Jess Klein - Backstage

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

My friend Siobhan Begley made this picture - she makes them out of yarn - so brilliant!  She names each one after a song she likes - this one is called Springtime, after my song from Draw Them Near!  I do absolutely feel as excited as a little kid that she made this beautiful picture, with swirls of color and texture and depth, based on my song!!

See more of her work at www.siobhanbegley.com and www.myspace.com/siobhanbegleyart

How did I let 3 weeks pass and not blog?  I passed them eating Mung Dal which I read about in my book on Ayurveda - I took the book with me everywhere I went in New Hampshire and consulted the lists of appropriate foods for my body type before putting anything in my mouth.  A little obsessive I guess, but I like to really dive into things, in case you can’t tell from my music. 

The health food store in Portsmouth had some really nice gluten free muffins made with amaranth and blueberries.  Oh man, those were good.  I stayed on a family farm across from a field, and with a view of a cold but still moving lake.  The morning of my departure a snowstorm blew in - everyone was talking about its coming, as people do before storms.  I guess people there like to snowmobile, so, extra excitement.  I pulled myself together at 6 a.m., put on all my clothes until I was stuffed into my winter coat, and walked out into 9″ of snow.  Stomped through that towards the rental car, which for reasons unknown did not come with a scraper, used the arm of the coat technique, said ’shit’ when the snow got in between my glove and the sleeve, and then burned a quarter tank of gas trying to get the little mustang out of the parking lot…ouch. 

 The whole drive home all I could think was, ‘go slow, speedy, there’s a snowstorm’, and then, once I entered NY State and it was sunny and dry-ish, ‘don’t stop for lunch because you don’t want to be late’.  I guess I wanted the rental car people to like me and think I’m a good citizen… (Oh, dear.).  A courteous van driver stopped in the lane facing me and waved to me to turn into the Enterprise lot - as I’m turning, exhausted but completely on time, in one piece, and with zero damage to the car (Victory!), some Daewoo speeds around the shoulder and hits my bumper: crumple!

I put my face into my hands, but no one was hurt, and if I hadn’t been so shaken I would have been laughing pretty hard - the cops didn’t think it was funny, and neither did the poor bloke who’d hit me, since he was clearly at fault for passing on the right, on the shoulder - but I appreciated the irony. 

 When I walked inside, the woman who’d rented me the car looked at me disapprovingly and all I could think was: ‘I’m not at fault!’   And ‘I had it here on time!’ 

I think next time I’ll just risk not being liked by the rental people. 

The Amex agent was all “mmm hmmm, and why don’t you go ahead and read me the plate number for the car?  Mmm hmm, and why don’t you tell me the other driver’s name?  Mmm hmmm, and yes (sigh) there’s zero deductible, so don’t worry…”

Apart from that I’ve been in my little room scheming, learning blues riffs, making them mine, stomping around in furry boots on cold wet concrete, reading Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore.  The man has a way with allegory, and an incredible sense of humor.  I ride the subway with a huge grin on my face looking at the pages - in his story of a 15 year old runaway in Japan, and an elderly man who lost consciousness while on a class trip during WWII - suddenly Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders waltz in, talking philosophy/smack - it’s great.  Colonel Sanders is sort of a spiritual pimp - in the story anyway.

More stories soon  - enjoy the early snow, if they have that in your area.

 jk

There are only 2 flights per day into Bloomington-Normal Airport so I got up at 4:30 today (that’s a.m.) so I could catch the flight that would put me there in time for my Blue Moon show tonight.  Because I had the time last night, I enjoyed putting extra effort and attention into packing my suitcase - it’s a new one, unscuffed, clean, so I was psyched to get all the contents organized, and put my new Carbon Balanced Flyer luggage tag on the handle.  Ah, it was a handsome looking bag. 

The ride to LaGuardia was smooth, and I felt pretty awake too given the time of day.  On the radio Carley Simon and Mick Jagger sang ‘You’re So Vain’, and I semi-alertly grooved along in the back seat.  I thought, this song is pretty good for car service music.  I also thought, I’ve had that experience she’s singing about.  Then I thought - hazily at 5 a.m. this morning, but more clearly now - this is kind of a similar theme, though less heartwrenching, to Patty Griffin’s Nobody’s Cryin’, which my friends Alexandra and the Thieves covered at the Living Room last night: women moving on.  Irked/torn and aching - but in expressing those feelings, moving on.  This is how we all move on, right?  But there’s something piled up and then torched in these songs, which is where their power lies.  Don’t sing til you know what you’re saying, then slay the demon with all you’ve got…I couldn’t have articulated that in the dawn hours…

I checked in, drank my Airborne and fell right to sleep on the plane.  My connection in Chicago went by almost without me waking up.  Arrived in Bloomington-Normal and stood at Baggage Carousel 2 (out of two total) like a lost puppy waiting for its owner to show.  I kept thinking, the belt is still moving, so that means there might still be more bags coming, right?  Even though everyone else has taken their bags and its empty, mine’s still coming, right? 

