Jess Klein - Backstage

Today I got a special ride, in an ambulance.  My friend Butterfly is a medic and corralled one to get my stuff to the storage space!  We got some strange looks from the storage people, but nothing is unheard of in NY.  The piece de resistance for us was when we rolled my dresser (the last piece) in on a stretcher - a properly theatrical finish to a long day of hauling stuff down stairs.  I shot some footage of the dresser’s finest moment.  Everything I ‘need’ seems to fit in a suitcase and a guitar case.  I noticed when I locked the dark storage room and missed nothing, I don’t really need any of those things.  Strange how when we settle into a place we decorate to make things ‘homey’, but when we’re travelling, or when I am, the last thing I miss is my stuff - I miss my friends, my food, my neighborhood, but not my stuff.  Maybe it’s not this way for everyone.  Probably not in fact, or the road would be jammed with people just tooling around - a whole world of nomads rather than just a few of us dreamers.

Speaking of dreams, tomorrow night I fly to Shannon.

xo

jk

Just back from two weeks in the midwest and northeast US with the lovely and soulful Irish singer-songwriter Damien Dempsey and his guitar player John McLoughlin. Wednesday I leave for my own tour in Ireland - I can’t get enough. Wrote two songs on this tour, which is rare, and rare is good. Damien’s music is divine: inspiring.

It’s 70 degrees and sunshine in Brooklyn. I’m exhausted but happy. Today random strangers helped me carry my suitcase and guitar up and down subway stairways and this morning a friend in Boston made me the best breakfast I’ve had in ages - it was an elixir made with coconut oil and bee pollen and blueberries and soy milk and other goodies to counteract…um, booze.

The friends I’m staying with are playing music I don’t recognize but it’s catchy, with harmonies and guitar licks - kind of sounds like they were influenced by the beach boys. God only knows where I’d be without you - this is something I’ve been thinking about in my writing lately, like wtf - it’s so amazing that we’re able to dig deep and make music and leave our souls bare for people to share and that despite all the ballyhooing and fears, it makes us safer - you think you know, but then you don’t, then you think you do then you don’t, then you try it and it f-ing works. Pardon the language, but I’ve been with two hilarious Irishmen for 2 weeks - the phrases rub off. Art is salvation, is what I’m saying, but so is living- the more you put into life, really the safer you are - somehow our egos don’t get this, but it’s true.

Much love to all who stood right by the stage and listened so intently at the Damo shows. It was a thrill to play for you all and I hope to see everyone soon.

Love,
Jess

One of the most beautiful things in the world is when you can be thrown off guard, out of your comfort zone, and learn unexpectedly what the world has to offer, and what you have to offer the world. 

I’ve been touring the past week with Damien Dempsey around the midwest and northeast.  Damien is one of the few contemporary acoustic songwriters who’s passion and soul are so present in his work.  It’s political and passionate and brilliant.  When my manager gave me Damien’s album “Shots” a couple years ago, I immediately started clamoring for him to get me on tour with Damo.  So then I got a call last fall saying I was on for support for his US tour this April and May.

It’s been a really mind-blowing experience because I just watch the whole show every night and learn from it and try to absorb as much as I possibly can from someone whose work has influenced my own so much.  It’s like that buddhist saying - when the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  I feel like I’ve been looking for a ‘teacher’ for a while, and this experience has been one.  Also, we’ve been singing one of my favorite of his songs together, “Sing All Our Cares Away” each night.  I just feel like a sponge absorbing all this soul.

Then it’s off to Ireland for me next week, which is like icing on the cake.

Wrote a new song today - a real weeper.  Sometimes I wonder where that stuff goes in between songs - I mean luckily touring means singing them every night.

xo

jk

Listening to Ella Fitgerald’s scatting on “Take the ‘A’ Train” made me feel enamored with what humans can achieve when they really focus on and develop their art.  I thought, ‘Will I ever master something like she has mastered that?”  I hope so, but more hope that I remember to find things I haven’t mastered.  That’s the point. 

