When I finally stopped playing soccer competitively, in 2004, at the age of 40, it was time to pick up the guitar. Singing? I’d always done that, though never performatively, with other adult humans.
In my relative dotage, I’ve come to realize there are very few collaborative enterprises we American adults undertake with other adults, outside of the workplace. Sport is one arena for such things. Playing music is another, and it’s frankly more joyous. I feel as though I wasted 30 years on the front end not indulging and developing myself in this way. Did I mention my lovely wife bought be a new Telecaster for Christmas 2023?
I’ve been involved in a bunch of different projects through the years: the immortal Dirt Driveway, the dormant-for-now Bald Hill. The regular gig these days is a band called Pocket Full of Mumbles, which started in 2017 as a duo, Mike Conant and myself, performing Simon & Garfunkel tunes acoustically. We still play those songs, along with others featuring lush harmonies. But the Mumbles have evolved into more of an alt-country band, with drums and pedal steel, delivering Son Volt, Uncle Tupelo, Jackson Brown, Ryan Adams/Whiskytown, The Grateful Dead, CSN and a bunch of originals with what we call “smart twang”. And lemme tell ya, if you haven’t heard S&G’s America with pedal steel, you’ve not really heard it.
The members of all these bands all reside here in south/central Maine, and if they weren’t friends at the start, they are now.
