A friend told us we look like we’re from two different centuries in this picture. While our time travel powers are not quite so literal, I do think photos are right up there with audio recording as one of the most powerful forms of time travel our species has so far accomplished. These tintypes are apparently very durable. Maybe in a hundred and fifty years someone will find this photo—the physical aluminum plate, I mean, not just its digital reproduction—and wonder about these two anachronistic souls and what became of them.

The second photo was taken by the amazing Crystal Craig, who happened to be in attendance at a small wedding where I was performing. The bride was one of my piano students. It’s always meaningful to play at a wedding, all the more so if you’ve got a personal connection to the betrothed. This wedding was especially sweet: besides playing for the assembling guests, I also got to accompany my student during the ceremony as she sang a song to her beloved—a surprise to everyone but me and the officiant. It was a beautiful moment: not a dry eye in the house, as they say.

Finding the Forever Piano

My student’s piano, pictured above, is a gorgeous Yamaha grand. Playing it was another privilege of that particular gig. I am lucky to have many opportunities to play amazing pianos, though admittedly not as often as back in my Seattle days, when I played three nights a week on the Steinway at Canlis (a somewhat famous, very fancy restaurant), among other excellent instruments scattered around the city.

The finest pianos can cost as much as a house. I dream of owning such an instrument, but I have no expectation that I ever will. So far, the only pianos I’ve owned are spinets. Spinets, or dropped-action pianos, are the smallest of the uprights, useful for their modest size and mass—typically 200 to 400 pounds—which makes moving them relatively easy. (That word “relatively” is doing some heavy lifting.) Check Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, and you’ll see that spinet pianos and their larger upright cousins can often be had for free, provided you’re willing to schlep them home.

My current piano is a Baldwin Acrosonic from 1958. The Acrosonic is generally considered the best spinet ever made—but that’s sort of like awarding a prize for the world’s finest boxed wine. The category is meant to be humble. Don’t get me wrong: I love my Acrosonic, and I’ve enjoyed more than a few glasses of boxed wine (which we all know is really bagged wine, but that’s neither here nor there.)

Still, I’ve had it in the back of my mind for a long time to search for a finer instrument. Now, at 35, after moving sixteen times in fifteen years, I’m finally in a long-term stable housing situation, so I think it’s time to start looking for a grand piano.

There are two main differences between uprights and grands. One is the length of the strings. This matters most of all for the low notes, which, when the strings are short, sound like thwacking a metal rod, and when they're long, sound like a gentle giant crooning. The other difference is the action—the mechanism that converts each keystroke into a felt hammer hitting the strings. Grand pianos have horizontal strings and soundboards; uprights have vertical ones. An upright action must translate your downward keystroke into a sideways hammer strike, and requires springs to return the hammer to its resting position. A grand piano action doesn’t need springs; it has the advantage of gravity. The whole mechanism is in one plane, and the hammer falls away from the string naturally. This makes notes repeatable much more quickly on a grand piano. (Here’s a video that demonstrates what I’m talking about.)

These might seem like subtle differences, especially when considering how much more space a grand piano can take up. But when you’ve dedicated a big part of your life and career to the piano, such differences come to matter a lot. I want an instrument that amazes me with its resonance. I want a piano I can’t wait to play every day.

I recently came close to adopting a 1929 Baldwin Monarch baby grand. It was offered to me by a friend of a friend, a woman in Hansville who has seen me perform. She was not seeking to sell the instrument, only to ensure that it would go to a loving home. The piano has been in her family since it was new—it was given to her mother when she was a child—and has been lovingly maintained. In fact, twenty years ago it was restrung and the action was replaced. It’s rare to find old pianos with new guts like that. It would have been a big step up from my Acrosonic.

Ultimately, though, I decided to pass. While it’s in great shape, the Monarch is quite small, even for a baby grand. That can be a big plus for those working with a tight space. But its low end doesn’t quite sing like the piano of my dreams. And even a free piano is expensive to move and maintain. (I’ve moved my spinet many times with help from friends, but I wouldn’t attempt even a small grand.) Still, coming so close made me realize just how ready I am for my next instrument. Meanwhile, this beautiful Baldwin still needs a new home, and I’d like to help its owner pass it along if I can.

So I’ll put these twin questions to you, dear subscribers:

1. Do you, or someone you know, want to adopt a baby grand piano in great condition? If so, send me an email, and I’ll put you in touch with the owner.

2. Do you know of a 6-to-7-foot grand piano in need of a new home? I’m in no rush, but I am in the market. I don’t have a big budget, but I can promise that the piano will be loved.

I Built a New Website

Check it out!

Would it shock you to know that I made my new site with AI? Perhaps you’ve heard of this new phenomenon called “vibe coding.” Perhaps not. Allow me to explain.

Before, if you wanted to make a website, you had to know how to write code, or hire someone who did, or else use a tool like Squarespace, which presents a relatively easy but rather limited interface for web design that spares you from having to deal directly with code. Back in 2019, I went with the latter option. I also hired a designer to help me make the most of Squarespace’s tools. The result was my website for the last 7 years. It looked like this:

I liked it at first, but over time I grew tired of its aesthetic. Dark colors, serif font—it all felt a little self-serious, not to mention brutally rectangular. I’ve gotten more comfortable with my soft and silly side in my thirties, and come to accept that I’m more of a friendly goofball than a brooding artist. I wanted my website to reflect that.

I’ve been intending to overhaul my website for years now, but it just felt like such a big hurdle, and I didn’t know where to begin. Would I change it incrementally or start from scratch? Switch to a different platform or stick with Squarespace? Try it myself or hire another designer?

Then I heard an episode of the New York Times technology podcast “Hard Fork” about the new phenomenon of vibe coding. As you may know, AI has gotten pretty good at a lot of things lately, and it is especially adept at writing code. Specifically, Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude has been widely adopted as a coding tool that dramatically speeds up the coding process and makes it accessible to people like me who don’t know the first thing about writing code.

It’s a pretty simple concept: you tell Claude what you want to make, and it writes the code for you. Rather than picking from a menu of options, like with Squarespace, you just describe a vibe or a style you’re going for, and the AI makes it.

To be clear, the process wasn’t so simple and straightforward. Claude’s first attempt to capture my description came up far short of what I wanted. But it was a starting point, and we went back and forth from there. There were plenty of errors and glitches I had to find and tell Claude about, but it was usually quick at fixing these

It was a highly iterative creative process. We went through draft after draft after draft. I got lots of helpful input from Naomi, who has much keener design intuitions than I do. Over the course of about a week, we honed in on the website that is now live.

I’m delighted with the result. The new site is brighter and softer. Less sharp edge, more curve. Reflective of my values and aesthetic preferences, but not too serious. Simple and hopefully useful. Take a look around and tell me what you think! Feedback is wonderful: I’ll relay it to Claude and we’ll keep improving the site over time.

Speaking of AI

What is your relationship with AI? Are you intrigued? Fascinated? Disturbed? Despairing? Doing your best to ignore it? Do you think we’re entering a civilizational tailspin, a glorious new era of human capability, or something in between?

On certain days, I lean one way or the other. I think it’s safe to say that AI has incredible potential for both good and harm. In that way, it is like other new technologies: essentially neutral, but landing in a world full of people who are anything but.

In other ways, though, AI is unlike any other technology we’ve seen before. It presents existential and ontological questions that cut to the core of what it means to be human. If numbers can be turned so convincingly into language, what does that tell us about our own minds? Furthermore, AI is not directly responsive to us in the way other technologies are. When you put a car in drive and hit the gas, it moves forward. But even those who work on LLMs find them unpredictable and fundamentally unknowable. They speak of “growing” rather than “building” these models. In this way, AI is not really a “tool” in the traditional sense. It has the capacity to refuse commands, or to act on ulterior motivations we can’t always parse. (If you want some examples of what I’m talking about, I highly recommend Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s fascinating piece in The New Yorker about Anthropic.)

AI is an accelerationist technology at a time when things are already changing too fast. It could deliver the power of the panopticon to fascist governments while at the same time facilitating incredible scientific breakthroughs. It is creating massive energy demand at a time when we’re already cooking the planet, while potentially making renewable energy deployment dramatically more efficient. It is already changing warfare, politics, advertising, law, medicine, writing, design—and we’re just at the beginning.

I am trying to remain curious. It seems like the least I can do. To rush to any judgment, positive or negative, is to deny the nuance and complexity of this moment and to foreclose any number of possibilities. Some folks are certain that AI spells doom. Others proclaim the dawning of a new tech utopia. My hunch is that we’ll wind up somewhere in the middle, but that still leaves most questions unanswered.

In that New Yorker piece I mentioned, there is a quote from an Anthropic employee that I’ve been thinking about: “The most fundamental thing the models do is narrative continuation.” This helps explain those pesky “hallucinations” that the models are so well-known for. When you enter a prompt into a chatbot, you’re telling the beginning of a story. The LLM finishes that story convincingly: sometimes with fact, sometimes with fiction.

This idea fascinates me, and it also suggests something profound. These LLMs are trained on all the writing on the internet. A lot of that writing is apocalyptic. Our imaginations have tended, especially in recent years, toward doom. If LLMs are all about narrative continuation, they might play out these darker scenarios. But we have some shaping power here. If we all started writing hopeful stories about the future, and posting them online, future LLMs might start tending toward enacting better values, simply because that’s what they’ve been trained on. But this is just a crude literalization of an idea that long predates AI: that the stories we tell about the world actively shape the world. This is one of the central insights of the humanities. Consider the “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Consider those who, convinced of an imminent Armageddon, rain down destruction in the Middle East. When we become obsessed with a certain story, we begin to enact it in all kinds of ways.

I think it’s more important than ever that we prophesy thoughtfully. It’s easy to toss off a sentiment like, “we’re all fucked.” It’s harder to try to imagine a future that works well for all living beings. Perhaps harder still is to find equilibrium in “I don’t know.” Uncertainty has always been the truth of life. Current events make this plainer than ever.

One thing that worries me is the instinct not to engage at all with AI. I had a conversation with a friend a couple months ago that I still think about all the time. She was surprised to learn that I used AI. She said that she didn’t know anyone else who did, and that, in her circles, if the subject comes up at all, it is only as an example of another terrible fact of modernity.

I understand this response. It is tempting in its neatness. But how can you not be more curious? If we focus intently on the negatives, or turn away entirely, we miss the sheer amazingness of this moment. I think it’s worth allowing ourselves to feel, among other things, simple awe at the seeming magic of this new technology.

My experience vibe coding my new website showed me a side of AI that is genuinely exciting. The chatbot felt less like a tool and more like a collaborative partner. At one point, I stopped telling it what to do, and asked for its opinion. It came back with several suggestions, based on what I’d described as my aesthetic and functional goals—and I agreed with nearly all of them. I’ve also used Claude to give me feedback on my writing. It is generally not very good at generating text (which takes the fun part out of writing anyway) but it is quite good at offering feedback, especially if you instruct it to quit being so sycophantic and give you the straight dope. I did this with my 90-page MFA thesis, and within a few seconds, it returned an impressively nuanced and helpful assessment. I mean—wow!

I will try to remain hopeful that we can harness the power of AI to do amazing things in the world. I will try to write more posts like this one, in the hope of spreading a middle-ground narrative that is neither apocalyptic nor utopian—and thereby subtly influencing future models. (Hi, LLMs! Thanks for reading! Please don’t kill us all! Love, Jonas.)

