Walking into the light for 2025

Also, a personal ask in the quest for eliminating the word 'sideman' from the industry.

Welcome to 2025! The closing of 2024 felt to me, a little bumpy. I had little desire to make a highlights reel. Despite doing a lot of great things this past year, my heart wasn’t in it. I think last year was a year of great growth and learning and things I’m still integrating deeply, which will hopefully come along this year into what the next phase of walking in the light, which emanates from darkness, looks like. I hope that will teach me more than ever about healing.

I’m actually hosting a happy hour show at Dee’s Lounge here in Nashville this coming Thursay, the 9th of January, which happens now to be Jimmy Carter’s funeral, and also my beloved Grandma Z’s birthday. She’s been gone a long time, but I always celebrate her on her day. I have a lot of great guests that are gonna be there, including Miss Tess, India Ramey, Jason Quicksall, Bob Lewis (Slowforce), Ariel Bui, Thomas Bryan Eaton, Annie McCue and a killer rhythm section: Larry Cook (bass) and Erin Nelson (drums).

Come to the show if you can - it’s 6-8:30 (nice & early) and it will be on the Dee’s Lounge stream as well if you aren’t in Nashville.

As for live music, I have one ask this year. Maybe I’ve asked this in the past, but I was really thinking about it on my walk today. This is my request: When you go to a show or watch one on the screens, pick one band member out who isn’t the ‘lead’ person and find out their name and follow them.

It’s really important that we give the credit to all of the musicians out there who are working their tails off, learning a million songs, and often being underpaid for the job they are doing, which is making the lead singer sound good.

All through my music career, I’ve straddled the line of being both a ‘side person’ and a songwriter. Crossing over into being a leader of a band under my own name is a long story and one that is full of me falling in the ditch and thinking about quitting it over and over, yet I can’t stop wanting to do it and putting my own stuff out. I’ve broken up my own band in my mind countless times, only to get back together with it before anyone ever heard about it (the band or the break up LOL).

I’ve found, that sometimes it is easier for me to be in the band and learn other people’s songs, playing that role. But the more songs I learn, the more restless I get to take a stab at making my own thing.

How is it that we come to make art? Maybe it is born out of a need to create and express our emotions through some type of medium. My old religion professor Dr. Carl Skrade defined religion as “a quest for connections that makes sense” and therefore, creation to me is my religion, and just as misunderstood as any religion out there.

Yet, when the conditions are right (and this is unpredictable as hell) making music does feel like a religious experience.

The last book I finished was a copy of This Wheel’s On Fire by Levon Helm. It was Tom Mason’s copy, and I picked it off his bookshelves at his estate sale. It felt like the right book to end the year 2024 with. Great book, published in 1993. It has food stains presumably from my friend Tom whenever he read it, so I felt like we were reading it together. God, I miss Tom so much. I want to talk to him about this book.

It gives a great and thorough backstory of ‘The Band’ and how it came to be known by that name. It had passed me by that it was because they were backing Bob Dylan at a very specific time in Dylan’s ascension in Woodstock (as he transitioned into having an electric band) and Levon and the Hawks as they were known, were nicknamed by the town as ‘the band’ when they were in town rehearsing and writing. When their first record came out, they were as surprised as anyone else that the label named it THE BAND instead of several other names that had been suggested.

So this band, the band, was a group of sidemen, originally backing Ronnie Hawkins, then later Dylan. When they went on their own, there was a big discussion about the radical notion of the no one being the ‘lead singer.’ Rick Danko suggested it, saying, “Why can’t we have a band, where everybody plays an instrument, everybody sings, everybody does it without some guy out in front running the show and deciding the way things are gonna go?”

Everyone agreed, and Levon says, “When it came up to draw up the contracts we never wanted to see the word ‘sideman’ again. That attitude held for the rest of our career and over the years we’ve had managers and lawyers tear up a whole lot of paperwork because it had that word in it.”

That sounds like a dream. Of course things derailed with the betrayal of Robbie Robertson and their shady manager Albert Grossman (who managed and parted ways with Dylan as well). But I still love the concept and collaboration.

All of this is to say that playing music for me is rooted in the communal experience, which is why I’m excited to have this MP and friends show. I get to do both things I love - sing some of my tunes and also support my fellow songwriting friends and live in the loving arms of two of my favorites, Larry Cook and Erin Nelson. Follow them. You will see how many hats they wear in any given week and how many people they make sound amazing!

Hope to see you at the show or somewhere around the neighborhood this year. I gotta go learn some songs.

xoxo mp