just hold me down by the water

Greetings & welcome back to another transmission from the spring of chaos & curiosities that is this year so far. I write to you from Kansas City, where I’ve only just returned to after a wild week in Austin, Texas. I feel like I’ve written about this before but it bears repeating, I personally sort of love going to SXSW. Obviously the grotesque reality of it and all that that entails doesn’t enter into my affection, but I do love the ability to see people I love, hear cool music I’ve never heard and be in a city attached to some of my best memories. Happy we’ll get to come back to Austin once or twice this year.

I wanna thank everyone who came to my little festival out at Willie Nelson’s Luck Ranch on Friday. I kept saying that pretty often on really big days I don’t actually get a chance to enjoy myself because I’m running around, stressing out, overwhelmed and over-socialized - I think that’s probably a universal feeling. You create a big fun day for others and that occasionally comes at the expense of your own enjoyment but it’s worth it. Alas - that was not the case on Friday. I had a fucking blast, got to see or be a part of every performance and played maybe a personal top 5 Waxahatchee set to cap it all off. The day started off with Brennan Wedl who’s a favorite young/new artist of mine & ended with me singing along to “Crescent City” and playing such a crazy fun set I kind of can’t stop thinking about it. I got to catch up with Lucinda for about 10 minutes and in that 10 minutes she told me about the first time she met Bob Dylan, her new eye glitter, how she picked some Texas-local-referencing songs for the set and was just generally so lovely to me as always. It was all just a beautiful confluence of longterm vision and wonderful people and amazing music and I just really hope we get to do it again someday.

It was our first show with my pal Liam Kazar on guitar and BGVs. He’ll be with us all year and I’m thrilled about it. Stop me if I already mentioned this but earlier this year I found out we’re going on the Outlaw tour with Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow? Have we talked about this yet? Surreal. So blessed. Can’t believe it. Madeline Edwards opens (she rules) - I can’t even begin to describe how crazy getting that call felt. I was in Durham about to walk out the door. Speechless. So excited. We go on tour with Wilco in about a month all over the Southeast. Can’t wait for that one either.

All these different little signals from the universe keep leading me to a strangely intoxicating nostalgia for my teens and 20s. It doesn’t feel like regression, per se. It’s more like I’ve spent my 30s really stepping in to who I am “now” or something and shutting out the past a bit but I’ve loved investigating this further lately. Pretty much from the time I was 16 til I was about 28 I was pretty emotionally stunted by substance abuse. I put all my experiences and feelings in the songs and my curiosity sort of stalled out there. I’m not sure why. Maybe some unprocessed trauma, some self medication. Maybe I was just immature. Anyways. I’ve listened to a couple songs I wrote at around age 21 or so. The first record. I usually cringe so much when I think about those songs. I’m weirdly finding it all interesting and summoning something like compassion. If my records all build off each other and the whole catalog is the Winchester Mystery House - that record was like, the basement. Tigers Blood is some spiral staircase only accessible via secret passageway through a moving bookcase. I think I’ve struggled to look at that record or those years of my life because it was honestly a really dark time that should have been fun and adventurous and free. It’s kind of satisfying to pull it out of storage and parse the text for a deeper understanding of why I am who I am right now. I’ve always shrugged that time off as just simply bad and it’s been really beautiful to actually examine the nuance.

I had this really visceral memory yesterday of taking the J train to the coffee shop I used to work at in Gramercy Park. I would listen to “Bells Ring” by Mazzy Star and just soak up all the cinematic romanticism of my life in that moment. Young, dark, full of ideas, so much ahead. It’s weird being an age where you’re still really young but you’ve lived long enough to have significant distance from a time in your life when you were technically an adult. I hope that concept is less convoluted than it sounds in my head but I don’t know how else to say it. I feel young and old. I’ve lived so much life. Parts of me are different and parts of me are exactly the same. Anyways.

I’ll leave you with this. I kept saying we’re playing so few shows in 2025 and yet I look at the calendar and we’re out so much of the year. Most of the dates are announced, some are forthcoming. If you live in America, Canada, the UK or Europe there’s a chance we’re coming right to your town. Check that out here.

We were on the Tonight Show a few weeks back & since Eliana was on tour with Tim Heidecker I called in a couple ringers (Brad and Allison) - check that out here.

Okay thats all! More some time soon.

XO

KC