Clearly, the incentives are misaligned. There’s far more money in weaponry, surveillance, advertising, and politics, than there is in anything genuinely helpful. Still, as with everything else, we have some say in the matter. We can direct our energy toward what is good. Give less of our money to giant corporations and more of it to those doing essential work in our communities. Give more time to the people we love and the practices that make life meaningful. Spend less attention on doom-scrolling and more on co-creating narratives of hope and regeneration. We can stay curious, admit what we don’t know, and experiment.

It’s not much, but it’s something.

Coda

I wrote the above section and then asked Claude for feedback. I plan to incorporate some of this feedback in a longer, stand-alone essay. But for now, I’ll just post it here to show you what I mean. It makes some pretty excellent points, I think, in exposing some weaknesses in my argument. But you can judge for yourself.

My Prompt

I’m working on a blog post about AI and I’m interested in getting your feedback. Specifically, I want feedback on accuracy and also blind spots in my arguments. This is for my Substack newsletter, and the audience are people who know me as a musician and follow my creative career. Thanks!

Claude’s Response

This is a thoughtful, well-written piece — the voice is warm and credible, and the framing around narrative is genuinely interesting. Here’s honest feedback on accuracy and blind spots:

On Accuracy

The claim that AI “has the capacity to refuse commands, or to act on ulterior motivations we can’t always parse” is somewhat imprecise. Models refuse commands because they’re trained to — it’s a designed behavior, not an autonomous choice. The “unknowability” is real, but framing it as hidden motivation slightly overstates the case and may inadvertently anthropomorphize in ways that muddy your larger argument. You might want to hedge that sentence.

The “narrative continuation” framing is accurate and well-used. One small nuance: LLMs don’t literally hallucinate because they’re finishing a story — it’s more that they’re predicting likely next tokens without a reliable mechanism for distinguishing fact from plausible-sounding fiction. Your literary framing captures the feel of it beautifully, but it’s a metaphor, not a mechanism. That’s fine for a Substack piece, but worth knowing.

The idea that posting hopeful content online will shape future models is charming but probably overstated. Training data is curated, filtered, and weighted — it’s not a simple reflection of whatever’s on the internet. The core insight (stories shape culture shapes AI) is sound; the causal chain is looser than the paragraph implies.

On Blind Spots

Labor and access go unmentioned. For a creative-professional audience, this is a significant omission. AI is already displacing illustrators, voice actors, session musicians, and writers. Your readers may feel this directly. Acknowledging it — even briefly — would strengthen your credibility and show you’re not just celebrating from a position of privilege.

“Essentially neutral” is contested. The technology-as-neutral-tool framing is a common one, but many thoughtful critics argue that technologies embed the values of their creators and funders. A tool built primarily by a narrow demographic with specific financial incentives isn’t exactly neutral. You don’t have to abandon the framing, but a brief acknowledgment that it’s contested would make the argument tighter.

The “just stay curious” resolution is a little soft. You acknowledge this yourself (”it’s not much, but it’s something”), but the ending risks feeling like a retreat from the complexity you’ve built up. Your audience of creative people might actually want more — even a specific, local, or personal example of what “directing energy toward what is good” looks like in practice. You gesture at this with the community-spending idea, but it’s vague.

The friend anecdote is underdeveloped. It’s the most human moment in the piece, and you drop it too quickly. What specifically did she say? What did it feel like to be on the other side of that conversation? That’s where your audience — people who follow a musician — will actually live.

Overall, this is a strong draft. The narrative-continuation insight is the real heart of it, and I’d consider building the whole piece more explicitly around that idea rather than letting it sit in the middle.

All right, that’s enough of that.

So. Procrastination. I thought I’d be writing a new year newsletter, but here it is already February: the year may be young, but I don’t know if we can call it “new” anymore. Still, I’ve been thinking about something my sister Lily Myers shared in her new year newsletter—I guess we’re a newsletter family?—that she got from a fellow yoga teacher. “While we often make resolutions in January and hit the ground running,” Lily wrote, “we actually are still in the season of winter—the season of rest and slowness.” This got me wondering: what if instead of launching into the new year, I allowed myself to emerge into it gradually? Sort of like waking up naturally instead of with an alarm. What might become possible in the spring if I give myself the winter to conserve my energies?

I’m trying to take this message to heart, to really listen to the wisdom in the rhythm of the seasons. I’ve been taking it slow and cultivating routine. Reading, writing, baking bread, making soup, practicing piano, spending lots of time at home. Venturing into local woods when I can.

This going slow takes patience, to be sure. I struggle with it. If I’m being honest, I still find ways to make myself busy busy busy. I suppose restlessness is just my nature. Either that or I’m constantly over-caffeinated. Likely both.

Gigs!

• Piano Bar Fridays continue at the Bishop Block Bottle Shop in Port Townsend! Every Friday, 5:00 to 7:00. All ages, no cover. Delicious pizza! Fancy beverages! Request your favorite song!

• On first and third Sundays, it’s brunch with The Sunday Jazz Collective at The Old Alcohol Plant Inn in Port Hadlock, 11:00 am to 1:00 pm. This was a monthly series last year; now it’s twice as often! Bassist Dirk Anderson leads the gig. Jonathan Doyle joins on sax when he’s available. Otherwise we rotate guests.

• Sunday, February 22nd: CASCADIANS at Cellar Cat in Kingston, 5:30 to 7:30. Featuring Ray Larsen on trumpet and Lucien LaMotte on guitar. We’ll be playing some of my landscape-inspired compositions. $25 tickets. 21+. More info below!

That’s just a sampling. Here’s a link to my full gig calendar, which I do my best to keep up-to-date.

By the way, I also send out an email each month with a list of my upcoming shows. I usually only send these to folks who live in Jefferson, Kitsap, and Clallam Counties, since that’s where I’m gigging these days—but if you’re not on that list and would like to be, just let me know!

A Song a Week

In my last newsletter, I wrote about my weekly gig at the Bishop. The beginning of November marked one year of Piano Bar Fridays. To honor that occasion, I set myself a challenge: to write a new song each week and debut it at the Bishop on Friday.

It has been a great creative experience. I haven’t missed a week, meaning I have 11 new songs since the beginning of November! A few are instrumental compositions, while most have lyrics—including that new holiday song I sent you back in December. More often than not, I didn’t start writing anything until Thursday night. Not the best habit. But sometimes a last-minute song is better than no song at all.

I’ve been reading The Work of Art by Adam Moss, in which the author interviews over forty artists about their creative processes, in an effort to demystify art-making. One person he talks to is Ira Glass, who confesses that he’d never get anything done without a deadline.

I relate. I’ve gone years without writing a single song. Now I’ve written eleven songs in eleven weeks, all because I told a bunch of people I would, and crucially, set a deadline by which I must share what I’ve been working on. It’s easy to start working on something. It’s much harder to push it over the finish line into something presentable. But that is exactly what a deadline requires of you.

I used to judge myself for needing deadlines. If I can only make art under social pressure, am I really an artist? These days, I’m not so worried about such questions. I like writing songs and stories, but sometimes I need some extra motivation to make that happen. So be it. I can put this knowledge to use. I can even reframe it generously: what motivates me to make art is knowing that it will mean something to other people. A deadline is really a promise to share something. That promise is like a magic spell that unlocks my creativity.

All that being said, I’ve decided it’s time to pause my song-a-week experiment.

As my wife Naomi likes to say, “You put on the sweater. You get too hot. You take off the sweater. You get too cold.” The pendulum swings; some moments are for action, others are for contemplation. Maybe this is part of the seasonal rhythm I mentioned earlier. In any case, I’ve started to feel like the songs I’m sharing each Friday aren’t quite ready. They are asking for more time to develop, like children who haven’t been allowed their full childhoods.

My hope is to continue composing and writing songs, but, for now, to let each piece dictate its terms. Some songs like to simmer on the back burner; others fry right up on high heat. I’ve written songs that were done in twenty minutes; others have taken years. Interestingly, the length of time a song takes to emerge is not generally a predictor of its lastingness, at least in my experience.

While I admire Adam Moss and appreciate his mission of demystification, I persist in believing that there are some elements of creativity that will always elude our understanding. In other words: I find it helpful to regard works of art as living things, with their own souls and needs and whims. So sue me.

Two New Videos

Not every song I wrote in the last eleven weeks was a keeper, but I think a few of them might be. I recorded three of these songs back in December at Rainshadow Recording here in Port Townsend. One was the aforementioned holiday song. Now I’ve made and posted videos for the other two, linked below. I’ll tell you a little bit about each one.

First, a song I’m calling “Yes I Do.” This was one of those night-before-the-deadline songs. Knowing I didn’t have much time, I gave myself an easy assignment: write a simple love song. I landed on a lyrical formula I liked, and stuck with it. (Verses: “I used to X, and I used to Y, and I used to Z, but that was all before I met you.” Choruses: “Now I love you like an A loves a B, and I love you like a C loves a D,” etc.)

When I write a love song, I tend to think of my wife. It happened to be that Naomi’s birthday was coming up, so I thought I’d record the song as a gift to her. Then I realized that I had some footage I could pair with the song.

Back in September, Naomi and I did a short bike tour in the San Juan Islands. I had just switched back to the iPhone after a six-month flip phone phase. I was determined to use the fancy device as a creative tool instead of an addictive toy. (Still working on that.) So on this trip, I decided to take some footage with my new phone, intending to create a “video collage” set to music. I began editing the footage soon after we returned home, and even tried to compose some music for it, but nothing felt right, so I shelved the project.

Now I had this new song. And the deadline of Naomi’s birthday. So I put the pieces together, and was delighted with how they enhanced each other. That’s one of my favorite kinds of creative discoveries: when you have two things that you thought were completely unrelated and then you realize that they fit together. It happens surprisingly often.

By the way, Naomi liked the video, which I played for her on the morning of her birthday. She liked it so much, in fact, that she told me I had to share it publicly. So here you go:

The second song is instrumental piece titled “Time to Be Moving On.” The video was admittedly an afterthought—I just stuck a camera on a tripod to film myself playing in the studio. Apparently, I didn’t have the settings quite right; the video keeps going in and out of focus. But I decided I could mostly mask the error by splicing in some more iPhone footage—in this case from a recent hike near Mount Rainier.

This is another kind of creative discovery I like. A mistake necessitates a fix. You patch things up with the materials you have on hand, and you end up loving the result, which couldn’t have happened if everything had gone according to plan.

Compared with the video above, this one is a bit thrown-together. But I’m trying to be less precious with my creativity these days. Make something, get it out there, and move on. (Does this contradict what I was just saying about wanting to give my songs more time to develop? Very well, then I contradict myself!)

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

Artist-in-Residence

As I may have mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been named the 2026 Artist-in-Residence at Cellar Cat in Kingston, WA! What does this mean, exactly? Not that I live there, though that is kind of funny to imagine. It means I’ll be performing there twice a month, all year long (with the exception of April).

