My friend Jeff from Sebastopol gave me the bad news last night.
Upper Fourth is closed.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, Upper Fourth is, or rather, was a beautiful, classy bar in Santa Rosa that offered adults the perfect place to meet, have a drink, talk quietly, laugh loudly and listen [...]

Everybody’s just a stranger, but
that’s the danger of going my own way.
It’s the price I have to pay.
— John Mayer, from the song, Georgia
This afternoon, I’ll be singing at Don’t Tell Mama in New York City.
It’s my sliver of a New York City debut.
My friend Jason Britton from California is premiering his “Listen to Your [...]

I have a friend who’s a songwriter. A damned good songwriter.
And sometimes, not always, when he’s working on a song, he catches fire.
The creative spark, lit by a riff, a snippet of melody, a chord progression starts burning, and he becomes consumed in a creative blaze. The song, as it emerges, overtakes him. He can’t [...]

I wrote this post while in New York City last week. I never finished it, so I’m posting it now.
It’s the simple things that feel so empowering to me now.
Like knowing that if there’s a subway entrance for the 1 train going downtown on one side of the street, chances are the train going [...]

Oh, New York, New York! What have you done to me?
I’ve been back home for over a week now. What a wildly wicked and wonderful trip! It changed my life and then changed it back again. It lifted me up, twirled me around and then threw me to the curb… and I’m just now finding [...]

There are days, like today,
when all I need or want is to be alone
listening to John Mayer sing “Dreaming With a Broken Heart.”
There are days, like today,
when I feel hung by the weight  of betrayal and disappointment
and yet I don’t care.
Because soon, at 5:00 pm today I’ll be standing in front of a room
of strangers, [...]