...Happy New Year.

Good morning. There’s a thousand directions this little "Happy New Year" missive could go in, and I’ve already deleted 3 wildly varying lead-lines so far.

I’m feeling a little directionless - overwhelmed, really - as 2021 ends and 2022 starts, with or without me.

A trying year closes. On the heels of a trying year. And we dive headfirst into...another trying year.

People are tired.

I pushed myself to stay up last night, like I did last year, to usher in the stroke of midnight. From Times Square, I watched Ryan Seacrest and the ancillary countdown hosts play a tightly choreographed game of “BACK TO YOU” hot potato, trying to deflect attention from a noticeably spartan, subdued NYE crowd of revelers and hype extras.

You get the feeling that the the ball dropped merely because it was New Years Eve, not because people were particularly ready for the start of another one.

‘Dropping the ball' metaphors notwithstanding, it’s a struggle for me to find a starting point today.

There’s a lot of things I want…a lot of things that are hard for me to hold on to...a lot of things that are difficult to let go of. I’ve spent many a New Years Day making those lists, setting those goals, creating those action plans. I’ve watched the days run together and away from me like a freight train carrying it’s cargo off to some other place. I’ve missed many, many goals by a mile.

Ah. But I’ve also acquired a nifty grab bag of things I have accomplished! And, I am equally disciplined at pulling each one of them out to notice all their nicks, dings, scratches, flaws.

Why do we beat ourselves up? There are so many people out there willing to do that for you.

Staying positive truly is a choice in the worst of times. And for someone that wants to make things Just-So, the struggle to stay positive is real. Making yourself Thankful becomes a real goal. A real To Do, a real habit. Being thankful is the best defense against an overwhelming sense that things aren’t going your way, or that the universe is indifferent to your mood, or an overwhelming feeling that forces may just be plain against you.

For me, if ever there has been a year for mustering up some proactive Thanks, it’s been 2021. I want to contribute my pots and pans and pantyhose to the war effort and win. I want to move through the target.

This time last year, with 2020 in our face so much, 2021 felt fresh, and we were eager for things to ‘return to normal’. It’s been a long year of New Normal, and we will see more of that in 2022.

But...we want these January 1sts to mean something, to signify a fresh start and for the year to deliver that to us. We have ambitions, and this is how the year should go. Right? Meanwhile, ignoring the reality that each ‘water tight’ day offers the same opportunity. If anyone is guilty of trading in those days in favor of an annual ceremony, it’s me.

It takes a lot of energy to navigate life/work through the new routines; to parse and glean the useful information; to understand tomorrow will probably be very different from today, for good or for bad. It takes energy to keep all the balls from dropping. You can go to bed tired yet energized that you've put your heart and guts into something you value, only to awake with one of those “SHAME ON YOU!!” messages sitting like a cancer in your inbox or feed, for whatever current thing you said, did or expressed.

So, “THANKFUL" , is going to have to be my fortifying buzzword this year.

It needs to be. There’s just too many forces to blow my house down.

I must remain Thankful this year.

It’s the daily mortar.

- Barry

Happy Veterans Day

Road Journal 11/11/2021 - Happy Veterans Day

I’m at the desk getting to the day’s tasks and after settling last night’s paperwork, my attention turns to Veterans Day.     

I’m sensitive that veterans carry with them a wide range of roles, duties, experiences, emotions, struggles, gains, victories, defeats, losses and physical affects from their time spent in military service that I am not privy to and that belies any well-intended “Happy Veterans Day” salutations I could offer.  I’m also clueless to those details. Many of us Americans don’t know what it is like to be a part of that culture, and don’t have any compare/contrast to hold up to our lives as civilians. I think non-military civilians want to show acknowledgement and appreciation without coming across as smug, trite, or worse, completely tone deaf.

Having said that,  Happy Veterans Day to our 19 million veterans, and a big thank you to all of you Carbon Leaf fans who have served in our United States military.

It was a really fun Wednesday night in Portland playing our first time at One Longfellow Square to an appreciative audience - and on CL drummer Jesse’s 34th birthday - thanks for the love.  Our usual venue in town, Port City Music Hall, was one of many casualties across the country that did not come out the other side of a prolonged shuttering during the height of the ongoing pandemic. We are heartbroken that PCMH closed, and thankful One Longfellow Square opened it’s doors to the band and it’s audience.  

Things out here always feel tenuous, fragile, in the balance of going one way or the other.  