I was, in fact, on the ‘A’ train, riding from Brooklyn up to Chelsea to meet with Tanya Braganti, the photographer who shot the recording of Draw Them Near, my first album for Ryko, which we recorded in Nashville back in 2000.  Tanya and I were meeting to sort through pics for the best of the early years album my label is putting out this spring. 

As I think about leaving NYC, and as the actual date approaches, everything is sorting into phases - I was always going wherever I ended up and now I’m choosing to go somewhere to create a life - weird phrase since I have a life - but to enter a surrounding one step closer to what my soul looks like - green, slow-growing wilds, something a wood nymph like me would dance around in.  Ultimately I will probably end up in the middle of nowhere, a cabin in the woods, with a fireplace, oatmeal on the stove, that kind of thing.  But I’m still a young woman with some oats to sow.  So Austin it is.  Scary to write this, as it seems to set a chain of events in motion, but since I keep talking about it, it’s not news to anyone else.  And here I am in my least favorite coffeeshop in BK (my fave is closed for renovations - here, I just spent an hour trying to get online!) but as I did, and opened this page, Willie Nelson (Austinite) came on the stereo, singing a plucky version of ‘Midnight Rider’.  Which I think I once went into at the end of Little White Dove, which was a song on Draw Them Near, so isn’t that a complete circle?

Outside my house is a church which chimes the hours and, on Sunday, the Mass times…despite this, I wrote a new song this weekend, with the word ‘f**k’ in the chorus.  I can’t even spell it out here because it makes no sense in this context.  But I’m kind of glad the word has the impact it does.  In the context of the song, I meant it.  Important to reserve words for the right moment.  I don’t make a very good potty mouth.  Going to try it out at Rockwood tomorrow night.  Today seemed to be about napping one page in to Matsuo Kirino’s book, Out.  Looking forward to staying alert next time I open it, because I was hooked, I was just also under 4 blankets - I didn’t want to take any chances on being cold.  It’s cold out.  I was really getting into Kenzaburo Oe’s Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness but I left it with my friend by mistake after wandering around Williamsburg, Brooklyn at 1:30 a.m. I/S/O taxi.  My friend, Butterfly (that’s a code name) only had a $100 bill, so there was debate about stopping somewhere to try to break it or just taking a chance on the cabbie having change.  I didn’t want to stop in at White Castle, though Butterfly told me about a former White Castle somewhere which was converted into a vegetarian restaurant and is now called ‘Veggie Castle’, and that is somewhere I would have wanted to stop into.  So now I have to give Butterfly the $80 change to get my Oe book back.  Seems fair enough. 

Without going into too many details, here’s a picture from my New Years Eve:

Couldn’t help but thinking about JR on our swing through Dallas.  The wonderful Tom Prasada-Rao and Kerry Cooper put us up in their home (and drove me to the airport!) and gave us directions to Kalachandji’s - a Krishna temple, inside a palatial building, with a restaurant serving sattvic vegetarian food - buffet (everything’s bigger in Dallas).  Did you know food could make you drool even without garlic and onions?  I didn’t, but then we ate there and neither Byrd nor I could really speak for a good 30 minutes after the meal except to say ‘Wow’. 

No photos of Kalachandji’s, though if you go to the neighborhood where it’s located in Dallas, the temple will ‘appear’, as the website promises, just off I-35. 

 Instead, here are some pics of us laying down some love onstage at Uncle Calvin’s - thanks to Ira Hantz!

I don’t even know where to begin about how great this town is.  I’m kind of waiting for someone to pinch me - it’s like New York without the parking hassle, without the attitude…with sunshine…and, lots of cowboy boots.   

 This’ll be a quick one since I’m about to run out to see The Resentments at the Saxon.

Climbed around the Green Belt today, the series of parks/trails/dry riverbed around and through Austin.  Every night we (my tourmate Jonathan Byrd and I) go out (we have almost a week off here total, god bless our booking agent) we find great music and just enough trouble…I took some girlfriends to see Bruce Robison at the Broken Spoke Friday night.  Bruce just wrote a number one for George Strait and wrote Travelin Soldier which the Dixie Chicks sing, but at the Spoke, he was playing swing, two step, etc. My friend Eleanor Whitmore was playing fiddle with him.

