This feels like the beginning of the end of the movie.
First, I was voted into The Oly Music Awards as a solo artist. I was the only actual solo artist on the bill at The Northern that night. All the other “solo” artists were duos or people playing with bands or recorded tracks.
I was doing all this to promote my book, but performing music in front of an audience again…it felt good and alive, and a lot deeper than when I put it down after my divorce in 2003. I also realized while playing these songs that Accidental Initiations is a key to understanding a lot of my music in a way that wasn’t possible before for anyone but me.
I’ve been syncing with Kendl Winter and her band The Blackberry Bushes all spring so it was great to have her sitting in with me on this old Beer Pressure song. Beer Pressure was a short-lived project I did with Sandman and Dan Kauffman.
These next two are my favorite new songs. If I was still doing this professionally I’d call them my singles.
This is an old song written with Chad Fischer.
I’m a huge Jon Brion fan. Not sure if I did this song from I Heart Huckabees justice but it was a blast doing it with Kendl.
If I was a smarter guy I’d sing this song every day.
The next day I took a group for a walk in The Tree…More on this in the next post.
Accidental Initiations 2 
Congratulations! And awesome post, too! 🙂
So you call out the other artists for using backup and claim that you were the only one who played solo, yet two of these videos show you… performing with a female artist?
Trying to make sense of this…
I didn’t intend to “call out” the other musicians. You could just as easily say I was calling out the organizers, but I wasn’t. I was just noting that it was a solo showcase and I was the only actual solo act.
As for Kendl joining me onstage to accompany me on a couple of songs, it’s true, she did, but that was more a case of one solo performer playing with another solo performer. She wasn’t a part of my band. We just decided to do something together after we realized we were going to be on the same bill, but I played the majority of my set alone onstage with a guitar.
This point is mostly interesting to me because of the paradoxical synchronicity of my being the only solo performer on the solo performer showcase, and then Radio8Ball being the only non-band at the band showcase the next night.
I get a kick out of ironies like these. Sorry to have confused you but life is confusing. Best get used to it.
I still have my Beer Pressure poster, stored in a trunk, but not the trunk of my mind – a real one, actually.