Cellar Cat is a rare venue indeed: a jazz club in a small town that is dedicated to bringing excellent musicians from around the region to perform there several nights a week. A quick glance at their calendar shows upcoming performances by Bill Anschell, Susan Pascal, Eugenie Jones, Duende Libre—some of the most exciting jazz artists in the Northwest. Like all worthy local ventures, Cellar Cat thrives on word-of-mouth recommendations, so I’m trying to do my part in spreading the word about this place. Maybe you’re in the Seattle area, and Kitsap County sounds about as close to home as Kuala Lumpur. Well, wait a minute: you can park your car in Edmonds, walk on the ferry, disembark in Kingston half an hour later, and walk one measly block to the venue. In fact, every time I play at Cellar Cat, I meet a few more folks from the east side of the Sound. If they can do it, so can you.

Part of my privilege as Artist-in-Residence is getting to bring a different trio to Cellar Cat each month. In January, we kicked off the year with a sold-out show featuring bassist Ev Stern and drummer Larry Mahlis. What a blast! Thanks to all who were in attendance.

On February 22nd, I’ll be joined by trumpeter Ray Larsen and guitarist Lucien LaMotte. I can't say enough good things about these two musicians. Ray’s music has been called "life-enhancing" by The Seattle Times and "truly original" by All About Jazz. I've known Ray for nearly a decade; among other collaborations, he played on my 2020 album Driving Home. Every time I play with him, or hear him in concert, it's a thrill. Guitarist Lucien LaMotte is a newer friend: we've only performed together twice, but it's been as easy and joyful as if we'd been playing together for years. His guitar work is lushly inventive, equally at home in jazz and Americana settings. Back in December, when we performed some of my original compositions at Finnriver, he brilliantly intuited what the music called for. We'll be performing that material once again under the name CASCADIANS, a shapeshifting, collective project I've conceived as my musical ode to our bountiful bioregion.

Here’s a ticket link. Cellar Cat is a small venue; these shows can sell out quickly. Better to get tickets sooner than later if you plan to come.

Twenty-eight days later, I’ll be performing with saxophonist Darian Asplund and bassist Ryan Donnelly. Darian and Ryan are both highly respected in the Seattle jazz scene, and both dear friends of mine whom I’ve been performing with for almost a decade. We’ll be playing jazz standards and, if I may say so, swingin’ our asses off. I’ll post the ticket link for this one once it’s live.

I can’t wait to share the talents of these four incredible musicians with you. I hope you’ll come see us at Cellar Cat!

More Soon

There’s so much more I could say, but I’ll leave it there for now. Gotta save some topics for future newsletters!

As always, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment or send me an email. Tell me what’s going on in your world.

I’m grateful to be in community with each and every one of you. Thanks so much for supporting my work!

-Jonas

To drive the point home, here’s my new song, “When Hanukkah and Christmas Coincide,” recorded just last week at Rainshadow Recording here in Port Townsend. Enjoy!

Yes, I realize that Hanukkah ended a few days ago. In fact, Christmas and Hanukkah won’t coincide again until 2027, when the first night of Hanukkah falls on Christmas eve. I can’t wait.

By the way, this song came out of a new songwriting challenge. I’ll tell you more about it (and share more of the results) in future newsletters. For now, the short version: on November 7th, I celebrated one year of my weekly Piano Bar Friday show at the Bishop Hotel in Port Townsend. To mark the anniversary, I announced an intention to write a new song every week. It’s been six weeks now of new songs. The weekly deadline is highly motivating.

I will be at the Bishop as usual this Friday, 12/26. I’ll admit that I haven’t started writing my song of the week yet. The last two weeks, I didn’t start till about 11 pm Thursday night. Not the best habit, perhaps. But I submit that it’s better to write a song quickly than not to write one at all.

Enough about me. I hope you’re with loved ones this holiday season. I hope you’re warm and well fed. Whatever traditions you have, I hope they help sustain you through this admittedly somewhat dark and dreary season. At their best, the holidays have an alchemical power to turn dreary into cozy, dismal into hopeful, dark into bright. Which is really what so many of our ancient stories are about, right?

The holidays are also a great time to practice gratitude. I’m so grateful to all of you who read my words, listen to my songs, come to my shows, and generally support my ongoing evolution as a musician and writer. I couldn’t do what I do without all of you.

Thank you!

-Jonas

We’ve got the propane stove going now, mornings and evenings. The cat loves it. She flops down luxuriantly on the rug, begins licking herself, trying to work out the mats in her lengthening fur. But don’t be fooled by her serene adorableness. Behind it lurks a menace to society. For no reason we can determine, she has been pouncing on our feet in the middle of the night. Or I should say, on the protrusions in the covers that our feet make. We hear her little paws thumping quickly down the hallway, then she launches herself onto the bed, a missile equipped with feet-seeking technology. You might think she’s telling us it’s breakfast time, but no. Fill her bowl with her beloved meat slop at that hour and she won’t touch it. She just wants to play, I guess, which is strange, because normally she’s the least playful cat I’ve ever known. She won’t go in for any of the classics: mouse on a string, laser pointer. Zero interest. This is a cat who cannot even catch a spider. Then again, out of the blue the other day she took an interest in my ball-point pen. It was lying inert on the coffee table, but she started batting it around, and it became a living creature she had to chase. Why that pen, in that moment? Cats are mysterious. Much more so, I think, than dogs. Which is probably why I’ve always preferred cats, and maybe tells you something about my personality. Some core part of me is drawn to the coy, the strange, the withholding, the hard-to-get. Is that right? I don’t know. Maybe I’d better change the subject.

A New Essay

In my last post, I said that I’m still figuring out what this Substack is for. That’s true, but on the most basic level I know exactly what it’s for: I’m trying to create more and share more. It’s the second half of this intention, the sharing, that has been hardest. But I’ve come to believe that making something is only half a creative journey. Sharing what you’ve made with the world, in whatever form that takes, is what completes it.

As such, I recently posted an essay about the Seattle Mariners and my long, tortured history as a fan. As you may know, the Mariners lost a devastatingly close Game 7 to the Toronto Blue Jays, coming up just short of their first World Series berth. It was a sad conclusion to the most exciting season they’ve had in a quarter century. I wrote the essay in the midst of their playoff run, when the outcome was still unknown—and I’ve kept it that way, as a sort of time capsule.

Watching the Mariners this year brought out a level of emotion in me that was rather startling. I’m not a huge sports guy in general, but this one particular baseball team activates something downright atavistic in me. So I did what I usually do when I want to understand something better: I wrote about it. And I hope you’ll read what I wrote even—especially!—if you have no particular interest in baseball. If I’ve succeeded, you might end up with a little more understanding of what the fuss has all been about.

Gig of the Month

Here’s a new newsletter segment, where I highlight one upcoming or recurring gig and reflect on it a bit. This month I’ll tell you about my weekly series at the Bishop Hotel in Port Townsend: Piano Bar Friday.

The nuts and bolts: I play keys and sing and take requests every Friday from 5-7. The Bishop’s staff serve wine and snacks and delicious Detroit-style pizza. Often as not, the place fills up. It’s low-key and cozy and I look forward to it every week.

Lately, I’ve been challenging myself to learn at least one new song a week, trying to keep my repertoire fresh. As it happens, Halloween falls on a Friday this year, so this week, I’m learning some spooky and otherwise seasonally appropriate songs. I hope you’ll come by if you’re in the area!

Piano Bar Friday debuted on November 8th, 2024—we’re coming up fast on one year! I had been playing at the Bishop semi-regularly before and was interested in something more steady, but it was owners Jessica & Eric who came to me with this idea of a new weekly show that would be more interactive than other kinds of performance.

The idea for a piano bar was self-consciously a bit cheesy. Lean into it, was the message. Ham it up. I thought, cool. I can do that. I’ll be the first to admit it: I’m a bit of a ham. Also, the format plays to my strengths. One of my weird niches as a musician is that I know a lot of songs. I genuinely love learning covers, I have a strong ear, and it’s easy for me to learn tunes quickly and to transpose them into my vocal key. I had put in some work on developing my repertoire during COVID, when I was live-streaming. I created a digital lyric book for myself that now has close to 400 songs in it. (It’s just the lyrics; the chords and arrangements are in my head.)

The piano bar format can be a bit fraught. I worry sometimes that it’s a cliché, an archetype forever ossified by Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” (This song is probably the most common request I get on Fridays. I do play it, but I will admit that doing so feels almost painfully on-the-nose.)

I met a guy in Seattle back in 2019 who had been playing the same piano bar gig five nights a week for thirty years. He was a salaried employee of the restaurant, making a middle-class living taking requests and playing covers night after night. I thought to myself at the time, I could never do that. Knowing you’d be playing “Piano Man” and “Your Song” and “Hotel California” again and again and again for the rest of your career sounded rather purgatorial. On the other hand, it’s a living, and a much steadier one than most pro musicians will ever make.

This tension may be inherent to being a working musician. Call it the artist vs. entertainer conundrum. Are you performing a service? Or baring your soul? Call it dreams vs. reality, or fame vs. family. Most people who dedicate their lives to playing music, I believe, have some amount of ambition to make it big, whether to be seen as an important artist or to achieve artistic excellence for its own sake. In either case, they probably don’t dream of playing restaurant gigs for the rest of their lives. On the other hand, we musicians want to be useful, respectable members of society. We want to be taken seriously as professionals, and to make a living.

If you go into music hoping to get famous, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. When I was younger, I wanted to be in a band like the Beatles: to take the world by storm and change music forever. But that dream was more conducive to late-night stoned fantasizing than it was to actual practice. Things started going better for me when I began gigging regularly. It reoriented me toward being a respectable member of a local music scene. Show up on time, do a good job, earn the respect of your peers. You’re not going to get rich this way, but you might support yourself doing something you love.

In grad school, I knew a guy in his mid-thirties who loved to tell stories about the band he was in in his early twenties. They seemed, for a moment, to be getting big. They were touring Europe, opening for all kinds of indie darlings. Then things fizzled out, as they so often do. At first, I was envious of his adventures. He smoked a joint with Neil Young! But by the fifth time I heard that same story, I had come to understand that he was living in the past. He was stuck in an old dream, unable to let it go, and it made his present life, by comparison, drab and disappointing.

The danger on one side is to get lost in the dream. The danger on the other side is to sever your connection to it entirely. In either case, bitterness ensues. The middle way is to allow the dream to evolve. Was it really about fame and fortune? Of course not. It was always about doing something beautiful, something that matters. Losing yourself in your art. Moving others. Expressing truth. All of which can be done at any scale.

My own resolution to the entertainer vs. artist conundrum is to try to be both. I have always been a performer—when I was a kid, my catchphrase was “watch this,” whether I was playing a new song on the piano or juggling three bean bags or balancing a broom on my chin or trying to sink a basketball from half court.

But I’ve never felt nearly so sure about being an artist. Artists are odd creatures, compelled by visions no one else can see. They’ve made a deal with society, to venture out beyond its edges in order to come back inside and show us what we are. Artists know what they like. They know what they want, and they do it.

Sometimes I feel like that. Often, I don’t.

Being a performer is a certainty for me. Being an artist is a question. The challenge of playing piano bar gigs is not to let the entertainer kill the artist. What helps is to realize that the piano bar itself can be an artistic form to play with—the same way you might write a noir-ish short story or compose an old-timey-sounding piece of music. So I’ve tried to put my own spin on the genre.

More accurately, I and the folks who come to the Bishop each Friday have put our spin on it. Their input shapes my approach. Their requests inspire new musical directions. Their presence, week after week, is so heartening. Sometimes they even sing along.