So at first the three of us gals sat there admiring the display of boots and various dance styles, half judgmental, half in awe…then we got scooped up by some cowboy-businessmen, who could actually dance - I didn’t know 1) how easy it is to dance with a man who knows how to dance or 2) how cowboy boots are actually good for dancing (did you?)

Luckily, I knew enough to walk away when my partner leaned in to say with a drawl, “You’re starting to get the hang of this….”

 More soon…

It’s blog-mania!  Ok, not at all really.  I tried in Austin to post something detailing my feeling of being completely in love with the place, but apparently it didn’t post!  Mercury is in retrograde.  Now I’m in my favorite coffeeshop in Brooklyn, as the wireless is down in our house, trying to be brilliant on the spot as they close in 12 minutes - a good writing exercise, not necessarily great reading.

Um, shit, just got reminder from the friendly barista…ok, uh…my latest discoveries in list form:

 1) I couldn’t get enough of Austin - just couldn’t, so I may be moving there…

 2) Great combo: Acorn squash, green beans, chickpeas, spices, raisins - saute the chick peas in olive oil and spices, add steamed acorn squash, green beans, raisins, some water, a lid, steam those puppies = yum.

 3) Carina Round - you Brits know her, and now I do too!  Yanks - check her out - she is the bomb!  www.myspace.com/carinaround  Carina and I are working on various schemes together.

4)  Girl next to me at coffeeshop is singing harmony (loudly!) to Jack Johnson album. 

5) Promise to start earlier in the day next time -big love, and apparently I’ll be on the west coast, midwest, northeast and UK/Ireland this spring, so hope to lots of you! 

xxoo

 Jess

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a book I was reading on Ayurveda - if you’re not familiar, the phrase Ayurveda means “the science of life”, and it’s an ancient Indian practice that focuses on achieving and maintaining balance in the body and mind through diet, exercises, and activities appropriate to one’s specific body type (don’t take my word for the definition though - go ahead and google it - you’ll find someone with a more studied explanation).

Some of you may have noticed I talk a whole lot about food on this songwriter’s blog, to the point where I often question why I am posting this stuff?  Tonight I figured it out.

Part of Ayurveda is to focus completely on the food you are eating - really appreciate each bite, the aroma, the texture, the temperature, the flavors.  For people who don’t know, life on the road, can be, especially for someone like me who can’t have eggs, corn, dairy, gluten, OR tomatoes (that’s the kicker, isn’t it?), really hard for someone who wants a good warm plate of food at every meal - sometimes it’s good, sometimes warm, sometimes a meal - rarely all three.  Just last week Erin and I were talking about the usual road food options “Meat and cheese? No?  Fried meat and cheese?  Oh, ok, how about potatoes and cheese?  Cheese and meat?”  Sometimes, charmingly, in another language. 

But in cooking these perfect, balanced dishes the past few weeks, and then sitting down to them, not speaking, not reading or writing, just me and the food, I’ve started to understand why people belong together - I’m not crazy - okay, that’s a lie, I am.  But bare with the revelation - when I take in, with all my senses, a full plate of fresh warm vegetables, legumes, spices, grains, I go limp.  It’s involuntary.  Tonight’s meal - a one pot colorful dish of broccoli, okra, red peppers, purple cabbage, millet, tofu, and some herbs and spices  - made me understand as I was sitting here revelling over it and feeling like I would do anything for it (!) - this is why people fall in love; it’s why we’re here.  We’re not here to, literally or metaphorically, just drive ourselves around.  We’re here for experience.  And experience is meant to be shared.  (I might have learned this at the end of ‘Into the Wild’ when Christopher McCandless scrawls in his journal “Happiness is only real when shared”; it did register at the time, but not totally - more like a pre-echo of something I meant to learn.)

*

Now you can have your own nirvana-like meal, if you like - the recipe is “Miletto” - and I got it from a fantastic blogger I just found today (she’s got loads of other recipes as well) - Fran’s House of Ayurveda: http://franlife.blogspot.com/2006/11/recipe-milletto.html

Buon buon appetito,

Jess