the truck.

Saturday was supposed to be the debut of The Medium Heroes, my new bluegrass band, at the Shelby Block Party in East Nashville. We’d rehearsed twice. We had arrangements. We were ready.

Then the sky fell out.

I’m standing behind the stage watching rain cascade down the exposed speakers like water off a roof. Picture the last time your rain gutters overflowed. That. The PA is soaked. The stage is soaked. My set is canceled. Not postponed - canceled. The rain isn’t going anywhere.

There’s a particular feeling you get when something you’ve been building toward just evaporates. Not quite grief, not quite anger. It’s more like the air going out of a mylar balloon. It still floats, but.. anyway I’d been excited about this show in a way I haven’t been excited about a show in a while, and now I was standing in the rain watching it not happen.

Here’s what I didn’t know yet: it was already handled.

A few weeks earlier, my friend Michael Weintrob and I went for a walk. That’s the whole setup. Two grown men with small children, catching up over a little low impact exercise. We were crossing under the railroad trestle when I told him I was playing the Shelby Block Party. He said, “Oh yeah, I know Austin.” He picked up his phone right there on the sidewalk and texted him. Austin texted back immediately. Yes. The truck would be there. Done.

Michael Weintrob is a photographer and artist best known for his Instrumenthead project - portraits of musicians with their instruments replacing their heads. Bootsy Collins on the cover of both books. Everybody on the eastside knows his studio. We talked about it all when he was a guest on the Morse Code Podcast.

The truck is part of the project, a rolling installation that travels to festivals and events, and it has a covered area off the back that functions, if you squint, like a stage.

Three weeks later, when the rain came, Michael was sitting in that truck, dry as a bone.

Austin, the festival organizer, looked at the situation and said: maybe you could play in his truck? I already knew Michael would be down. That’s just who he is. I walked over, and he was already clearing space, already getting ready, making it work before I’d said a word. Everybody who knows Michael knows how on brand this is.

We had a stage. I texted the band. They came.

The set wasn’t what I’d imagined. Acoustically, performing in an outdoor setting without amplification means the music kind of washes over people as they pass by rather than hitting them the way a festival show does. I mean, each player in the band was good - Nashville good - and I’d written or co-written all the songs and we’d spent real time on these arrangements. In the moment of playing them, some of that detail got lost in the soak. That stung a little.

But the thing about bluegrass is, it doesn’t need electricity. Not really. That’s not a consolation - it’s the point. Bluegrass is a form built for exactly this kind of situation, for porches and parking lots and the backs of trucks. It’s honest music. It doesn’t require infrastructure to justify itself. You can hear that in the records, the way the instruments sit together without anything between them and you. That directness is a big part of why I love it. The luddite in me.

I’ve spent, ohh twenty years trying to make music work inside a system that turns songs into streaming metrics, and at some point in maybe 2021 that endeavor just left me cold. Not bitter, just cold. The numbers stopped meaning anything because they were standing in for something they couldn’t actually deliver, which is the experience of music happening in a room, in real time, between people.

You can’t stream what happened on that truck. It either happened or it didn’t. For the people standing in that parking lot in the rain, it happened.

My family was there. My daughter - seventeen months old, just starting to get her legs under her - was bop-dancing the way toddlers do, that full-body commitment to rhythm that hasn’t learned to be self-conscious yet. Randa was there. People I love were standing in the rain watching the first set the Medium Heroes ever played.

None of that would have happened if I hadn’t gone for a walk.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to. The truck was there because Michael texted Austin. Michael texted Austin because I mentioned the show on a walk. The walk happened because we live in the same neighborhood and we’re friends and we made time. That’s the whole chain. No single link is impressive on its own. A walk. A text. A yes. And three weeks later a toddler is dancing on a truck bed in East Nashville while her dad plays bluegrass in the rain.

I don’t know what to call that exactly. Not luck, because luck implies randomness, and there’s nothing random about fifteen years of friendship. Not planning, because nobody planned this. It’s more like - the world taking care of people who stay in relationship with each other. Who stay present. Who go for the walk.

While the podcast is on break I’m using the time to get really focused on my playing. Specifically guitar. More specifically I’m finally surrendering to the plain fact that as a player I worship at the altar of Jerry Garcia. I like the Dead, but I love those records he did with David Grisman. I love the songs. I love the singing. I love the solos. To listen to that solo he does on Friend of the Devil is one of the reasons I have for staying alive. So I’m going to learn every solo on the first Garcia/Grisman record, as a way of honoring one of my favorite albums ever made. Quite possibly, no measurable good will come of it. But it’s a worthy pursuit and I’m capable of it, and lately that’s the only test I trust - is the thing worth doing? And can I do it?

That same test is behind the work that’s taken up most of my professional life these last few months: I started writing songs on commission. One song, for one person, about one person. Somebody tells me about their wife, their father, the friend they lost, and I write the song that only that story could produce, then record it and put it in their hands.

It is the exact opposite of music dissolving into streaming numbers. It can’t be streamed by strangers. It exists for one person and the people who love them, which turns out to be the audience that makes the work feel most alive.

Two weeks ago I one for a birthday. I got a surprise text from the receiver. Said he gets misty eyes every time he hears it. That feeling I got, reading that text, is the opposite of the music business.

This weekend The Medium Heroes played their first show on the back of a rolling instrument truck in a rainstorm, my daughter danced, and it was a good beginning. The walk made the show. The friendship made the walk. It all runs on the same current. I’m just trying to stay in it.

P.S. - The commission work is called A Song for Someone You Love. I wrote about it a week ago, and that post has the video. It’s here. Father’s Day is three weeks out - if there’s a dad in your life who’d understand a song better than anything you could buy him.

In the meantine, I can’t wait to post some of these Jerry solos..