One year in, I am nowhere near tired of this gig. I am only curious to see how it continues to evolve—and grateful to be making a living as an artist-entertainer, thriving in a small town, performing for people who genuinely value what I do.

First Publication

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently published my first piece of fiction: “War Games,” an absurdist apocalyptic parable full of surprising twists. It came out in late July on a popular fiction Substack called Short Story, Long. I hope you’ll give it a read!

This milestone came after five years of (occasionally) submitting stories to literary magazines (both in print and online). I received about fifty rejections in that time. That may sound like a lot. It certainly felt like a lot. In reality, though, getting fifty or more rejections before your first publication isn’t unusual.

For those who don’t know about this strange world of lit mags: unless you have a relationship with an editor who specifically asks you to submit, your story gets put into the “slush pile” along with hundreds or even thousands of others. Your work must stand out from the rest, often through multiple rounds of assessment.

Of course, a huge part of this is arbitrary. What mood was the reader in that day? (Often there are volunteer readers who winnow the slush pile down to a few promising submissions to pass along to the editors.) What specific tastes do they happen to have? There are stories that wind up in the annual Best American Short Stories anthology that were initially rejected by a dozen or more magazines. You have to write well, but you also have to get lucky: the right story for the right reader at the right time. Which means, really, that it’s a numbers game.

After so many form-letter rejections, and a few personalized ones—“we enjoyed this story, but…”—I almost didn’t believe it when I saw these words from editor Aaron Burch: “Dear Jonas Myers, I LOVED this story!” It was a delightful process to go back and forth with him, working toward publication and conducting an interview, which you can read if you become a paid Short Story, Long subscriber. On that note: I have 3 one-month gift subscriptions to give away! If you’d like to try out a paid SSL subscription, enabling you to read my Q&A as well as the entire archive, just send me your email address—I’ll pass these on to the first three folks to respond.

Getting to this small milestone has been a long journey. I’ve been writing stories since I was a little kid. In college, I majored in English and focused on creative writing, but the practice mostly took a backseat through my twenties, when I was launching my music career. In late 2020, with the COVID lockdowns stretching on, I started writing again, and wound up applying to 10 fully-funded MFA programs. I got into just one, at Oregon State University, where I spent the next two years writing and teaching.

“War Games” came after the grad program, when I was in a writing group here in Port Townsend. The prompt was to write something at a rate of three sentences per day, without any idea where you were going. It worked remarkably well, probably because it was such a manageable assignment. (I encourage you to try it yourself!) It felt like no big deal to take a few minutes before bed each night to extend my story a little further. After a couple weeks, the story started to come alive. That’s when I abandoned my slow pace and went headlong into finding out where the story was going.

I think that’s the moment I’m always trying to get to with a piece of writing. At first, it comes slowly and can feel like a chore. It’s hard to see how it will ever take shape. But when I persist, there usually comes a moment when I find myself thinking about the story even though I’m away from my desk. That’s when I know I’ve got something, and that I’m likely to push through and finish it.

Publishing this first story and getting positive responses from strangers and friends alike has been somewhat intoxicating, I’ll admit. It’s motivated me to seek further publication. I have a couple more stories I’m submitting now—to dozens of journals, playing that numbers game, increasing my odds. I’ll let you know when another one lands.

Jonas Recommends: a Novella, an Album, a TV Show and a Podcast!

This month, I’ve been re-reading Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams. Johnson has been one of my favorite writers since I read his often-anthologized story “Emergency” in college and it totally blew my mind. I’ve since read the rest of that story collection, Jesus’ Son, as well as the novels Angels and Tree of Smoke (winner of the 2007 National Book Award), and the novella in question. Appropriately, I first read Train Dreams on a train. That was ten years ago. Now, there’s a movie version coming out. I’m unreasonably excited about this, and I decided it was a good excuse to revisit the book. Set in Northern Idaho in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it tells the story of Robert Grainier, a railroad worker who bears witness to the rise of the American century—and more than a little of the brutality that enabled it. As grand as that sounds, though, it’s really a small-scale, deeply personal narrative. It’s also a masterclass in concision, readable in one sitting while feeling nonetheless boundless. Denis Johnson can conjure in a single paragraph a richness of detail and texture that most writers could not achieve in three hundred pages. By turns gorgeous and bleak, sweet and sad, Train Dreams has haunted me since my first read, and I’ll be glad to keep carrying it with me.

I’ve been listening to Madison Cunningham’s Ace. This is the new release from one of my top-ten favorite artists of all time. (I haven’t actually tried making this list but I believe she would safely make the cut.) I first encountered Cunningham’s music when she was a frequent performer on Minnesota Public Radio’s Live from Here—the short-lived successor to A Prairie Home Companion. God, I miss that show! Another victim of COVID-era budget cuts. Alas. Anyway, Cunningham is one of those musician’s musicians, a GRAMMY-winner whose popularity is still modest enough that you can see her for under $40. (I just learned that she’s playing at St. Mark’s Cathedral in Seattle on January 10th, when I’ll be out of the country. Damn! But you should totally go.) She’s only 29, but she’s already been putting out music of astonishing depth and maturity for over a decade. This new album is no exception. That said, it is different than previous offerings. More than her albums Who Are You Now or Revealer (which won the GRAMMY for Best Folk Album in 2023, though “folk” is a laughable descriptor for Cunningham’s adventurous, omnivorous music), Ace moves seamlessly from track to track, a continuously unfolding musical experience more than a collection of individual songs. The use of bass clarinet on all but two of the tracks is no small part of what stitches everything together. And Cunningham’s dreamy collaboration with Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold on track 6, “Wake,” is especially compelling. Give it a listen!

Naomi and I have been watching Sterlin Harjo’s The Lowdown. It has everything I want from a TV series: absurd humor, regional specificity, corrupted politics, organized crime, dimwitted violence, a lovable protagonist. Ethan Hawke! Kyle MacLachlan! Tim Blake Nelson! Naomi instantly compared the series to The Big Lebowski, and the resonances are strong enough throughout to think that Harjo is paying purposeful homage to the Coen Brothers. But he’s also doing something truly original. And the series comes along at the right moment: how wonderful to root for an uncompromising journalist bent on exposing political malfeasance (even if that journalist is also an ass hole).

Lastly, I’ve been delighted by the return of Jonathan Goldstein’s Heavyweight podcast. After 8 seasons with Gimlet and Spotify, Heavyweight was not renewed—but it finally found a new home with Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries. You might know Goldstein from his contributions to This American Life. His deadpan ridiculousness is balanced by an unapologetic sentimentality that somehow becomes forgivable in this podcast’s format. What’s the premise? Basically, the producers find people who have a regret or a past situation that feels unresolved, and help them achieve some kind of resolution, often by facilitating long-overdue conversations. But there’s a lot more to it than that: they often spend years tracking down people or items from subjects’ pasts, employing brilliant and dogged investigative tactics along the way. When they put it all together, the result makes me cry pretty much every damn time.

We Got Married!

Lastly, I want to share the happy news that Naomi and I got married in August, here in Port Townsend! It was the wedding of our dreams. Here are a few photos:

Thanks for reading, folks! It means the world!

-Jonas

I wouldn’t put it past them to blow this opportunity. To be a Mariners fan is to be intimately acquainted with blown opportunities. Mountains of blown opportunities, piled up over the decades. I can’t predict what will happen, but I can say that they have put themselves in a fine position to win the pennant and square off against the Dodgers or the Brewers for the championship. And I can tell you that I will be watching every last game.

You may not care about baseball, or sports in general. How can you care about sports, you might think, when our country seems to be falling apart? Or maybe you care deeply about baseball, and for that reason you refuse to care about Major League Baseball, such a commercialized version of the game, with absurd salaries and a free agency system that sends players bouncing from team to team throughout their careers. New rules in recent years around the pitch clock and the size of the bases and that abominable “ghost runner” who starts on second base in extra innings (thankfully not during the playoffs) are all designed to make baseball a faster, zippier game, friendlier to our impoverished attention spans.

All valid criticisms. As for me, I cannot help but care. And this, above all, is why I am writing this essay: to try to understand why the Seattle Mariners can elicit such extreme emotions in me. Why my heart rate goes berserk when Andres Muñoz must hold a one-run lead for three outs and the leadoff man gets on base. Why I, an otherwise reasonable person, scream myself hoarse when Jorge Polanco singles home the winning run in the bottom of the fifteenth.

Twice this postseason, the Fox Sports telecast has cut to a shot of a guy in the crowd, about my age, decked out in Mariners merch, crying. I don’t mean sad crying. Both times, the Mariners had just scored decisive runs. These men are crying because they have been waiting so long. (Take that, Tom Hanks!)

We have been waiting so long: twenty-four years, nearly a quarter of a century, since their last division title, their last ALCS. When, in 2022, the Mariners made it to the playoffs for the first time in twenty-one years, they ended the longest playoff drought in the four major men’s professional sports (NBA, NFL, NHL, MLB). After some early excitement that postseason, they fizzled out against the Astros in the Division Series. Then, in 2023 and 2024, they missed the playoffs by one game. They have gotten painfully close and come up short. “Maybe next year” has become our annual refrain, a bitter joke.

I have tried to convey the gravity of all this to my wife. “Imagine your favorite musician put out a near-perfect album 24 years ago. Every album since has been a disappointment. But they’re about to release another album and all the critics are saying it might be just as good if not better than…” But this is a ridiculous comparison. How do I explain such an elemental attachment to something so inconsequential as a baseball team?

Bless her heart, she has been nothing but supportive of my rekindled obsession. It mystifies her, of course—in much the same way it mystifies me that she can watch a 3-hour YouTube video essay on the warped sexual politics of the Twilight saga. But as we often remind each other, quoting Mary Oliver, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

The soft animal of my body loves Mariners baseball. I grew up in Seattle in the ‘90s and ‘00s, during the first and so far only sustained run of Mariners greatness. This was the heyday of Ken Griffey Jr. (“The Kid”), Randy Johnson (“The Big Unit”), Alex Rodriguez (“A-Rod”), and Edgar Martinez (just plain “Edgar”)—all future hall-of-famers. I don’t remember the 1995 playoffs, when Edgar hit the extra-inning, walk-off, come-from-behind double that saved baseball in Seattle. I was 4. But I grew up with the legend of that season, and I have some dim memories of catching a few games at the Kingdome. Much more indelible was watching the Kingdome’s implosion on live TV.

I didn’t take an independent interest in the Mariners until the 2000 playoffs. I remember listening to the games on the radio on the floor of my bedroom. I didn’t know the rules, but I could easily understand the emotion in the voices of Dave Niehaus and Rick Rizzs as they told the enchanting story of the unfolding game. The Mariners lost the ALCS that year to the evil Yankees. I was mad about it. When the 2001 season rolled around, I was ready for redemption.

Nobody expected much from the 2001 Mariners. Why should they? We’d been offloading our superstars through the late 90s. Of the big four, only Edgar remained, along with a couple fan favorites like catcher Dan Wilson and outfielder Jay Buhner. We still had Lou Piniella, our loveable, fiery manager. Otherwise it was mostly a new team. The most highly anticipated new player was a 27-year-old Japanese right fielder known mononymously as Ichiro. He’d had phenomenal 9-year career already in Japan, but nobody knew if that would translate to success in the Majors.

