You’ve probably heard about the island of Samoa skipping a day by now, but if not, here’s an abridged version of the story:  To align with it’s Asian trading partners, the nation of Samoa decided that December 30 would not happen — they would go directly from Thursday the 29th to Saturday the 31st, skipping over Friday entirely.

How can you skip a day? How can Friday simply not happen? People just decided, that’s how. Funny how many things in our world we think are fixed and solid.

Do you feel too old, or too young? Is it too late to change something big in your life?What ideas have you turned into brick walls?

Can you take a conception that isn’t serving you, and just let it go, like the Samoans did with Friday?

It might be easier than you think. Maybe that’s the frightening part.

Happy New Year y’all,

Eliot

It was a busy year for me too. I started a new solo career, released Blackbirds, toured the East Coast, formed a new band, bought my dream guitar — hiked the 17.6 mile, Dawson Pitamakan Pass, in Glacier National Park — and have secretly been training a small army of Samurai Unicorns.

I also started a blog. This blog. It was going strong for while there, but faded out like Five For Fighting. Remember them? Me either.

Anyway, I’m just thinking about what it means to start a new year. It doesn’t have to mean anything I suppose. It’s an arbitrary point in time, in some ways. On the other hand, it can mean whatever you want it to.

The New Year could mean a fresh start in a relationship, or with your family. It could be the year you run a marathon or hike the Appalachian Trail. Maybe you’ll go back to school, or join a monastery. This could be the year you get yourself a jet pack. You could also build a windmill or a really little bicycle for squirrels. In the new year, you might become the world champion at that game Chubby Bunny. Or perhaps you’ll stop drinking coffee, and start drinking mayonnaise. You might resolve to invent your own new language and insist on speaking in it exclusively.

I don’t know what you’re going to do, maybe you won’t do anything differently. Or maybe  the point is, we are all going to do things differently, it’s just a question of how, and whether or not we’re going to take an active role in that process or not.

Oh yeah, this blog just got poignant and whatnot! Poignant is a strange looking word, don’t you agree. Poig-nant. Poy-guh-nant. How did we get that G to sound like a Y? I bet someone did it on New Years!

Akemashite Omedetô!

Eliot

P.S. I’m making a new album next year.

Right now I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Nashua, New Hampshire. Some old folks sitting close by have pulled a third chair up to one of these tiny round two tops. They’re having coffee and talking to each other in a language that sounds an awful lot like English. I can’t be sure though. Seems like as good a time as any to try and squeeze my life down into a bit-sized morsel of bloggery for you nibble on with your triple grande skim latte.

Whiskeytown just came on the stereo. A man wearing some heavy work pants is nodding to the beat. There’s a big guy next to him with a ZZ Top beard and a hood covering his head and most of his eyes. A couple of middle-aged moms are talking loudly about their families, cars, and diets. I now know how much money they make, and that they vacation in Australia. They feel really bad for this one poor family they know, and try to help them out, but they don’t really know how. A young woman is carting in a baby, while a new employee is being taught all about the magic of the French press. There’s a “caution wet floor” cone in the middle of a completely dry room. It’s a little too loud and a little too cold in here, but still, I’m enjoying the downtime.

Last night I watched most of the Republican presidential debate in my hotel room. I’ve never seen so many people appling for a job they seem to think has no use. Each one vowed to do less than the next. Well, I believe so little in government, that I couldn’t finish watching it. Maybe I should run for president. Vote for me, I promise to call in sick everyday!

I’ve been on the road for a week now. I’ve played in Columbia, SC; Charlotte, NC; Baltimore, MD and New York City. Seven more performances to go before I head back to Atlanta. It’s been good to give all the new songs some airtime. It takes a while to get inside of my songs. Sometimes I don’t even know what they’re about till I sing them a couple hundred times. Sometimes they surprise me. Sometimes they let me down. One of my old songs cracked my thumbnail a couple nights ago and I had to superglue it, to keep it from tearing off.

This is a strange life. It doesn’t get any less strange with time. You look for meaning in what you do, but if you get too close to it, you can’t even tell what you’re looking at. If I’ve learned anything it’s just this: Lean into the oddities. Try not to let yourself go numb.

My coffee is cold.

Cake or death,
Eliot

I’ve spent the last hour or so this morning sifting through the rubble of Myspace. The Brilliant Inventions once kept a relatively popular blog on there. Far more popular than this little one I’ve got going now. Then Myspace crumbled, and the blogging slowed down. Then stopped. Here’s one I wrote 4 years ago! Kinda strange to read now; like an old journal entry. The person writing isn’t really me. But I know him. We could even be friends. I could give him some good advice. He could probably give me some too.

