September update + seeking hosts for November Undertow tour

It’s the end of the summer and I am moving.

photo by Mike Gustafson

Hi all,

Full update below, but for you TL;DR types—there’s a NEW FREE ESSAY and TWO BRAND NEW LIVE RECORDINGS available on Patreon, AND we are SEEKING HOSTS for another Undertow Living Room tour in November!! This one will be in the Southeastern US and will be the last one for a bit before I hibernate in preparation for a new record. More details below if you’d like to volunteer to host us!

Since my last update I’ve been in the studio—specifically my favorite place in the world, Betty’s in Chapel Hill, NC. After spending some time there I’m fairly confident that I’m finished tracking on what will be my third record as Flock of Dimes. Obviously you’ll eventually be hearing much more about this record in this space, so for now I’ll just say that it’s been a particularly long and trying process, so the thought that I could be actually nearing the finish line is a welcome one.

I was (and continue to be) pretty gobsmacked by the amount of support I’ve received right out of the gate with Patreon. I get an email every time someone signs up and every time I see a new one my heart gets a little lift. I’m so excited about it! I’m enjoying having a reason to brainstorm and create a little more casually, with a more instant-gratification sort of response. It’s really fun. Which brings me to my offering for paid subscribers this month: while I was at Betty’s, I carved out a little time to record two of my favorite live arrangements from the duo configuration with Alan Good Parker: One More Hour, and Pure Love. These two songs are consistently a highlight of the sets that we play, and they are VERY different from their studio counterparts. I really wanted to have these arrangements documented, so I went ahead and did it. These are both live takes, warts and all—our only audience to vouch for their credibility the great Alli Rogers, who engineered and mixed them on the fly. Please enjoy!

And speaking of live arrangements—after some deliberation, I have decided to embark on one last run of house shows before going into hibernation in preparation for my next record—THIS NOVEMBER in the good ol’ SOUTHEASTERN US. We’re striking out to cover some of the ground we’ve yet to hit—so we are now looking for hosts in NORTH CAROLINA, SOUTH CAROLINA, GEORGIA, FLORIDA (that’s right, fuckers, it’s your moment) ALABAMA, MISSISSIPPI, and LOUISIANA. If you haven’t caught this set yet, now’s your chance! But we (quite literally) can’t do it without you—if you want us to play in your town, please volunteer to host us with the good folks at Undertow.

A little inside baseball on this one: we’re trying a different method of host-sourcing this time—instead of pre-determining the cities we want to hit, we are casting the net a bit wider, and will route the tour based on where we get the best host submissions. Larger cities preferred, but will definitely go off-roading for the right spaces. Also, we are going to avoid places we hit on the last two tours for now (so won’t be playing in, say, Atlanta this time—but places like Athens, for example, are still up for grabs!) If you have any questions about what’s in play, hit me up, my Patreon DMs are open. I look at every single submission and try to make the best call based on the information I have. Hosts would need to be available (with some flexibility) between November 9th and 25th.

Initially I was a little nervous about touring in the South in November due to, uh, the other big, scary thing that’s happening in November—but ultimately I decided: what better time to be creating a space for folks to connect and feel it all together? I’m certainly going to be needing it; maybe you will, too?

Until next time,

JW

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UPDATE 9/1/24: MOVING

It’s the end of the summer and I am moving. As I sit down to try and write this, my brain is being pulled in a hundred different directions—I’m up to my ears in logistical minutiae, trying to anticipate how I will respond to the onslaught of micro-decisions that will ultimately decide what goes and what stays. It’s not the easiest moment to stop and carve out time to check in with myself—in these moments of upheaval I tend to lean into disassociation and let the emotional chips fall where they may once the eventual new safe harbor is reached. But this is one of the many reasons why I’m glad to have the accountability of this new format—because if I wait for the right time to scratch the surface of my inner world, it may never come. In other words, this is a big move—after almost a decade in North Carolina, I’m moving to Los Angeles, and there are many miles to go before I’ll be fully settled in a place that feels like home.