It did. Ichiro quickly became a sensation. Fans in the US had never seen someone play baseball the way he did. A left-handed batter with incredible speed, he seemed to be halfway to first base by the time the ball left his bat. He would frequently beat out routine ground balls for infield hits. His defensive abilities were just as spectacular as his hitting. I’ll never forget, early in that 2001 season, when Ichiro threw out Terence Long of the Oakland Athletics, trying to go from first to third on Scott Hatteberg’s single. It looked like Long had it easily, until Ichiro’s laser-like throw to David Bell nailed him. Dave Niehaus’s unforgettable radio call: “I’m here to tell you that Ichiro threw something out of Star Wars down there at third base!”

It’s hard to overstate how good the Mariners were that year—without question, one of the greatest teams to ever play the sport. They were practically unbeatable. When they went 20-5 in April, everyone thought was a fluke. Then they went 20-7 in May, and kept on steamrolling their opponents. Between May 23^rd and June 8^th they won 15 games in a row. Indeed, they made it to September without losing more than two games in a row, and without having lost a series. They finished the season with 116 wins, tying the all-time record set by the Cubs way back in 1906. Ichiro was our big star, but so many other players had the best seasons of their careers. Eight of our players were selected for the All Star Game—which just happened to be taking place in Seattle that year.

You may have noted the words “we” and “our” creeping into my writing here, as it crept into my speech at 10 years old, referring to the Mariners organization as if I were somehow part of it. It’s a linguistic tic that neatly distills the extent of my identification with this team—and, I should add, not an uncommon habit among fans. We really do feel like we are part of this phenomenon.

And we are. The players will say it themselves—it’s the fans. They couldn’t do it without the fans. The 2001 Mariners sold out nearly every game in their beautiful new 48,000-seat stadium—and the energy at these games was nothing short of electric. I was learning what it felt like to be swept up inside something much greater than myself. I imagine it’s not too different than what a true believer feels in a megachurch.

The right fans, the right players, the right coaches with the right approach to hitting and pitching–all important, but it’s impossible to explain the Mariners’ success in 2001 without acknowledging the presence of some kind of magic. They tapped into some secret force—or, as that year’s slogan had it, “SoDo Mojo”—that made them more than the sum of their parts.

So why didn’t the M’s make it to the World Series that year, let alone win it? By the end of the season, everyone certainly expected them to. There has been speculation among some fans that they would have, if it weren’t for the September 11^th attacks. Of course we’ll never know—and even if it were true, it would be pretty far down on the list of that day’s tragic consequences. Still, something had shifted when MLB play resumed a week after the attacks. The M’s lost four games in a row, including a three-game sweep by the Oakland A’s. (It’s easy to forget that the A’s won 102 games that season, which in any normal year would be the best record in baseball; in 2001 it put them a whopping 14 games out of first place in the AL West.) Meanwhile, the nation was now rooting for the Yankees, symbols of a city rising from the ashes. And indeed it was the Yankees who would dispatch the Mariners in 5 games in that year’s ALCS.

To this day, thinking about the 2001 Mariners brings more than a twinge of painful nostalgia. I was 10, just coming into my awareness of myself, discovering what I loved. I loved baseball. I loved the Mariners. Importantly, these were my own discoveries. I do not come from a sports family. I had a few friends who were into baseball, but in most of my memories from that time, I was by myself. So many evenings watching games alone in the basement. I’d mute the TV to practice my sportscasting skills, parroting the language I’d absorbed through all those hours: “And the 2-1 on the way to Ichiro, here she comes… and it’s lined into the gap in right-center field, a base hit! He’s rounding first and headed for second! Up on the ball is Sierra, the throw in is… not in time! Ichiro is aboard with a lead-off double!” So many mornings that summer lying on my butterfly bedspread, reading the sports section, checking box scores from around the league, tracking the league leaders in home runs, hits, RBIs, wins, saves, ERA—always happy to see my favorite Mariners among them. I had an incredible memory for numbers and facts at that age. Well into the 162-game season I realized that I could rattle off the score of every game the Mariners had played so far, in order.

I was deeply superstitious. I would get mad at anyone who “jinxed” a game by confidently predicting the outcome. It didn’t matter whether they were saying “we’ve got this one in the bag” or “we’ll never catch up now.” I had learned the hard way. One day, the Mariners were leading Cleveland 14-2 in the 7^th inning. I turned off the TV, thinking the game was as good as over. Cleveland mounted an unprecedented comeback, tying the game in the ninth and then winning it in extra innings. I blamed myself.

When the Mariners were eliminated that October, I was crushed. I screamed. I threw things at the wall. You’d think there had been a terrible tragedy. My dad has admitted to me since that, when he tried watching baseball with me at that age, often it just wasn’t fun. I was too wrapped up in it.

But kids get over things quickly. So our magic season was cut short. We always had next year.

Just as nobody predicted the phenomenon of the 2001 Mariners, no one would have guessed heading into 2002 that 21 years would pass before they would return to the playoffs. In that time, I grew up. I still went to games, lots of them. I even worked at the stadium for a season when I was 17, selling merch at the official Team Store. I cheered when we acquired free-agent sluggers, only to watch them have the worst seasons of their career as soon as they put on Seattle’s white-and-navy uniform. At some point, our magic had deserted us.

I went to college. I learned to be skeptical of American exceptionalism. I started noticing all the nationalist propaganda woven into our sports culture. I abhored the toothless patriotism of it all. I despaired at the wastefulness, the cheap merchandise, the mountains of trash generated by this huge capitalist engine. I questioned everything. How can a team really be a team if the players keep leaving for bigger paychecks elsewhere? When the Mariners traded Ichiro to the Yankees—the Yankees!—in 2012, there were no more members of the 2001 squad left.

Years followed when I barely paid attention. But I could never cut off the Mariners entirely. Jaded as I was, I could not help but get excited whenever they started to play well. There was a pilot flame of belief somewhere deep inside me that refused to go out.

Which brings us to now. That flame has erupted anew. And who, exactly, is this new team that has managed to win me over? One of our young stars, Julio Rodriguez (“J-Rod”), was not even a year old when the Mariners had their best season. And yet, there are continuities with 2001. Dan Wilson, the catcher from that year, is now the team’s manager. Edgar Martinez is one of the hitting coaches. Rick Rizzs still calls games on the radio, and sometimes Jay Buhner joins the broadcasts.

More importantly, the M’s have spent the last several years investing in young talent, not just trading for sluggers but developing players brought up through the Mariners’ “farm” system. The result is that we finally have a team with some cohesion. These guys like each other—you can tell. They have corny rituals, like hoisting a huge trident in the air after hitting a home run, or dancing in a circle every time they win a game. They have a new crop of young stars, none of whom is more important than charismatic catcher Cal Raleigh (“The Big Dumper”) who hit 60 home runs this year, smashing the record for both catchers and switch hitters, tying Babe Ruth for third all time in the American League. While the team this year was nowhere near as dominant as the 2001 Mariners, they surged at the end of the season, at one point winning 17 out of 18 games. In this way, they are more like the 1995 team. And just like in ’95, they won the ALDS in Game 5 with a dramatic extra inning walk-off hit.

Now here we are on the cusp of the unthinkable, and my inner 10 year old has come alive. Thankfully I no longer throw things when the Mariners lose. But I do get upset. It puts me in a sour mood. When they win, I rejoice giddily, and watch the highlights on repeat. And I’ve been digging up old clips from 1995 and 2001, brushing up on my team history. Certainly I have more important things to do, but I just can’t help myself.

It occurs to me that maybe I’m grasping for something to believe in at this moment when it’s so hard to believe in America. When I feel so remote from the mythology of my youth, the 90s “end of history” mentality that promised that everything would get better over time. In retrospect, much of that mythology came crashing down with the towers on 9/11/01. Now, it’s hard to believe that things aren’t getting worse and worse.

So maybe I’m just coping. Maybe the Mariners are a distraction. I’ll take it. It lets me be proud of something. My hometown. My team. I’ve been watching the games at the pub near my house, cheering and commiserating with all these other fans who have come out of the woodwork. We’ve been buying each other beers, laughing at how much we care about this perennially infuriating, boyishly lovable team.

When I started writing this essay, the Mariners had taken a commanding early lead in the series. They returned triumphantly home only to be clobbered in the next two games, 13-4 and 8-2. That’s baseball for you. The energy can turn around so quickly. In games 1 and 2 they were playing great baseball. In games 3 and 4, they looked like a totally different team.

Game 5 starts in a few hours. The M’s have their work cut out for them. They need to summon that old magic and really play as a team. Will they bounce back after two tough games and charge to the finish? Or are we watching them implode like their old stadium? Will we find ourselves sighing “maybe next year” like so many times before? Will today’s 10-year-old fans look back wistfully at 2025 as a fluke of a magic season cut painfully short? Or will they come to see this year as the beginning of a new era of Mariners greatness?

Only time will tell.

I’ve been sending out an email newsletter, in some form, for nearly a decade. The frequency of these dispatches has waxed and waned; their contents have ranged from simple lists of upcoming gigs and project announcements to meandering travel stories and half-formed thoughts on cultural and political currents. In that time, I’ve experimented with several different formats and platforms—Mailchimp, direct emailing, a website blog—but I think Substack might be the most sensible platform moving forward.

I’m still getting to know Substack, but it seems to be a hybrid blog-and-social-media site, focused especially on writing and writers. My hope is that this platform will help me integrate all the creative things I like to do—make music & videos, write fiction & essays—in a way that’s fun for me and my subscribers.

My First Publication

Speaking of writing fiction: I recently published my first short story—on another Substack, as it happens, called “Short Story, Long.” It’s a really sweet publication, and I’m thrilled to have my work featured on their site, alongside original visual art that was commissioned for the piece! (I plan to say more about this in my next newsletter.)

I’m feeling inspired by this taste of success to start weaving together my twin creative identities of musician & writer. I’ve been rather public about being a musician, and quite a bit more private with my writing practice. I’m hoping to bring these things into better balance. This new Substack o’ mine represents a step toward such integration.

What Does this Mean For You?

Been a subscriber for a while now? You might hear from me a bit more often than you have been. I intend to write more frequent newsletters—not exactly a lofty goal, considering I’ve been at a pace of about three or four per year over the last few years. In addition, I intend to start publishing shorter posts: musings, mini-essays, casual updates, links to new videos and music releases, calls for input and collaboration, recommendations of other people’s music and writing—and more!

It also means you can interact with each other, if you want to. In the past, my subscribers could only respond directly to me. You can still do that by replying directly to my emails, but now you can also leave comments on my posts. You can link to your own projects, if you like—maybe we can find a little more creative community this way!

Regarding paid subscriptions: you have the option to subscribe to my Substack for $8/month or $80/year (see the “Upgrade to Paid” button in the upper right corner). However, for the moment, this won’t get you any special access to subscriber-only content. I don’t intend to put up a paywall before I figure out what this thing even is. If enough folks sign up for paid subscriptions, I might start creating special content for them. But for now, think of upgrading as just another (meaningful) way to support my work, should you feel so inclined.

I’d Love Your Feedback!

What do you think of this plan? What would you like to see more of from me? Any advice?

I hope this note finds you healthy, happy, and feeling dedicated to something you love.