Can You See Me Now?

Seriously though, there are 71 Peachtree Streets in GA! The whole state is like that M.C. Escher drawing, where the stairs all lead back to themselves, but upside down and twisted — drunk on peach schnapps and mint juleps. Mmmm, does anyone else want a cocktail, right about now?

For whatever reason, this summer I’ve eaten a stupid amount of peaches. Just a absurdly enormous pile of our fine state’s most famous crop. And you know what? Turns out that our peaches are no joke, my friends! There’s a good reason why everyone down here has peaches all over the brain.

I even went as far as to compare Georgia peaches to other fresh peaches from all over. Our peaches kick their peaches asses! And peaches do have an ass, if you haven’t noticed. I recently bought some organic, tree-ripened California peaches to compare to our humble conventional peach. It wasn’t even close. I’m sorry Georgia, I totally get it now. I do.

That’s probably the biggest thing that’s happened to me this summer. The peach thing. I mean, my new CD did get great reviews in Georgia Music Magazine and No Depression (thank you Darius Rips) among others. That was awesome. I was also a finalist in this folkie festival in the hottest dustiest place on earth. That was alright too. And I did teach several kid’s songwriting workshops — which kept me on my toes and reminded me that creativity is a renewable resource. My favorite line was from an 11-year-old girl, “death comes once or twice in a lifetime.”

Still the peaches kinda stand out

If anything was going to compete with my newfound Georgia peach-appreciation, it would be the show I’ve got coming up this weekend. I’ve got a new band that just sounds amazing! I’ve been talking a whole lot about it, so I won’t go into it all again. If you somehow missed my ramblings on this, you can read all about it HERE!

Thanks for reading, and listening, and you know, hanging on with me in one’s and zeros. I appreciate it.

Bye y’all,
Eliot

So I’ve been trying to lucid dream, on and off for a while now. In case you’re wondering, that is not a good strategy for lucid dreaming. Apparently you’re supposed to practice everyday. How do you “practice” dreaming, you ask? Well, it seems to amount to “pinching yourself” throughout the day, to make sure you are in fact, awake. The idea is that it becomes a habit and you’ll start doing that in your dreams as well. Just the same way I drink whiskey in my dreams every night.

It’s not a airtight argument I guess.

In case you’ve never heard of lucid dreaming… or google, it’s basically a state where you “wake up,” within your dream. Think Neo and Morpheus here. You can do whatever you want, and it feels “real.” You could make a sound argument that it is real. Or just as “real” as being “awake” anyway. (Can I stop putting quotes around every other word now?)

Last night I had the longest lucid dream I’ve ever had. Or, semi-lucid I suppose. I mean, I knew I was dreaming, but I couldn’t seem to make whatever I wanted to happen, happen. I also wasn’t in total control of where I was in the dream. I went back to the street I grew up on. All the houses were dark and burnt-out. I tried make the lights come on inside the houses, but the darkness just stared back at me. I flew up to the tree tops and snapped off the end of a branch. I thought, I’d stick it in my pocket, and see if it is still there when I wake up. I said I was semi-lucid.

Some other weird stuff happened that I don’t really want to talk about. I woke up and remembered everything very clearly. I reached for my pocket. I wasn’t wearing pants. Damn.

Dolla dolla bill y’all,
Eliot

I’ve been staring at a blank screen for about twenty minutes now. I’m terrible at starting. I’m really good at persisting. I’m tenacious and determined once I break inertia. But, I’m a sorry initiator. In fact, I’ve been thinking about how to write this blog for weeks. Just how do I craft the perfect preface? What is the secret combination of nouns and adjectives, the alchemy of meter and metaphor, that what will unlock the vault of verbiage, and bath us all in the light of that pure blog gold? I haven’t a damn clue. So here’s the story…

It was almost two months ago now. I’d just finished up a short run of shows with my friend Dean Fields. I was driving home from North Carolina after a performance the night before in Richmond, Virginia. The clocks had all sprung forward, but I can’t say the same was true for me. I had checked into a Hampton Inn at 3am that morning. I slept as late as I possible could and spent the remainder of daylight hours listening to podcasts of This American Life, and Fresh Air, as I drove, maintaining my constant vigil for the next Starbucks. It was about as uneventful as you might imagine.

