you're making me feel like a dollar in your hand

Hello there -

I’ve sat down to write this approximately 147 times in the last 3-4 weeks and alas, here I am again. I start writing this newsletter entry up on the 12th floor of my hotel in Ann Arbor, MI all alone, playing my guitar, listening to music, avoiding the hostile, icy air outside. I’m really looking forward to playing a solo set tonight. I haven’t done it in years and the set I have planned is not planned at all and is in fact very fluid and subject to spontaneity. New songs, old songs, a voice fried from too much talking and not enough sleep. Loose and fun.

Obviously a lot has gone down since 2024 became 2025. I wrote out my experience of the LA wildfires 3 or 4 times but never felt moved to share it. While sometimes it feels cathartic and correct to work it out on the Substack, this particular experience has shifted and stung and felt both consuming and also relatively inconsequential to me personally based on how horrific it was for so many others. I guess I’ll just let everyone know I was there the night it all got really scary and I got out of there quickly and everyone I know is safe, even if their homes aren’t. I’m devastated for everyone who lost everything. I’m grateful more people weren’t hurt. Everyone grieves and copes in this big spectrum of ways and it feels both heavier and lighter to watch people do that together. I’m returning to LA this week and I really look forward to being with all my people out there.

As per usual, I work on entries for several days and since I started I’ve been to New York to do a fitting for my dress for the Grammys and then back to Kansas City where I write to you from now. I’ll keep all the details of the Grammy dress quiet until Sunday but I’ll say that it’s custom, it’s one of my all-time favorite and most-worn designers and it’s truly a fucking dream on a hanger. Anyone who knows me knows how deep my relationship with clothes goes. It’s a close second in the race for my truest creative passion. As I made one of the bigger fashion choices of my life I kept thinking about Viv Albertine’s book Clothes Clothes Clothes. Music Music Music. Boys Boys Boys. and kind of reveling in the level of satisfaction I derive from engineering an outfit. Part of my New Year’s resolution has been to return to an earlier mindset I had about clothes as a teen which is to just enjoy wearing whatever I want, whenever I want, without too much regard for how it might be perceived. I think as I’ve aged I’ve been overly conscious about dressing for other people or telling a specific, palatable story. I’m making an effort to just dress for myself and to get a little subversive and messy with it.

I’ve been an aerodynamic, carry-on queen this week, bouncing from snowy locale to snowy locale. Mostly I’m inside all the time, avoiding the brutality of the cold. There’s something about being driven indoors and the suffering associated with the blistering, freezing cold that really aligns with my nature. I hate it but I also need it. It inspires me to create some excitement for myself or to slow everything down. It envelops me in its breadth and it forces direction in its extremity. Anyways. It’s fucking freezing but I’m vibing with it. I’m eating soup and drinking coffee into the afternoon and taking an unbelievably hot bath every single day.

I spent a little time in Durham last week and while there Brad showed me the Cameron Winter album Heavy Metal. It has quickly consumed my mind and emotions and all of the empty time and space in all this travel I’ve been doing. I don’t even really think I know how to talk about it. It feels hyperbolic to call it brilliant. It’s something else. There’s a casualness and stupidity to its complete and total airtight perfection. Brad said it sounds like freedom. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve felt sort of inundated with great, newly released songs lately. Morgan Nagler’s “Cradle the Pain”, Benjamin Booker’s “Lwa in the Trailer Park’, Hamilton Leithauser’s “Knockin’ Heart” and Cloakroom's “Bad Larry” are all coming to mind. I would make a playlist if I wasn’t so committed to just adding to our house music playlist until it finally becomes 24 hours long.

We’ve got a few shows on the horizon as well as a few extremely exciting things that are getting announced soon. We’re at the Forum in LA with my friend Nathaniel Rateliff & Iron & Wine in a few weeks (2/21) - tickets to that here. We’ve got our special Luck Reunion show in March outside Austin featuring Lucinda Williams and many others as well - tickets to that are here. Tour with Wilco starts in April and tickets are on sale here. A bunch of other odds and ends can be found here. 2025 is shaping up to be another busy one but man, every single thing we have planned excites me.

January is somehow over. Time is a hit man.

That’s it for now.

Until later,

KC

(photo by kevin morby)