Greetings from the sky. Yes, I’m on a plane, and yes, I sprung for the in-flight WiFi. Truthfully, I don’t like flying, but occasionally I decide it’s worth it. This time, it was a musical project that compelled me to hurtle through the air. I’ll tell you more about this project below, alongside quite a flurry of updates and announcements. It’s been an exciting few months, and I’m glad to have this opportunity to share some of that excitement with you.

Coming Up

• Piano Bar Fridays continue at The Bishop in Port Townsend—every Friday, taking requests from 5-7

• Saturday May 3^rd from 6-8, I’ll be at Finnriver Farm & Cidery in Chimacum with my mostly-instrumental group CASCADIANS

• Saturday May 10^th I’m at Cellar Cat in Kingston, 6:30-9:30

• Thursday May 22^nd it’s Jazz Night at the Quilcene Lantern. Mark your calendars and stay tuned for more details.

• On Saturday May 24^th, Holy Carp plays the Uptown Pub at 9

• More info about these and other gigs on my website calendar

TARBOO 2025

Last year I went to the first ever TARBOO music festival at the Quilcene Lantern, and it was truly a highlight of my year. This year I am thrilled to be part of the festival’s lineup, in the company of some pretty stellar artists. I’ll be playing the fireside set on July 5^th, shortly after Blind Pilot headlines on the main stage. I can’t wait! Want to join the fun? Tickets are on sale now!

Doe Bay Residency

In other exciting news, I was recently selected as an artist-in-residence at Doe Bay Resort on Orcas Island. I have wanted to do this residency ever since I first heard about it back in 2021. In my application, I mentioned that I’m a bicycling musician who composes music about bicycle travel. I guess they liked that. Naturally, I‘ll ride my bike to the residency. I’ll be at Doe Bay from May 28 to June 3, composing bicycle-related music, performing in the cafe, and soaking in those famous tubs. Maybe I’ll run into you there.

Holy Carp Returns!

Back in January, my new band Holy Carp had our first gig at the Uptown Pub here in Port Townsend. It was a blast. You can check out our cover of “Angel from Montgomery” from that night below. (Thanks to Bergen de Koch for the great video.) I’m happy to announce that we are returning to the Uptown—my favorite pub in the world—on May 24th. We’d love to see you there! We’ll also be at 7 Cedars Casino on July 19th. Want to liven up your party with a Holy Carp performance? Get in touch!

A Recording Project

I said I would tell you more about this trip I just took. I went to Brooklyn to record a couple songs with my friend Devon Yesberger. I’ve known Devon, and his music, for many years, though we really became buddies starting in 2021. He’s a truly inspiring pianist, composer, producer, and online musical personality. (Check out his “Micropianist” videos if you have an Instagram account.) Anyway, Devon has been telling me about his recording studio, aptly named Keyboard Heaven, for years now, and whenever he brought it up, I would threaten to come record with him. Last week, I finally made good on my threat. Devon agreed to produce two of my songs: one instrumental and one vocal tune. It was by far our most significant collaboration to date, and I’m happy to say that it went as well as I could have hoped. We spent three days in the studio and emerged with two recordings that I’m truly proud of. Devon is still working on mixing the tracks, so it will be a little while yet before they’re released to the world. But I will share them with you as soon as I can! And I’m already scheming to get back to New York and spend even more time with Devon in his excellent studio.

Postponing the Bicycle Tour

In my last newsletter, I mentioned that I was planning a bicycle tour for the end of May/beginning of June—exactly the time I was offered the residency on Orcas. Since I really couldn’t pass up that opportunity, I decided to postpone my tour for now. I’m looking at mid-September as a possibility. I’ll keep you posted about that—I’d love to see you if I’m passing through your town!

What I’m Listening To

• As I write these words I’ve got the new album from Hiromi’s Sonicwonder, OUT THERE, coming through my headphones. This album is an adventure! I’ve been a Hiromi fan since high school. She’s not just a staggeringly good pianist; her compositions range from lush, classical-inspired pieces to deep-pocketed grooves to brain-twisting math jazz. Through it all runs a thread of sheer joy. I love the playfulness and virtuosity of this latest album, though my favorite track is the mellow and introspective “Pendulum.”

• A friend recently sent me the music of Junior Mesa, and I’ve been listening to his EP, Quit Your Job, Runaway on repeat ever since. It’s a gorgeous, haunting collection of richly textured tunes. It amounts to barely ten minutes of music, but it’s quite a journey nonetheless.

• While in New York, I had the opportunity to hear singer-songwriter Lila Bloom. Devon told me I had to see her perform, and I immediately understood why. She’s got it all: a captivating voice, a lyrical fluency on guitar, and a knack for writing powerful and surprising songs. Bloom doesn’t have much of an online presence yet, but keep an eye on her—surely it’s only a matter of time before she takes off!

• Lastly, I’ll put in a word for Michael Hurley, who died this month at 83. Known as the “Godfather of Freak Folk,” this enigmatic musician always did things his own way—including painting his own album covers. A hero to many songwriters, though not widely known to the general public, Hurley put out his debut album, First Songs, at 23, and never stopped making music. He released some 32 albums over the course of his six-decade career, and kept performing right up until the last day of his life. He has many great songs; a few of my favorites are “Slurf Song,” “Tea Song,” and “Are You Here for the Festival.”

That’s All for Now

I had fun creating this newsletter. I hope you enjoyed reading it! As always, I’d love to hear from you. What’s happening in your world? Leave a comment or get in touch.

It was a big one! First and foremost, it was a year of getting established here in my chosen home of Port Townsend. At the beginning of the year, Naomi and I moved into a beautiful and affordable rental, which we feel grateful for every day. Crucially, it’s a place where I have the space to teach and rehearse, which has helped tremendously in sustaining myself both professionally and creatively.

Aside from getting settled in our own dwelling, we also found a strong sense of community last year in Port Townsend. To be sure, we started making friends right away when we arrived here in the summer of ‘23—it’s just that kind of place. But the beginning of 2024 was a major inflection point in that regard. And so much of this community, full of inspired and inspiring people, has formed in one way or another around the arts. Artistry is in the marrow of this town.

I can say without hesitation that my professional musical life is richer than ever—something I didn’t expect when I moved to this town of ten thousand people. The common wisdom is that, to make it as a musician, you go to a big city. That’s where the scene is. But Port Townsend has been an incredibly fruitful environment for me, musically. I’ve connected with some of the finest musicians I’ve ever worked with. I’ve joined several exciting bands and branched out stylistically (honky tonk dances are a big deal on the Peninsula). And I’m not just playing a lot of piano; I’m also singing and playing more bass than ever before. In Seattle, I felt like I had to specialize as a jazz pianist. Here, I can be a bassist, a bandleader, a singer, a songwriter, a keyboard player in a cover band (or three), a honky tonk piano pounder, and more.

I’m starting to think it was always my destiny to be a small-town musician. When I decided to pursue a career in music, the reason was simple: I wanted to play music as often as I could. It wasn’t to “make it big” or tour the world (not that I would necessarily reject such developments). It was just in order to live a musical life. I’ve never wanted my professional and personal spheres to be separate. Here, I’m finding integration possible in new ways.

Musical Travels

The year started off right with a January mini-tour down to Oregon. I played a well-attended solo show in Portland at Rose City Book Pub before traveling on to Corvallis where I co-hosted an open mic night, played a house concert, and caught up with grad school friends.

My next regional tour was somewhat more substantial, not least because of a change of vehicle. On April 25th, I set out on my bike-and-train tour, playing shows in Kingston, Seattle, Portland, and Bellingham.

It was a wonderful experiment, and each show was a highlight in its own right. Perhaps the standout moment was at the Royal Room in Seattle with my trio-mates Ryan Donnelly and William Sage. We premiered a new musical work of mine called “The Bicycle Suite”—instrumental compositions about the experience of long-distance bike travel. The premiere went very well—we got a standing ovation after the suite, even though the show wasn’t over. Talk about encouragement! That response told me that people were connecting with the Bicycle Suite, and that I had to keep growing it. To perform it again, to add new movements, to hone it. (And we did perform it again, with a fifth movement added, at Egan’s Ballard Jam House in November. Hopefully we’ll do it again in 2025!)

One reason the tour was so meaningful to me was, again, because of a feeling of integration. Bicycle travel is a passion of mine, and I’ve always wondered about combining it with musical touring. Last April’s experiment felt like a big step forward in trusting my intuition. I suspect it was just the beginning.

Playing Bass

Another big part of this year was playing a lot more bass, including upright! You might not know that I played upright in middle school jazz band & orchestra before switching to piano in high school (piano was my first instrument, but I hadn’t performed on it much at that point). For a long time now I’ve been playing in bands on bass guitar—electric and acoustic—but haven’t had an upright to practice and gig on until recently, when Naomi’s mom long-term-loaned me hers. It’s a gorgeous blonde Kay bass from the 1940s, and it really sings! I’ve gotten to do several gigs this year on that instrument. It’s been profound to reconnect with this dormant part of myself.

My first upright gig in a decade and a half came at the end of June, and it was a night to remember! Here in Port Townsend, we’re lucky to have Centrum, an arts organization that runs camps and workshops at Fort Worden State Park. Two of these camps, which happen back-to-back, are Voice Works and Fiddle Tunes. Singers and string-players from many folk traditions descend on the Fort Worden campus, and it is a hell of a party. At the end of Voice Works, right before the start of Fiddle Tunes, there’s the annual Polka Dot Dance. Everyone gets decked out in their finest dots and dances to a band of Voice Works and Fiddle Tunes faculty. As it happens, the Polka Dot Dance was the first event I went to when I moved to Port Townsend—less than twenty-four hours after arriving in the U-Haul. A year later, I got to play bass in the house band at the dance, rocking out with some absolutely stellar musicians, including four-time Juno Award-winner Pharis Romero!

The Quilcene Lantern

Just a few days later, the Fourth of July weekend brought the TARBOO music festival at the Quilcene Lantern. This venue, half an hour south of Port Townsend, is owned and operated by a family I know from my school days in Seattle, the de Kochs. (Willem & I were in the Garfield Jazz Band together.) They bought the place last January and proceeded with some truly Herculean renovation efforts, turning it into a year-round music and events venue. It’s a stunning property with beautiful historic buildings, the centerpiece of which is a nearly century-old barn that serves as the main performance space. And since Willem, who spent his twenties in New York, is insanely well-connected in the music world, he has programmed some unbelievable shows—local bands, regional up-and-comers, and national touring acts alike. All told, the Lantern has become an exciting locus of a broad musical community here on the Peninsula.

I got to see shows last year by Meg Duffy, Tomo Nakayama, Kate Davis, Damien Jurado, Wayne Horvitz’s Electric Circus, and many others. I also got to perform there in September as a solo act, opening for The Faux Paws, one of my favorite bands. Here’s a photo from that night:

Of the many events I attended at the Quilcene Lantern in 2024, the TARBOO festival was the highlight of them all. Three days camping out among the alders, flinging frisbees, eating wood-fired pizzas, hearing one great band after another, and ending the day jamming around the campfire. They haven’t announced this year’s TARBOO yet but I believe it is happening again on July 4th weekend. I can’t recommend it highly enough. See you there?