I neared Atlanta in the early evening. I stopped one last time for gas about an hour out of town and bought some awful snack mix to hold me over until I got home. I was worn out from my trip and excited about sleeping in my own bed. But, I had had a few really fun shows in a row, so my spirits were relatively high, despite my exhaustion. All things considered, I was feeling good.

As I passed “Spaghetti Junction” and the tall buildings of Atlanta started rising in the distance, a slight uneasiness began forming itself in my chest. At first I simply ignored the feeling, but it dug in and called out for my attention. Suddenly I could feel my heart thumping up against my rib cage. My pulse was racing. I felt a fire in my sternum. Sweat gathered on my brow, and then the final alarm sounded… my left hand began to go numb. “I’m having a heart attack,” I said out loud.

My mind spun like a top, wobbled a bit, then fell over on itself. Terrified and confused, I looked down and my hand was dialing 911 on my phone. It rang…

“What’s your emergency?”
“I think I might be having a heart attack.”
“Where are you right now?”
“On the 75/85 connector.”
“Are you driving??”
“Yes.”
“Well, pull over!”

It took the ambulance driver about 45 minutes to find me on the highway side. Good thing they take these emergencies seriously! The EMTs took my blood pressure, it was 190/110! They did an EKG and some other hocus pocus. Then they told me I really should go to the hospital right away. Awesome. Then next thing I know, I’m being wheeled into the emergency room on the stretcher with my guitar and laptop balance on my chest. (I just couldn’t leave them on the shoulder of 85.)

I was in the hospital for about four hours. They hooked me up to everything they could find and monitored my heart. They did blood tests and took a chest x-ray. But mostly, they just left me in a tiny partitioned space by myself to watch my blood pressure and heart rate slowly come back to a baseline neurotic level.

One of the last people to visit my “room” was a forty-something year old black nurse who seemed unimpressed with my “condition,” to say the least. She handed me something disgusting to drink called a G.I. cocktail, and said, in a way that sounded nothing like question at all, “do you have issues with anxiety?”

My heart was apparently fine. Or at least, I hadn’t had a heart attack.

A few weeks later I had another episode a lot like the first one. This time, I just lay on the grass in the front yard of my friend’s house and waited for the sensations to pass.
A few hours of internet research, a couple thousand dollars in emergency room bills, and several conversations with trusted friends later, I came around to the obvious conclusion: I wasn’t having heart attacks. I was having panic attacks.

I wasn’t going to share this with too many people, let alone the entire interwebs. But it seemed that every time I did share this story, someone would tell he they had a very similar experience, or they knew someone who did. This isn’t the kind of thing most people go around talking about, because It can make you feel like you’re a crazy person. But, since I’ve never claimed to be anything else, I thought I could tell my story. I thought sharing this might make other people feel better about their own experience, who knows.

Its been over a month since I’ve had an attack. I had some good advice from friends about how to cope. I’m breathing a lot deeper these days. I’m excited about summer and new songs on the way. I’m sorry I had to take a break from blogging, but I hope to be back now. This one’s for all you worry warts out there. Thanks for reading all this everyone. Love you guys.

eliot

First of all… I’m sorry. I know, I’ve been a bad bad blogger lately. I’ve let you down. I’ve failed you. You hate me. I should hang my head in shame. But, in my defense, I’d just like to offer, that this month has been stupid busy. I put out a new record, drove all over the southeast,  took a trip to the emergency room (more on that later) and filled up nearly every waking minute of the day with some seemingly pointless task, in hopes of furthering, my already rockstar-like music career.

But, I’m back again. Yee Haw! Saddle up your unicorn and drink another pot of coffee, I know I am. You know, I think I might be beginning to go through a little postpartum depression now. Putting out a record on your own is weird undertaking. Maybe less like having a child, and more like tossing a coin into a deep well. You lean over and wait and wait for a sound. Or it’s like a message in a bottle. You don’t  know who has found it, or how they reacted when they did. Or maybe it’s like having a baby in bottle and tossing it into a well. Hard to say really.

To be fair, I’ve gotten some wonderful messages from people who are enjoying “Blackbirds.” I’ve been touched by some of the responses, actually. I know I took some big chances on this album, and I’m glad to know that they were worth it for many of you. I’m really proud of this little record, and now I just hope it gets heard by as many people as possible.

If you haven’t heard “Blackbirds” yet, I hope you’ll go to itunes or CD Baby and take a listen to the clips. If you like it, I hope you’ll download it, or order a physical copy. If you already have it, and it speaks to you in any way, I hope you’ll tell a friend or two. You are this music’s best hope for getting out there. Thanks again for coming with me on this new path.