But for now, it’s a sunny, crisp fall day as we exit the Kennebunk rest stop and the radiant heat from the morning sun is starting to warm the cabin through the windows.  Tour Manager & Front Of House engineer (“TM/FOH”) Doug Ross is at the wheel getting the White Whale underway towards our show tonight in Connecticut.   

The November shows are going well, after a  dip down south for shows in GA, SC and NC, we point north and into New England through the weekend.  Uncasville tonight, followed by Burlington VT Friday and Rockport MA Saturday. 

This road journal is brief because things are steaming along and my sit down time is shorter on the east coast because cities are relatively closer together.

Thank you for joining us on tour and through or social channels as we work our way through The Hunting Ground.  We hope to see you all at more live shows in the coming weeks as we wind down 2021.

- Barry

INSIDE YOU THE TIME MOVES...

Road Journal 10.29.2021 - Inside You The Time Moves.

Good evening. This is a few days late.

The band and crew landed back home this past Sunday, capping off a successful ‘2nd Leg’ of The Hunting Ground Tour (…was more like two legs) covering the south, southwest, west, pacific northwest, rockies, and midwest.

We resume touring this Tuesday for the 3rd leg…a run down south and then a zip-up into the northeast for November, followed by the 4th and final leg in December, covering more northeast stops and finishing up in the hinterlands of the mid-atlantic region.

Everyone is pivoting hard, from being on the road for 7 weeks, to leaning in hard on the various honey-do lists, 4th quarter CL HQ tasks, gear and body checks, repairs and otherwise mitigating the affects of tour fatigue and the sensations of being constantly in motion.

Last week was a colorful blaze of rock circus through Grand Rapids, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Houston, Dallas, Austin, St Louis and Nashville:

• We played a sweet acoustic listening room above a movie theatre playing James Bond that wafted fresh popcorn smells during our show

• We played R.E.M.’s ‘Cuyahoga’ at our Cleveland venue, situated 30 feet from the eponymous river

• We played a great show Saturday night in Indy, and followed up the next morning with another show for some fans unplugged on the tiniest seats that 5-year-old Liam’s romper room had to offer

• In Houston, we played upstairs, going head-to-head against one of my favorite ‘80s bands playing downstairs, The Psychedelic Furs

• Our trip to Dallas included a pit stop at Bucc-ees, a Texas-sized road attraction, for beef jerky, dippin' dots, cherry sours and a chance to marvel at the longest run of contiguous bathroom stalls in the lower 48

• Austin, we caught up with Twigger from Gaelic Storm who made it to the show with his wife, Ally, and we disappointed some fans for the 3rd night in a row by not remember to re-learn Texas Stars for any of our actual Lone Star tour dates (a gross oversight…next year!)

• A 17 hour drive to St Louis had us coming in hot 2 hours before doors, for a harried set up but hard rocking Friday night

• Saturday in Nashville was a chaotic load-in snaking gear through throngs of people watching the Tennessee / Kansas City game on the jumbotron for an outdoor show at 6th and Peabody brewery.

A night drive back to Richmond, and then...

Stillness.

…But not Nothing-To-Do kind of stillness. Just…stillness.

No generators, no ac units or engines rumbling, no moving, listing, yawing, pitching, bouncing, no amplifiers, cymbals, pa systems or ear monitors, no singing, screaming, jumping, yelling, clapping, no trucks whizzing by, no rattles or vibrations, no wind, no rain, no crosstalk, no 7 guys crawling around each other in a living space the size of a rich person’s walk-in closet.

The transition is alarming and you realize how numb your face is, and how your brain and body are just…not. used. to. the stillness.

It’s at once a relief and unnerving. You are programmed and ready. You’re ready to GO, somewhere, anywhere…to do…something…it must…be time…for…motion.

Anyways, I wish I could come up with something snappier to end this journal entry, but I’ve already moved on.

See you next week.

- Barry

Inside / Out

Road Journal 10/16/2021: Inside / Out

We have spanned a lot of the country in a short time this week. From Idaho to Utah… Colorado, Missouri/Kansas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Cleveland, Indianapolis…we’ve set up the circus all but one night in the course of 10 days. 

If someone were to ask me what I had for breakfast yesterday, I could shoot back ’oatmeal, spinach, black coffee’, because it’s what I have most mornings now. Boring, effective, cholesterol free.    

But if someone asks where we played last night,  I hang my head, close my eyes and focus on the answer for a micro-second.   It’s not a slight on where we just were, it’s that the senses constantly in motion mix together and can really blur some state lines.

Sometimes during soundcheck just after a night drive, the band can feel the sea legs adjusting to solid ground, like being on the water for some time, the body sways inside…motion of the ocean.