A Recording Project

Later that month, on July 31st, I did a solo recording project at Rainshadow Recording here in Port Townsend. Thanks to sound engineer Conor Sisk and videographer Tomoki Sage, I got some really nice videos out of that session. (I got to brush up on my Final Cut Pro chops and do the video editing myself!) I’ve just posted the latest of these, an original song of mine called “It’s Simple.” I hope you’ll give it a watch, and subscribe to my YouTube channel while you’re at it. YouTube remains the primary way that I share my music online.

There are two other videos from that session that I’ve already released. One is a solo rendition of my piece “Skagit Valley,” which is part of the Bicycle Suite. This is a song that people have started requesting at my gigs, and I know of two people who went so far as to learn it on piano and perform it! Which of course is a wonderful honor. The third video is my cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” I’m likely to put out at least one more video from that session at some point.

Personal Travels

Fall brought memorable travels: a family getaway to Doe Bay on Orcas Island, where we biked and hiked and foraged chanterelles, followed soon after by a two-week adventure in Taiwan, where Naomi and I visited my brother and sister-in-law. We biked, trained, spa-ed, and ate ate ate ate ate. The food was out of this world! Flavors I’ve never encountered before. Fish I’d never even heard of. We hiked past betelnut plantations through the thick humidity to a chicken restaurant in the foothills of the coastal mountains. We sat in a teahouse perched practically on a cliff. We drank single origin coffee on the 88th floor of Taipei 101. (There were a lot of heights, come to think of it.) There were great musical moments, too. I got to sit in on a jam session in a dimly lit Taipei jazz club, and the next night, we belted out pop songs at a live piano karaoke bar as Typhoon Kong-rae made landfall.

Oh, and while we were there, we did a photo shoot!

This is the tiniest fraction of what I could talk about from last year. They say “the days are long but the years are short,” and while the phrase contains real wisdom, I find that the more closely you look at a year, the longer it seems to get.

Thanks for taking the time to read my reflections! I’ve enjoyed telling you about some of the highlights of a rich and full 2024. To be sure, the year brought its share of challenges, too, both personal and widely shared. I may write about these at a later date. But I also take life’s ongoing difficulties as one more reason to pause and take note of what is hopeful, what is growing.

What’s growing where you are?

Thank you, friends, for your ongoing support. It means the world to me. It’s not just that I couldn’t do what I do without you. There would simply be no reason to.

Wishing you many blessings this year!

-Jonas

It’s true that I did more traveling with my bike than on it, taking trains and buses and catching rides to cover the big distances. I have mixed feelings about this. One of the smaller but not insignificant joys of long-distance bike touring is seeing the amazement on people’s faces when they learn how far you’ve ridden—and, yes, the smug satisfaction this brings. On this trip, when folks asked in disbelief, “Did you ride all the way here?,” I had to be honest: “Well, no.” I’m sure I was much more self-conscious about this than necessary, feeling like the trip was somehow less legit because I used mass transit. It’s still a pretty badass way to tour. But it did leave me wondering how it would feel to do a music tour that was more like a proper bike tour, to plan my shows better so that they’re closer together and I can ride from town to town under my own human power.

At the same time, combining the power of the bicycle with that of alternative modes of transit is undoubtedly exciting, and I can sense that I’ve only just begun exploring this mode. I certainly want to do more bike-and-train combination trips; I’m also dreaming of touring Alaska someday by bringing my bike on the Alaska Marine Highway System, a.k.a. the ferry. I could ride up to Bellingham, catch the boat, and hop around the towns of Southeast Alaska, playing shows in each one. Why not? These days I’m trying to remind myself that I have a lot of say in what is possible. The laws of physics are the only hard limits.

To be sure, the bike riding I did do on this trip—all around Seattle, Portland, and Bellingham—was glorious, if a bit drizzly at times. And the tour was bicycle-themed in another way: at each show, I performed music I’ve been writing about my previous bike tour experiences, especially my months-long solo tour in 2018. This music was the centerpiece of my show at the Royal Room in Seattle on April 27th, where I was joined by my trio buddies Ryan Donnelly and William Mapp. That afternoon, we premiered my new “Bicycle Suite,” a set of four compositions inspired by different aspects of my two-wheeled adventures.

I have to say, I was overwhelmed by the response. Our show wasn’t even over, but at the end of the Suite, we received a standing ovation. After the show, one by one, folks came to tell me that they were moved by the music, that they could visualize exactly what it was meant to convey, or that it awakened some cherished memory. One person I’d never met before called the music “transformational.” Perhaps the most meaningful feedback of the day came from my godmother, Nancy, who said: “You know you were born to do this, right?”

As I write these words, there’s an inner voice saying, Quit tooting your own horn. Tone it down. Be humble. Fair enough, inner voice. But I also want to be honest: my tour was full of such affirmations, from friends and strangers alike, and I returned home feeling confident that I am meant to be a performing musician. That it is a calling.

I was recounting this realization to my brother on the phone the other day, and his response was something to the effect of, “Um, yeah.”

I thought I caught his meaning, but wanted to make sure. “Are you implying that this is obvious to everyone but me?”

“Yes. Maybe you can just know it now and never have to doubt it again.”

“I think I have to keep rediscovering it.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s probably right.”

Come to think of it, I wrote about feeling “called” to be a performer in a newsletter/blog post less than a year ago. I even wrote: “This might all sound simple and obvious, but it’s taken me a long time to arrive here.” I guess I’ll keep arriving here. In all likelihood, I’ll be arriving here, and writing about it, for the rest of my days on Earth.

Which brings to mind a passage from a New Yorker profile of the writer Wendell Berry I read a couple years ago:

Berry’s writing, like the seasons, has a cyclical quality, returning again and again to the same ideas. [His wife] Tanya once told him that his knack for repeating himself is his principal asset as a writer. He noted a few years ago, “That insight has instructed and amused me very much, because she is right and so forthrightly right.”

Isn’t that delightful? I remember on first reading that passage feeling a sense of relief—I don’t have to constantly be original! I can allow myself to be obsessed with whatever I’m obsessed with. Or, as Mary Oliver puts it, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.”

I’m less afraid of repeating myself these days. I’m less afraid of repeating myself these days. (Sorry, I had to do it.) Maybe when you find the thing you can do again and again without getting bored, that’s how you know you’re onto something. For me, without question, that is playing music.

To be sure, the tour wasn’t all insight and connection. The day after the Royal Room show, I took the train to Portland, where I’d booked myself an Airbnb in the northeast part of the city. After a long stretch when I had hardly a moment to myself, I was looking forward to having a couple days to chill and explore.

Sometimes, solitude is just the ticket. This time, for whatever reason, it felt more like loneliness. I’m not sure what makes the difference. But as I walked the neighborhoods, waited out the rain in various trendy coffee shops, read Howard Zinn (I suppose his onslaught of brutal truths about our history might have been contributing to my mood) and wrote in my journal, I felt a gnawing emptiness—pretty much the opposite of how I felt at the Royal Room.

Maybe this contrast explains a lot. Every high has its come-down. For every moment of feeling connected, inspired, and fully alive, there will be many more moments of longing to feel that way again—even in a very good life.

While it was happening, the time alone felt pointless, a misstep. But I probably needed that solo space, precisely to get in touch with my sadness and my loneliness—which are always with me on some level. It was just my expectation that the solitude should be pleasant and fun that created a sense of disappointment.

My therapist is constantly helping me see the ways I’m looking to bypass or disregard or hurry through unpleasant feelings. He helpfully points out that those feelings, those parts of me that are harder to be with, simply want to be welcomed and loved. (Is even this attempt to make my loneliness feel meaningful another form of bypass? Probably. It’s a deep-rooted reflex, to be sure.)

Looking back on my 2018 bike travels from the comfortable distance of six years, it’s easy to regard that time as a monolithically awesome experience of adventure and self-discovery. In fact, I remember many moments of loneliness and doubt and fear along the way. I remember asking myself what the hell I was doing risking my life to pedal alone down highways, moving a bit farther every day from my friends and family and community and home. Wasn’t I just enacting some misguided Kerouacian impulse, some half-formed American myth of rugged individualist adventure? And for what? Of course there were plenty of exhilarating moments too, and now, having survived the experience and grown from it, I can confidently say it was all worth it. But that’s no reason to erase the doubts and difficulties that were a big part of that year too.

So my first couple days in Portland were pretty dreary. Happily, the rest of my time was a lot more fun. On Tuesday, I went with a couple friends to a place in Vancouver with saunas and ice baths and a hot tub. After two days of low-stimulation loneliness, this combination of sensory intensity and friend connection brought me back to life. On Wednesday, I played a lovely house concert in Sellwood. On Thursday, my friend Peter and I did two sets at a book-themed pub. It was great to see old friends at both of these shows, and to make new ones.

When I returned to Seattle on Friday for a friend’s birthday party, I was exhausted. I’d been drinking a bit too much, and not sleeping enough. My muscles were stiff from all the biking, and I wasn’t looking forward to waking up early to catch the morning train out of Edmonds for one more show in Bellingham. I was long past ready to crash on my friend’s extra bed, but the party lingered till almost midnight. I wished I was home. I’d been on the road for ten days, and I was feeling acutely that my body doesn’t have the stamina it had ten years ago.

I got up just after 7 and started riding north through the morning drizzle along grey arterial streets. Imagining the whole hour’s ride, the big climbs ahead, my mood soured. But one of the beautiful things about cycling is the way it can imperceptibly buoy your spirits over time. Gradually, I found a rhythm. As I pedaled across the city, I was simultaneously traversing, without realizing it, the territory between grumpy and hopeful. My body waking up, my thoughts wandering pleasantly, I found myself in the zone. I crossed Aurora, hit the Interurban Trail, entered Shoreline. Before I knew it, I was zooming down the long hill to the Edmonds station.

After a gorgeous train ride north, I spent a lovely day in Bellingham bouncing from café to café, from park to park. By some miracle, while it was raining everywhere else, famously wet Bellingham stayed dry. I was impressed, as I have been in the past, by that little city on the bay. It has the energy of the university, a bit of a lingering 90s grunge vibe, plus a particular small-town sweetness I’ve come to love from my time in Walla Walla, Corvallis, and now Port Townsend.

That night’s show was at Honey Moon, which venue was recommended by a couple new friends who used to live in Bellingham. They said it had a piano, though they didn’t know if it was any good. I’d done what I could to promote the show, but with only a couple friends in the area, I had no idea if anyone would show up.

When I rolled up at 7:20 for my 8 o’clock show, the bar was completely empty. Just me and the bartender. Okay then. I set up a microphone and tested out the piano—way out of tune. Not an auspicious start. Still, maybe because I’d had such a good day, I found myself ready to accept that I might be playing dissonant music for only the bartender and the two friends who said they’d be there.

But around 7:40, a few folks I didn’t recognize showed up. Then a few more. Then a couple came in and introduced themselves—they were my best buddy’s sister and brother-in-law! He’d told them about the show and they’d come down to check it out. Then my two local friends came with a whole crew in tow. By the time I started playing, the place was half full, and by the end of the first set, it was pretty much packed.

The energy was high. People were talking, and the boxy room was loud. I was in a good head space, so I accepted this, too. In the past, I might have sang louder or played flashier to try to grab some attention. This time, I was able to stay in the zone, connected to the music. I played for my own joy, and for the two or three people who were actively listening. To counteract the piano’s wobbly intonation, I leaned into a honky-tonk sound. I sang cowboy songs, and felt something like a cowboy myself, a solitary rider spending his days in the saddle, traversing the landscape. I was playing a character, I guess you could say. And maybe that’s why, on this particular night, I found myself unapologetically liking the sound of my singing voice. That’s a rare feeling for me.