Since it was Illinois and not NYC, I was greeted by a friendly sympathetic agent at the American Airlines counter, but unfortunately, she said, there was no way to locate my bag until it either comes in to Normal tonight on the 5 p.m. flight, or tomorrow morning on the plane I’ll be leaving on. “Or potentially,” she said, shrinking with a grimace, “because the airport codes are so similar, they sometimes go to Baltimore…” 

 So she sent me off with a slip of paper, and a phone number (in Dallas) I could call - funny, I just went through this 3 weeks ago when American failed to put my GUITAR on the same flight as me coming back from Dublin!

 So then I called Dallas and made up a story about having medication in the suitcase, so isn’t there some way to track it?!  I need …that stuff!! To which the agent on the other end of the line replied “You know, you can bring your medication on board - I mean, when it’s me, I always think, ‘Ooh, I don’t want to be without that!’”  She had me there.  “Yes,” I said, “but I can’t bring everything I need with me onboard - this has happened to me twice in 3 weeks with your airline - can I get some kind  of reimbursement?”  “This is just part of travelling,” she said, “especially this time of year.”

So I sat down on my guitar case on the curb, noting that there was almost no one around, so how busy could it be??!  But then the sun was on my back, and in my face (maybe it was to my side) and I started to let go of the whole thing - against my will, like I might win if I kept arguing to prove that American Airlines would only do justice in the world by becoming a company that cared about luggage - and instead I thought, “I’m here, the guitar is here, I have clothes on my body (mortified as I am to have to appear onstage in what is basically glorified long underwear, jeans, and big furry boots - I look ready for the Anorak - not my style, but…), I have a place to stay, my voice works, and I’m alive.”

Someone said to me a couple days ago, “Life isn’t about what happens to you, it’s about how you react to what happens to you”  I fought with my frustration a little more, and then just let it go.  There’s a sanskrit mantra for this kind of thing, which I started chanting silently to myself, because it always reminds me what I have, and what is abundant - always calms me down: Om sri maha lakshmi-ay swaha.  My spelling could be blasphemous, but it’s my best phonetic attempt.  Lakshmi is the goddess of abundance.  I love her!  Thanksgiving! 

The hotel shuttle pulled up, and I tried to open the door behind the front seat to put my guitar in, but it wouldn’t open.  So the driver hopped out and said, “I’ve never done this before, so I have no idea what’s going on”  which actually put me at ease, because I realized it was just going to be that kind of day, but at least here was a compatriot.  It turned out he had graduated with a degree in sculpture and was waiting on a job at a respected woodcarving shop, but right now he’s doing this catch-all maintenance job, and for the rest of the day is stuck cleaning air conditioners.  He said if I needed to go buy any clothes or anything we could take the shuttle -  fun!  But I think I’m going to go with the boots et al.

jk 

 **Epilogue:  The suitcase showed up, just in time.  A little scuffed, but no snowboots on stage, and more importantly was able to send the people home with albums…But I was kind of happier thinking about needing nothing…

Last week in Stockholm, I had a dream that I was going to play a set with Clapton at…The Philly Folk Festival!  He didn’t seem to realize he was a huge star, and this was (sorry philadelphians for the comparison, but..) JUST the philly folk fest…My best friend from high school, the person who introduced me to decent music, showed up and was so excited by the news, he licked my neck like a dog!  Weird, but under the circumstances I could understand.  Anyone else might consider these dreams drug-induced, but for better or worse, it’s just another night in my brain.

 Now I’m back in BK, relieved to know my way about, but missing Ireland, which I managed to stop back through on the way home.

 On the flight home, I watched three movies: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Nancy Drew, which I was kind of believing until the villain spilled his entire story to her just because she asked, and Hannibal, which I mistakenly thought would star Anthony Hopkins, but instead was a historical joint about the warrior from B.C.  (I think it was B.C.)  Quite liked that Harry Potter film - I never got to see any of them in the theater, but even on a 3″ x 3″ screen with crappy earphones, I think it translated.

 People looked at me strangely when I pulled out my homemade salad while they were eating tinned beef and rice, but I didn’t care.

 The last night in Stockholm was lovely, at the little Galleri Agueli.  Nice cobblestones they have around there!

xo

Jess