January 12, 2022

TOAST 01

Another holiday season past. Did you at least get one week of doing almost nothing, forgetting which day it was? I hope so.

I tried again, as I do most often at each year’s end, to parse my time of reflection between the things I remember (surprised by what’s worth keeping), and my thoughts looking forward (ever-hopeful about what might be different in the days and years ahead).

Old songs can feel like a house you built and don’t live in anymore.  Someone else lives there now, and that’s a great thing, but he knocked out a few walls, put up another, and wallpapered the bathroom. The place is familiar, but nothing is quite how you left it.

Today’s demo is one of those ghosts. I wrote Shatterproof sometime between 2003 and 2004. In those days, I shared a little recording room in Carrboro, above the O.C.S.C., with a great songwriter by the name of Mac McCaughan. We didn’t know each other well at the time, but we both had newborns at home and needed a place to write, and a mutual friend connected us. I liked to work late at night, often after the bar closed. Many of the songs (and parts of songs) I’ve found from that time seem to be exploring the idea of family, anticipation of changes to come, and a tangled projection of who I wanted to be for my new family (rather than who I think I was at the time).  

I’ll dig up the original demo eventually, but the version I’ve got for you here is one that Thomas and I recorded one night at his home studio when I visited him in Boston last summer.   

As is always the case with Thomas, we can sit down and without a word, start where we left off. Our shared magic trick, but mostly, just magic. Consider this the first offering from The Townsmen of a Stiller Town, or TOAST, as I call it. Tommy and JR. Doing the thing. 

Yours, 

JR