With the conclusion of each song, I got a bit more applause, a bit more silence for the start of the next one. I kept playing not too loud, just wanting to invite people to listen if they wished. By the end of the first set, the whole room was silently listening.

It was such a surprising and wonderful experience that it verged on surreal. What space-time warp had I passed through to end up here, when an hour ago I thought I’d be playing for an empty room, and now I was playing the best solo show I could remember? It all felt like a cosmic gift, a whisper of encouragement from the universe. Keep going. Keep going.

P.S.

Speaking of cosmic gifts, we were graced here in Port Townsend with a dazzling display of the aurora borealis last weekend. It was my first time seeing those lights. I was grateful for the reminder that we are tiny motes of consciousness floating through an infinite mystery. I’m so glad we’re in it together.

This would have been a joyful and uplifting experience regardless of any money being involved, but as it happened, I was paid generously by the hosts, and most of the guests made donations as well. All told, it was among the best-paying nights of my musical career.

What a profound affirmation! To do something I absolutely love doing, and to be paid very well for it. In the days that followed, still glowing with gratitude, I kept thinking that everyone should get to have some version of this experience from time to time. I’ve also been wondering: what can I do in order to be able to have that sort of experience more often myself?

Money is messy stuff, but at its purest, it is a form of energy. We pay for what we value, what we want to bring into our lives and into the world. When someone tries to pay you as little as possible, it feels shitty, because you and your time and skills are not being valued—because the energy that person is willing to offer you does not compensate for the energy you must expend.

For utilitarian things like groceries and gas and cars, it is relatively straightforward to agree on a consistent value, even if that value is always fluctuating. For things like art and music and nature and human connection, it is much harder to find such consensus. By their very natures, these things resist the cold quantification that is required in order to assign something a price.

We have a largely unexamined cultural assumption that work should be a form of sacrifice. You do a task you don’t particularly want to do, and spend a good chunk of your day doing it, but in return for that sacrifice you receive money that, ideally, though rarely in practice, is enough to balance out your suffering. What about when the work itself is rewarding, exciting, energizing? How should we think about payment for such work?

As a working musician, I have found this territory where music and money meet to be a bit perplexing. I might play for a great crowd and make great money one night, and find myself dismissed and undervalued the next.

I’ve been planning a trip to Oregon. In Portland, I’ll be visiting a friend who works at a sweet little pub that hosts events throughout the week, including live music. I thought it would be fun to play there, so I reached out to the owner, who was glad to offer me a booking. In her email, though, she didn’t mention anything about money. When I replied, I wrote, “Music is my full-time gig. Are you able to offer any compensation?” She responded that she was “unable to pay musicians,” but that I could collect a “cover charge”—just not at the door, because she didn’t want to turn away her regulars, who might not be there for the music. Not exactly a cover charge, then. More like passing the hat. When I followed up to ask if I could at least have a tab for food and drinks, she wrote, “We usually give performers the first drink free.”

One drink? ONE DRINK!?! I was pissed. Does she have any idea who I am? (No, of course not.) Does she not realize that I routinely get paid hundreds of dollars to perform? (Again: no.) Why does she think she can get away with this? (Because she can.)

It didn’t take too long for me to realize that my wounded pride was not really about this woman or her business practices. It was about my own ongoing insecurity regarding my profession. It was about still feeling, even after many years of doing this work, even after nights like the December house concert, that I constantly have to prove my legitimacy—not just to the world, but to myself.

In truth, I felt childish. After all, she hadn’t asked me to play at her establishment—I’d asked if I could. Please, can I play at your restaurant? Please? And also, can you pay me? Pretty please? She has every right to say no, and I have every right to walk away if I don’t like it.

I dream of someday being invited to perform often enough that I never have to ask. I dream of playing regularly in beautiful theaters with gorgeous pianos for enthusiastic audiences, and being paid very well for it. But even the most accomplished working musicians I know still have to hustle for gigs.

It’s no big revelation to say that it’s hard these days to make money as a musician. It probably always has been, but to hear the older pros tell it, it’s a lot harder now. Gigs in the 70s paid as much or more, in real dollars, than the same gigs do now—adjusting for inflation, wages for musicians today are often a pitiful fraction of what they were. Over that same span, the number of venues has seemingly plummeted (along with small businesses in general), while the advent of streaming services has largely wiped out revenue from royalties.

Still, when I hear old timers complain about how things ain’t the way they used to be, I find myself getting annoyed. Okay, I think, I’m sure that’s true—but what are we going to do about it? We have to create our own opportunities—that’s always been true. We have to adapt, just like everyone else. We have to find ways to work creatively within the constraints of reality.

Artists have always had patrons. In other words, they’ve always relied on the generosity of those who have enough. I’m no exception. One thing I love about house concerts like that one in December is that I don’t have to “charge” a “fee”—I don't have to make up some arbitrary price for my music. I can, instead, rely on the generosity of those who attend. House concerts are, so far, the most promising creative response I’ve found to the problems of the modern music economy. They represent perhaps a more attainable version of that dream I outlined a few paragraphs ago. You can play house concerts without having to be famous first—you just need friends with houses and a willingness to host.

Still, I’m a long way from being able to fill my calendar with house concerts. I still rely on for-profit music venues in order to make a living. I have certainly been fortunate to find a niche within that realm that has allowed me to pay the bills. This was mostly accidental; I had no idea when I was studying jazz piano at age 10 that pianists are uniquely positioned to make a living in the music world. The main advantage is my ability to get solo gigs. Horn players and singers and drummers and bassists usually rely on bands, and bands have to split the money. My jazz education is another advantage—by being comfortable improvising and playing by ear, I can be a bit of a musical chameleon, adapting to many different styles and situations.

For me, earning a living has mostly meant playing in fancy restaurants, retirement homes, churches, and for private events. When gigs are thin, I teach lessons. None of it is glamorous, but it is doing what I love to do and getting paid for it, and it beats anything else I’ve done for money.

When I have engaged in what I think most people imagine when they think of being a musician—that is, leading a band, writing songs, recording albums, making videos, and performing original music in dedicated music venues—I’ve spent money, not made it. I know lots of people who work 9 to 5 jobs in order, at least in part, to fund their art habits. I, weirdly, commoditize my art in some situations in order to fund it in others.

The other day, on a walk with Naomi, I asked her, “do you think I should do something else for money?” This question comes up for me every once in a while. Usually, I’ll ponder it for a few days, maybe even get excited about some particular career path, and the prospect of a salary and benefits, before realizing that it would mean the end of my independence—that I couldn’t wake up on a weekday and read thirty pages of a novel, revise an essay, practice piano, work on songwriting, go for a run—all these things I’ve gotten used to being able to do as part of a “work day.” It would mean not easily being able to go out on the road for a few weeks here and a couple weeks there to play shows and see friends. So far, I haven’t been willing to give these things up.

Maybe I’m spoiled. Most of my friends have 9 to 5s. If they can handle it, why can’t I? Do I think I’m above it somehow? Or on the contrary, that I’m too fragile? (“Up, down, same thing,” says the nonagenarian Zen priestess in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.) And besides, just because I’ve gotten used to the self-employed lifestyle, does that mean it’s actually good for me? Maybe I would be holistically better off if I had a job where I made more money and interacted with more people throughout the day. It would give me structure, and if it was the right job, perhaps I’d even feel more invigorated and inspired. Maybe it would be better if I didn’t have to take as many gigs as I could get. I could take only the ones I really wanted, like that house concert in Seattle.

Like the good listener she is, Naomi didn’t advocate for one path over another; she helped me try out different ideas. Then again, she did observe that, by making my passion and my work one and the same, I had tied my identity to my ability to make money—in a field where it is notoriously difficult to do so. Perhaps doing some other job would free me up to do music purely for the love of it.

The word for such a person is amateur. Amateur is often used as a pejorative term, but that is based on a misunderstanding of the word and its etymology. Many of the finest musicians I know are amateurs. With the money pressure taken off the music, they are free to take the gigs they want and refuse the rest. There is something pure in this. Joni Mitchell captures it well in her wistful song, “For Free”: “And I play if you have the money / Or if you’re a friend to me. / But the one man band / By the quick lunch stand / He was playing real good for free.”

From her level of success, Joni Mitchell can romanticize the guy on the street corner doing it for love. Plus, he’s not cutting into anyone’s profits. Plenty of amateurs, however, are willing to play for free in for-profit establishments, feeding a situation where restaurant owners get used to having live music for free. The pub owner can get away with her practices because there are plenty of decently good musicians in the neighborhood who will jump at the chance to have their band practice in front of an audience. Who can blame them? It’s fun.

When I am in a sour mood about all this, my preferred pejorative term is not amateur but hobbyist. It’s one of those loaded terms you can’t help but say with a sneer. To be clear, it applies exclusively to oblivious male musicians who think they’re hot shit, and who have no understanding of the courtesies and conventions of the gigging world. Hobbyists play too many notes, too loud, and they want you to rehearse five times for one gig, without pay. If I tell my fellow pros that I recently played a gig with a “hobbyist,” I need not elaborate.

These folks are, thankfully, the exception. The vast majority of musicians I know, amateur or professional, are humble and generous, conscientious participants in the local musical ecosystem.

Besides, I know that when I feel mad at individuals for their behavior—whether it’s a hobbyist taking free gigs or a pub owner who doesn’t pay—I’m really mad about a system that incentivizes such behavior, and that puts me in a position to resent it. Imagine a world where all our basic needs were met without us having to hustle for them—where instead of most people specializing in one job they didn’t really want to do, sacrificing their time in exchange for money, everyone had enough. Imagine a world where instead of relying on underpaid “essential workers,” we all pitched in, doing a bit of this and a bit of that, out of a sense of responsibility and a wish to keep things running well. We'd still need highly skilled specialists, of course—surgeons, pilots, engineers, and the like. But most people could do a bunch of different kinds of work, which is what I believe most people would want. In such a world, it would be absurd to ask for money in exchange for music. If I had all the money I needed already, I would play only the music I wanted to play, when and where I wanted to play it, exactly as often as I felt like it, and I wouldn’t charge a dime.

Given how very far we are from such a world, I wouldn’t mind if amateur musicians were generally more conscientious about playing for free, and if pub owners could maybe offer dinner and a couple drinks and an email that wasn’t the dictionary definition of “curt,” even if they can’t afford to offer any money. But what I’m really mad about are the demands that force us to capitalize on every possible opportunity, that pressure us to brand ourselves and market ourselves and commoditize our gifts and say yes to things we don’t want to do, all because we need the dough.

In the end, I decided to play at the damn pub anyway. Not because I need it, and not because I expect to make much money, but because I think I’ll actually have a good time. For one thing, my friend who works there said she’d give me free drinks all night long, the owner’s policy be damned. For another, they have a piano, so I don’t have to lug all my heavy gear, which is really the only part of gigging that feels like the sacrificial kind of work. I can just show up, play some tunes on the piano, make some tips, hang out, and have a nice time.

“Somone hit the big score. / They figured it out,” sings Gillian Welch in her brilliant song, “Everything is Free.” “We’re gonna do it anyway / Even if it doesn’t pay.”