We’ve been full-bore for 6 weeks now, and fatigue has set in. Everyone now conserves their energies for the 2-hour show. The guys with families get a little melancholy after Facetime and are missing their kids. My personal low was last Sunday, after emptying the tank onstage in Denver the night before. The ‘Mile High City’ at 5,280’ elevation (a mile) always humbles when it’s time to bounce around and sing.  With reduced oxygen and no time to acclimate, the spots during songs you are used to breathing get thrown out the window.  You really have to plan when to breathe, remember to breathe, and decide how much you are going to move around while trying use your words and long vowels on pitch in between breathing.   This, and a few nights of waking up earlier than planned, and I’m on fumes as we ride out of town towards Kansas City.

With a week+ more of shows before our next travel day, I took a CBD oil / Tylenol PM cocktail and went down hard for 11 hours.   That hasn’t happened since college.    Proper rest on tour is rare and you stock up where you can, but I don’t recommend that RX combo…I was a wasteoid the next day and wasn’t back to full capacity until Tuesday.

Rewinding to the band’s day off ahead of our Colorado shows, we pulled up under the ‘No Overnight RV Parking’ signs in the Ft Collins Walmart parking lot and set up camp for the evening.  It was fix-it piddle time and a Double Feature movie night aboard the White Whale.

For a year now, Jesse has been incredulous that none of the band has seen MacGruber, an SNL tv sketch-turned-full blown movie, this one riffing on the ‘80s TV show, MacGuyver.  It is a crude, low brow, juvenile action-comedy.  I laughed most of the time.  

For counter programming, next up was Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’.

‘Inside’  is a master stroke of creativity from a young, bright satirical comedian caught ‘inside’, literally and metaphorically, as he films himself ruminating on pandemic isolation and the toll it takes on our human need to connect, socialize, relate, and feel normal and loved in the age of digital dependance, addiction, distraction narcissism and dystopia.   It’s funny, sad, candid, surreal, disorienting, vulnerable, inventive, inspired and entertaining.  It resonates and I recommend you make some time for it.

In Chicago on Wednesday,  a young girl in her late teens or early 20s was on the corner against the wall of the venue we were loading in to.  It had started to drizzle and she was with her powder blue bike with white tires and a cute handlebar basket.  She was young, pretty, black, and was wearing clean, new fashionable clothes and sneakers and had nothing else but a ‘Hello Kitty’-type umbrella that she was using as a lean-to to keep from getting wet.   It started to rain hard now and her shoes were sticking out.  Surely she’s waiting for the bus, or to be picked up by a family member, or doesn’t want to bike home in the rain.

It’s now pouring, and we pull a blue tarp from the trailer and offered it, which she readily accepted and thanked us enthusiastically for, allowing us to cover her up, bike and all.   “Yes yes!! Thank you!!!” 

Bright, polite, alert, aware, normal.    

“Just leave the tarp by our trailer when you leave!” we said.

8 hours later, midnight, and we’re loading out after the show and she’s still there, completely covered as we left her.   It hit me that this is a brand new homeless person, clearly in her first day or two of having no shelter. (A homeless person who’s not a… ‘homeless person’ …ever been caught off guard by that prejudice?) 

The production manager said there is a sharp increase of homeless - a ‘new wave’, as he put it - emerging across the city.

We left a stored pillow and blanket next to the tarp and as we left town I was thinking….this is how it starts.  You walk out the last door that’s yours, and each night forward, you find your layers.  Tarp…blanket…pillow…the homeless starter kit begins.

The Hunting Ground tour continues this weekend into the midwest and down to TX, MO, TN.  Ya’ll come.

- Barry

Road Journal 10.6.2021 Too Busy To Rest, Too Restless To Relax

Road Journal 10.6.2021

Part of the day’s task on the Hunting Ground Tour…any tour…is looking at a list of ‘Necessary Things TO DO NOW’ and deciding what is going to be punted until tomorrow, or next week, or ‘when we get home’….or abandoned altogether.  

That last field is a real boneyard.

It’s a paradox on the road, to have no time for getting things done Just So, or having more personal time to breathe, take in the view; read a book or just get your nails painted….and at the same time, having the rare day off, or a travel day, where you don’t know what to do with yourself.  It knocks you off your rhythm of Go Go Go.  Either way, it seems you are always on the edge of falling apart in all Personal Self Care categories.

Too busy to rest.  Too restless to relax.  

Alas, it’s a familiar glove…worn, washed, tight…but still-sort-of-fits and shopping is hard.

Where was I?  

