (I'm not sandbagging; they're actual garbage).  But some of them feel true, and I'm trying to sort through them all to make a collection that hangs together.  

The older I get, the harder it is to make records.  Mostly because of my commitment to making something authentic.  You would think that--as we get older and become more self-actualized--it would be easier to make records.  

Not so.

What makes it hard is that I've had so many experiences that have shaped me differently.  In the earlier days of putting together an album, it was easy. I just picked all the tunes about a common topic like grieving the loss of my dad, becoming a mom, getting over a lost love, or capturing stories from my hometown.  But these days, the topics of the tunes are all over the place. 

Yesterday, I spent so much time looking through my old notebooks that I started to get dizzy.  I found blues tunes about stones and bluegrass songs rife with political trash talk and swanky soul numbers about booze and bars. 

My mind was racing last night. How do I make something cohesive with all of this?  What's binds these tunes together?  

It came to me this morning.  Glue. Glue is what holds things together. And I am the glue.

Reader, it's easy as a creator to have a crisis of identity.  We want ourselves to be one slick, easy-to-brand thing.  But that would be false.  We're all of our experiences.  We are concurrently skipping stones and singing the blues while talking political trash and tapping our toes while waltzing into late-night dives and being over-served.

All at once.  It's all us.

With that, I'm off to sift through more songs with a bit more confidence. I leave you with this picture of my Mom. Happy belated Mother's Day to all you mamas, especially you, Joan Hurd. See you next Monday -Em