Short version: Come see me this on stage this Saturday, August 9th at the Port Gamble Maritime Music Festival! I’ll be performing with Emily Groff and Jay Hagar from 12:50-1:35, and then again around 2:00 as…this year’s winner of the festival’s Bob Kotta Songwriting Contest.

Then, for you roadtrippers, on August 30th (1:15) and 31st (2:45) as a finalist in the Jane Titland Memorial Songwriting Contest and on stage at the Tumbleweed Acoustic Music Festival in Richland, WA.

Then (catches breath) the next weekend at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, sharing a set of new and original maritime songs with Brian Ledford at noon on Saturday, Sept 6th.

There are also a couple of other gigs in between, in town and out in Port Angeles, but those are the three big ones.

…

Okay, that wasn’t as “short” as I’d meant it to be, but you get the idea, right? Now, where was I?

I do seem to wear quite a few – hats, that is. Both literal and figurative. I learned to love the literal kind in my forties when genetic predilections got the better of that lush, curly head of hair I used to have, and it became clear that the choices were either hats, melanoma, never going outdoors, or slathering sunscreen all over the top of my head. Easy choice.

These days I seem to always have two, sometimes three, on hand. One on head. My “default ride” has been a brown fedora, vaguely reminiscent of a certain fictional explorer. It has served me well, both in terms of actually covering my head, and socially, as a stylish conversation piece. There was that time in Buenos Aires a few years ago when – not really speaking comprehensible Spanish, we couldn’t figure out how the bus system worked. The driver waved us forward and, in a baritone evocative of John Rhys-Davies said, “Indiana Jones – get in.”

There are plenty of “literal” hat stories (Andy – I’m looking at you raising your hand, eager to tell about when you were 11 and you told Dad he really should put the strap on his Tilley and he waved you off. But watching that hat float back up to us within snatching distance ten minutes down river made for a much better story than if I’d listened to your voice of reason. Right?)

But what I’m contemplating this morning is the figurative hats I seem to keep accumulating. Tech nerd. Aviator. Writer. Antarctic ship guy. Farmer. And now, apparently, traveling singer/songwriter.

I’ve pretty much always written songs – I’ve got scraps of one I wrote back when I must have been ten or eleven. And I remember, in my early teens, my brother and I with the guitar in his lap, composing forgettable (and mercifully forgotten) tunes in the basement.

I can still recall a few that I wrote in college, though I’d rather lie down on the tracks than play any of them in public, but there are one or two from grad school that I’m actually quite pleased with. And two that I think are still among my best came during that sojourn in Cambridge, over 30 years ago.

But that was all dabbling, to play with friends around the living room. And when I started writing travelogue (this blog), and then fiction, the songs just kind of went by the wayside. Sure, there were a couple here and there, but they were accidental, if anything.

That all changed last summer, when two things happened in fairly quick succession. The first was that I stumbled across the Port Gamble Maritime Festival’s songwriter contest and thought, “Hey – that looks fun!” It also coincided with the application deadline for Rocky Mountain Song School.

I’d attended song school once before, but more as a prose writer, and mostly because a bunch of friends who I absolutely adored were going. But this time, I got a bee in my bonnet and decided I was going to go, and I was going to Write Songs there.

It worked. The song I wrote for Port Gamble took second place, and I got so crazy jazzed and inspired by the instructors at Song School that the Port Gamble organizers invited me back to do a full set at this year’s festival. (You can see the performance, with Jay Hagar, here.)

Instead of properly catching my breath from that, I immediately signed up for my first Seven-Days-Seven-Songs challenge (note the inauspicious word “first”). I just started writing songs. Not necessarily good songs, but lots of them. Honestly, some of them were good songs, as evidenced by the responses to my submissions to both Tumbleweed and this year’s Port Gamble festivals. I just checked my list and I’ve chocked up 37 songs since this time last year – an average of one every ten or so days.

But at this point I’m reminded of a line from one of my unfinished (oh, so much is unfinished!) short stories from a few years ago: The camp counselor had said that the preponderance of Jordy’s difficulties could be explained by the fact that he was – in her words – “insufficiently clear on the distinction between ‘can’ and ‘should’.” 

Do we know anyone like that?

But at a bit over 62 years old, I’ve received my first laurels and got my first paying gigs as a traveling musician. It’s flattering. It’s seductive. But I’m also (nominally) running a farm, running an international open source software project, and…being retired? Do I really want to add this to the pile of things I take on, just because I can? 

Ask me again in September, after festival season. And damn it – come see me (and Emily and Jay) play in Port Gamble next Saturday!