we know what we did this summer
the pleasures of a low key season
welcome (or welcome back) to my monthly newsletter. as always it features a small essay, some news, some pop culture recommendations, then a complete list of my upcoming tour dates. click here or scroll down if you just want to see if i am playing near you.
“what did you do this summer?” when i was a kid i always found this question oppressively complex. there was no way for the answer to not be some kind of performance or virtue signaling. it was hard to hear what other kids did and not compare yourself. it always seemed like other families were having more fun than mine. as an adult, this feeling annoyingly persists. the internet doesn't help! the pressure summer puts on us to do something flashy, to accumulate outrageous experiences, to go out of our budgets, comfort zones, geographic regions and perform happiness, it’s just not my style! i find myself thinking, what if what i did or where wasn’t that impressive on the face of it, but who i did it with was the most important part? how do i explain that? this year, i tried something new: pretend the summer months are no different than any others. i love to live a quiet simple life. it balances my crazy public job and travel schedule. so here’s to the quiet summer, like the one i just had, full of slow days with friends, plenty of satisfying work, occasional swims, and lots of reading. and here’s to autumn. i gratefully welcome you, ye of low pressure fun, season of my busiest work, time of my birthday, and many a sporting delight.
with the approach of fall, comes the fruiting of several production projects i’ve been working on over the last year. namely, three (count em, three!) records by other artists that i worked on. steve slagg’s “strange flesh”, described as a “God-haunted, gay-of-center weird singer-songwriter with death problems”, is out now. jen zimberg’s “what sings”, containing songs about joy, darkness, faeries, joan of arc, leonard cohen and more, is out now. and driftwood soldier’s “stay ahead of the wolf”, gutter-folk punk songs about income inequality and the search for intimacy, arrives oct 18. if you're an artist looking to make something with me, find out more about what i do here.
this fall also marks the beginning of the 2019-2020 theater season around the country, and our musical “miss you like hell” has lots of productions coming. i’ll be visiting most of them and performing what i call “double-headers”: opportunities for you to see a performance of MYLH and then a concert of mine, on the same day or in the same weekend. baltimore & denver are right around the corner. olney MD, st louis, st paul, providence, northampton, seattle & more follow in the spring. see the complete production list here.
and finally, i just signed on with a super cool platform, parlour, that allows anyone to host me for a concert in their house. i’ll play in your living room, your deck, your man cave, your she-shed, your yard. not your bedroom. that’s a hard no!! its super easy to apply to host. i’ve already got a few gigs in the pipeline. apply to host here.
bathed in the nostalgia of BOOK IT (pizza hut's brilliant summertime books = pizza program), this month's ¡ME GUSTA! is the highlights from my summer reading.
see you out on the road!
x erin
¡ME GUSTA! : SOME OF MY FAVORITE THINGS
salvation on sand mountain in 1991 journalist dennis covington reported on appalachian snake-handling churches, but then found himself becoming a believer
the world according to fannie davis bridgett davis's beautiful & fascinating memoir about her mother, an underground numbers operator in mid-century detroit
an american marriage tayari jones's account of a fictional marriage that feels as true, painful, desperate, magnetic as your own intimate relationships
on earth we are briefly gorgeous poet ocean vuong brings us this gift of a novel about queerness & first gen life in hartford
where the crawdads sing i call this the "white lady beach read" of the summer, because all the white ladies i know read it, loved it, and recommended it to each other. there's alot to love and relate to in former wildlife behaviourist delia owens's first novel about a young woman surviving alone in the marshes of coastal north carolina. however, it also has a very problematic magical negro character and is possibly connected to a real life murder, so i worry that recommending it undoes some of the good work i am trying to do with where i put my attention. but i have to admit i ate it up and need to look at why that's so.