I love mangos,
eliot

Six months ago, I had no idea I’d be making a solo album. Josh and I were returning to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival in Upstate New York after winning the “most wanted” vote the previous year. Our career hadn’t really gone the way we’d imagined it would, but we were still making new fans and playing all over. We’d even started raising money  to record a follow up to our 2009 album “Have You Changed.” And even though there was every reason in the world to have seen it coming, I was completely taken off guard when Josh’s aspirations took a dramatic turn. Honestly, it just never occurred to me that The Brilliant Inventions wouldn’t make it, or go down scrapping. When I look back now, it’s painfully obvious that I’d been trying to keep a sinking ship afloat on my own, for a long time.

When it became clear that the new record we were planning on making, wasn’t going to happen (at least not in the way we’d imagined) I was honestly terrified. When you spend seven years of your life on a project that ends one day with a phone call, it’s kinda hard not to lose your shit.

One night I was getting in bed, trying not to have a panic attack, and I just couldn’t sleep. My head was spinning out of control with thoughts of the future. What should I do? Quit music? Get a real job? Go back to school? Move to India? I closed my eyes, but the darkness just swirled like a turbulent sea, tossing me around in my sheets. I was scared. I hadn’t prayed in years. I wasn’t even sure who or what to pray to. I decided just to ask the deepest, wisest part of myself one simple question: what the hell should I do?
Then I passed out.

I woke up some time later in a foggy delirium with an answer — an answer to a question that I couldn’t even remember yet. Then, just a though I was reading a letter, a simple message unfolded itself inside my mind. “You’re asking the wrong question,” it said. “You don’t need to know what to do with the rest of your life. You are dealing with hurt, insecurity, and fear. You are an artist, so make art out of it. That’s why you started doing this in the first place. These are the raw materials. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and make some music. That’s who you are. That’s what you do.” I don’t know where that came from, but I’ll never ever forget it.

“Have You Changed,” took two years to make. In some ways it took even longer. I won’t rehash all the shenanigans that took place on that project, but it was a war to make. Josh and I fought, sometimes bitterly, on so many details of the production that it was almost comical. I was always pushing for looser, more organic guitar parts and doubled vocals. Josh favored a sparse modern sound with clear unaffected voices. We labored over electric guitar distortions and harmony vocal levels. Our producer and friend, Will Robertson, had to play arbitrator on at least on occasion when tempers flared. But in the end, I think all that passion made for a pretty cool record.

But where do you go from there? Now on my own, with no one to fight with, could I make something good? There was no way I was going to do a “Have You Changed Part 2“, and I wasn’t about to even try. The only thing that made sense, was to take an entirely different approach all together.  Our foray into the world of pop music had started to sour me on the genre entirely, and I found myself going back to the music that had initially inspired me to write songs: my parents old records. Early Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and so many more. I decided to make a totally different kind of record than the slick, clean, calculated and deliberated one that Josh and I had worked so hard on.

Once again, I enlisted the talents of Will Robertson, and told him what I had in mind. He got it right away and we put together a plan. We recorded Blackbirds in two weeks. That’s right, two weeks! We used an old Guild parlor guitar with completely dead strings. Much of the vocals and guitars were tracked together, without a click. We consciously left the mixes messy and kept “mistakes” all over the place. Then we chose a rootys americana instrumentation, when the songs called for more production: Banjo, harmonica, and pedal steel. All those choices, I think,  made for edgier, but honest sounding collection. Edgy in an acoustic folk kinda way, that is.

I believe the strength of The Brilliant Inventions came from two dedicated artists hammering out there differences and refining their craft. I couldn’t do that alone. If I was going to have a strength as a solo artist, it was going to be singing from my heart, going with my gut, and letting the chips fall.

I don’t want to give away all my thoughts about this record. I hope you’ll find it deep and rich enough to explore and draw your own conclusions about. The title, for instance, has a lot of significance for me, but I’ll leave that for you to ponder. I will say, this collection of songs is about growing up. It’s about coming to terms with who you are, and what’s most important. It’s about dealing with youthful impulses and unhelpful emotions. Hopefully, it’s an honest picture of who am I, or who I was. Unlike some other projects I’ve worked on, I have no hopes or illusions that this will be commercially viable. I just wanted to make something I would want to listen to. And I just needed to deal with my shit, the only way I know how.

Thank for coming along with me.

Eliot

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