Yes, so we are traveling towards Salt Lake City from an always-super-high-energy engaged (TUESDAY!) crowd in Boise ID last night, and our first time at The Olympic Venue.  Hauling 10,000 lbs of gear to the 2nd floor stage (and also back down) is always a treat that the band savors.  We grouse, but it’s always a hearty exercise and you feel like a man and entitled to some extra calories when rolling out of town that evening.

Seattle is a special stop for the band and is our geographic watermark where the band reaches the top of the northwestern U.S. coastal border of our tour route where we start the southeast route back across the country.  We’ve been fortunate to play 3 shows across two venues here in a 24 hour span for the last 4 or 5 years: a Saturday standing show, and 2 seated/dinner shows on Sunday.  

Being in a town for 2 days in a row feels like you’ve practically relocated.  There is no extra time really, it’s mainly just that you’re not driving miles to your next stop, just a handful of city blocks.  So it’s wake up, walk it out a bit,  or grab a sit down breakfast that isn’t moving on wheels, or set up a mobile office at the coffee shop to do some paperwork, photo/video editing or check in with the families.  1pm Load In comes quick, and it’s Go mode once again.

Where was I?

Yes, so Seattle was great, as always.  At Neumos on Saturday, we got some vacuum-sealed fish gifted to us onstage; fresh smoked salmon from a fan who’s family business runs Alpenview, a fishing expedition outfitter in Alaska that you reach by ferry or seaplane.  At Triple Door on Sunday, someone named their boat “Life Less Ordinary” and we were given a framed photo.  

Another Seattle highlight - our eponymous song, “The Hunting Ground”,  made it’s public debut in Seattle on Saturday.  Having our friend Ty Bailie on keyboards added some magic to it, and to the whole weekend…thank you Ty and Emily for coming into town and lending your time and talents.

We have been enjoying peppering in some of the new songs into the sets - Her Father’s Pride, Everything’s Alright Mama, The Hunting Ground -  and they have been well-received.  {This is a REMINDER that you can listen to them all now for pennies on the dollar on Spotify.  Give a listen so when we meet, it’s not awkward.}

[Tempering some rosiness.   A general sense  that things are off everywhere you go, and it’s eery.  Some in small ways…businesses working to get open, to do some business…any business…understaffed or limited hours.   And in some large ways, in some areas the underbelly is more readily exposed than you’re accustomed…the homeless lining filthy back alleys, gangbangers shaking up their peddlers in broad daylight, and low level suppliers keeping a supply of cash and drugs to addicted junkies on death’s door, who smoke crack and shoot up in broad daylight under people’s feet, getting high and then taking their cash and drugs out on the circuit to keep the cycle going.]

Anyway, our shows are feeling safe and the vax card mandates/negative tests/masks are going well.

OK, on to other Hunting Ground things.  We hope you are making plans to join us on the upcoming shows in SLC, Ft. Collins, Denver, KC and into the midwest in the coming days.

All we need is gathering.

-Barry

ROAD JOURNAL 9.26.2021 3 WEEKS IN

So far our parlor trick this week has worked. The 5 of us are in the Atlanta airport awaiting our flight to Airzona, where we will resume our normal route and rendezvous with Doug and the White Whale for our show Monday. We dive in head first with 8 shows in 7 days…Phoenix, San Diego, L.A., San Fran, Portland and capped off with a 3 show stand in Seattle.

The coming month is brisk, with 25 shows in 27 days.

It was great to swing into Virginia this weekend for a few off—route tour stops. For a few hours, Jesse got to fly back to providence and hang with his wife and boy, and Carter and Terry got to see their wives and kids and check off a few abandoned chores from a few weeks ago. We packed up our cars with our studio gear and headed Saturday to Lexington for a VMI class reunion show, and Friday to Fredericksburg for an event benefitting Gwyenth’s Gift Foundation.

Gwyenth was a 12 year old girl who went into cardiac arrest during her school’s field day and no one knew what to do. She died, and the foundation was created by her parents with the goal of educating communities about hands-only CPR, and what to do in situations that could save someone’s life or prevent brain injury until paramedics arrive. It’s an unfathomable loss. Learn more about CPR and those AED defrillators you see on walls through Gwyenth’s story. www.gwyenthsgift.org

The Whale generator is repaired and back aboard and we have 6 new tires, which is one of those unsexy car things you don’t want to spend the money on but then rest easy knowing that your wheels will roll. By the way, if you live in the Hartford CT area, Cusson’s Automotive in South Windsor run an excellent ship and are some of the most solid and communicative technicians we’ve come across. They do it all…car, light and heavy trucks, commercial rigs and RVs. Thanks Don and crew.