What I’m telling myself is that I’m just going for a little while—that it feels like the right moment to try to build on the friendships and collaborative relationships I have there, but I’ll almost certainly be back. “I’m just going to try it, just for a few years, maybe two or three, and, hey, I can always come back, right?” After repeating this enough times I realize this is the exact thing I told others (and myself) when I left Baltimore for North Carolina in 2015. It makes sense. Emotionally, the entire picture is too big to take on all at once, too many individual goodbyes, too much grief to swallow in one bite. So I take it in pieces, and lie to myself, just a little.

Really, the truth is, I have no idea what will happen. I might want to move back to North Carolina after all, or somewhere else entirely. On some level I understand that the truth of the future is unknown and unknowable, but the illusion of certainty holds so much self-soothing power, so I let myself have just a little, as a treat.

Since I left Baltimore, NC has come to feel like home to me—not my first home, but the first that I chose, rather than simply inherited. The self I was before I came to this place would be unrecognizable to the person I am now. I loved Baltimore, I still do, but I felt myself growing in a direction that felt at odds with the version of myself most people there understood me to be. I’m not saying that it would have been impossible to follow that thread while staying put, but I do feel that it’s much easier slough off those outdated old skins while you’re not carrying the weight of shared history and the ingrained expectations of everyone around you. In North Carolina I could simply be different—no questions asked, no raised eyebrows.

We are all social creatures, and, intentionally or not, we adopt the mannerisms and affectations of the communities we are a part of. You are who you eat, as I like to say. In North Carolina, the people I met were so disarmingly earnest, forthright, and sweet. They didn’t feel the need to pick apart the things they hated; instead, they talked about the things they loved with passion and unselfconsciousness. Over time, my exposure to this allowed me to soften, and drop my defenses—in ways both creative and personal. I was able to find ways of enjoying things that had previously elicited only eye-rolls. But far more significantly, I learned that I could be honest about how I was feeling—that I could admit weakness, could struggle and cry—without scaring people away. I learned that I could be authentically myself, imperfections and all, and still be lovable.

So, of course, I worry that with this move, I might lose touch with that hard-earned sense of safety. Granted, I do feel like I’m in a good place within myself to endure a little bit of external chaos. I feel solid, rooted, firm in who I am and what I have to offer the world. But I also know how tempting it can be for me to adjust to fit whatever spaces I move into. Some amount of adjustment can be a good thing—I pride myself on being someone who can roll with the punches and make people around me feel at ease—but too much pressure to accommodate the external puts my inner compass at risk of spinning out, becoming useless and unreadable.

The friends I have in LA aren’t vapid, superficial, career-obsessed—there is so much more to that place, and the people who live there, than those overly simplistic cliches. But there will be, without a doubt, an increased proximity to things that I’ve been somewhat shielded from in NC—an obsession with money, power, and prestige, a fixation on youth and physical beauty, and a certain kind of visibility and success. To suggest that everyone in LA subscribes to that model would be absurd, but to assume that you can increase proximity without being affected in some way would be naive. I’ve worked hard to try to embody the values that I believe in, and eliminate the gnarly stuff that our culture implants into all of our brains—the ageism, the fat-phobia, the internalized misogyny, the belief instilled by capitalism that the suffering of the masses is a justifiable cost of doing business. I know what I believe, and at the same time, I’ve been in enough rooms to know that it’s impossible to fully escape the desire to fit in. It’s not that I worry that my beliefs themselves will change. But I do wonder if a certain type of exposure will trickle down subconsciously, slowly eating away at my sense of self-esteem, exposing its vulnerabilities.

Of course, there’s another side to all of this—a far more hopeful one, and the reason I’ve chosen to uproot myself and take this chance: the alchemical reaction that occurs when you change your surroundings can unlock the doors of rooms previously inaccessible to you. Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time in LA—short trips, long stretches—and I know it pretty well. Lately when I’ve spent time there I’ve felt a certain pull—a strong sense that there is work there for me to do. There are so many brilliant and inspiring people there, and I’m at a point in my creative process where I feel more than ever the need for collaborative energy. And if it’s going to happen, it’s got to happen now. At 38, I’m beginning to feel the very first edges of my mortality—and I’m starting to learn the truth of time as a finite resource. So: I’m going. Maybe I’ll love it; maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll stay for a decade, maybe only for a few years—the end result of where I go and when I go there is beside the point. The point is: I need to find out what’s behind those locked doors, or else I’ll always be wondering.