Your Answers, Questioned

Happy late Sunday night! Best music I listened to this weekend was definitely the new live album from Hiss Golden Messenger. He’s getting all the money out to the North Carolina Foundation for Public School Children to help students who are facing a loss of SNAP benefits. But this is a solo live concert and it’s reminder that Hiss Golden Messenger is a gifted writer and songwriter. He opens with this tune “Drum” that I played about fifteen years ago with Dessa and Ben on a run of very intimate shows we were doing. Listen to this please.

Strong recommend to go buy this music, get some money going in the good direction. And I have to say, it felt wonderful to buy something and then listen to it. It is also not only true that Spotify is an awful organization that I pay $16 a month to, guitars also sound like shit on Spotify. It feels great over there on bandcamp.

Music is spectacular. Music is moving.

Next weekend I have the honor of making music with Alexei, Josh, Peter and Steve as Crescent Moon X Big Trouble. That’s at the Bryant-Lake Bowl on Saturday, November 22. Everyone including you would be very happy if you bought tickets in advance. That’d be a great idea. Here’s that flyer!

I should also mention that Alexei (Crescent Moon) made a great new record with Andrew Broder. What a treat to hear those two together again, plus they have I Self Devine and Davu Seru along for guest appearances.

Got to take in the Trivia Mafia Tournament of Champions on Saturday at Amsterdam which was such an honor. We’ve been doing the tournaments for a long time and they started at Amsterdam. Tournament days used to be all clipboards, rail liquor, minor arguments and major laughter. I went down to this year’s tournament with my friend Amy Woo. Former Trivia Mafia leader, permanent awesome friend. We went and sat in the back, chatted up Brenda Karunya, the heart and soul of the Amsterdam Bar and Hall. Ordering drinks and laughing and everyone being a little bit old to be doing this and a little young to not be.

We walked around to say hello to the Trivia Mafia staff making it all happen. This is 25 teams, most teams 6 players, who dedicated a couple weekends to playing trivia. Granted one team makes $1000. But most teams are out there doing it for love, doing it for fun, doing it for trivia. It’s just such a rush to see something I helped build flourishing. And it’s good to see people hanging in downtown Saint Paul. We were far from the biggest game in town. . .the Wild were playing down the street. But the vibes were good and the trivia was excellent. One of those little moments where I got a sense that everything was going to end up alright. I don’t know how everything can end up alright while I’m sitting here at 11:07pm on a Sunday. . .but I promise you when I had two drinks in me and the trivia teams were walking out and laughing I thought things might be heading in the right direction.

I’m holding on to that as I head into this week full of podcasting, cooking, parenting and preparing for Saturday at the Bryant-Lake Bowl with Crescent Moon X Big Trouble.

I listed a couple questions I’ve been wondering about lately. . .please answer ‘em! I’ll get you the results next week!