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I'm going through something really profound today, this week. I'm doing it again, that thing I do, where I fall in love. I'm having a renaissance, a rememberance of my days as a folkie, my early days of fandom, before TV fandom or fic came along, when we had listservs and we sent each other desert island lists of our favorite albums and songs. The nanci-list, and later the dar-list, and rec.music.folk and the other newsletters and met up at festivals where we'd tromp around in the mud and sleep in our cars and listen to singer-songwriters tell stories under the stars.

After

projectjulie left, I was lonely, and I turned to an old friend to embrace. Of course it's Nanci Griffith.

Nanci's music is one thing that's truly mine, it's woven its thread through every part of my life, a thrumming, empowering constant. "Storms" was the first cassette I ever purchased with my very own money, 1988 and I was twelve years old and I played that tape till it stretched and snapped. I've been to see her in concert all over the world, wherever I could find her, for twenty years, from the Hudson River cleanup festival to Carnegie Hall, from Cape Cod to San Francisco. She is the closest thing, after fifteen apartments in five cities in ten years, that I have to a home.

I'm crying as I write this, I'm a poor fool with a fragile heart.

So here's Nanci performing Townes Van Zant's "Tecumseh Valley," at the memorial tribute for Townes. Here also is Nanci, tearful, watching Steve Earle perform Townes' "Fort Worth Blues" at the same memorial. Those are youtube links so you'll probably want to open in a new tab.

Nanci's just wrapping up a tour, and keeps talking about retirement. She's working with anti-landmine groups and Vietnam and Iraq war veterans, and, though I know the music won't shut up in her soul, she could well stop recording, stop touring, and I might never see her again.

I might never see her again, or hear anything new from her, this person who has provided the soundtrack to twenty years of my life.

And so, I'm sitting here listening now to her cover of Tom Waits' "San Diego Serenade." (Right click/save) Can you blame me for being maudlin? But tomorrow I'm off to San Francisco to see my sister, my bags are packed, and the Zune's loaded up with Nanci's entire discography. As always, she'll be with me on these wheels, on the roads, looking out on America.

So here's a little spin on a red brick floor, thank you kindly for listening.