Zodiac of the Christ

Jack has released an album of all new songs. Here are ten things you should know about him.

Ten things about my husband and his songwriting

1. I remember Jack playing the guitar in Southeast Asia, where we met twenty-one years ago. On the bus during training, he was playing it, and the women were going a little googly-eyed over him, and so I stuck my nose in a book. I was *not* going to be one of those women. That same week, I burned his CDs to my computer, and heard Gillian Welch for the first time.
   

(I was willing to smile for the picture though, apparently.) (We still have that blue t-shirt and I sleep in it now.)

2. There had been boys with guitars before, and I’d liked the cachet of being attached to a musician, one who might write songs about me. When Jack played his guitar, though, I just got jealous that the guitar was getting the attention I wanted. That was one way I knew this was different.
   

3. I don’t know if Jack wrote any songs in Southeast Asia, but I do know that I wrote him a letter and told him he had become the song in my head. He wasn’t sure what I meant, but hoped it was good.
   

4. When we moved to California a few years later, he wrote “The Continuing Love Ballad of Mr. and Mrs. Moof” (unreleased). Moof is short for muffin, and we didn’t call each other either muffin or moof, but we did call the applesauce-and-oatmeal muffins that I’d make before our hikes in the San Bernardino mountains “moofs,” as in “Do you want another moof before we leave?” Incidentally, one of the only insults our children are allowed to use is “muffinhead,” as in “Why did you eat the last moof, you muffinhead?!”
   

5. The first song we wrote together? There was one about a hellish night trying to beach camp at Matagorda that we wrote a year or two later ensconced in a snowy cabin at the foot of Mount Rainier. Cleaning out the basement from the flood this week, I found the lyrics to another where we just made ridiculous rhymes and the chorus was, “C’mon Violet, let’s run barefoot in the grass.”
   

6. When I was pregnant with Rosie, we recorded a Christmas album together (the first of four). I really have a dream that someday Jack will professionally record a few of those songs, like “In Bethlehem” or “The Year Round Christmas Store” (actually, my dream was that Dolly Parton would record that one. It is perfect for her, or it would have been — it’s covid-themed and a little outdated now).
   

7. Two years ago, our dining room chairs started breaking when normal-sized people sat on them. Jack took this as a sign, and starting building a guitar out of broken cherrywood pieces. I think now he’s built three guitars? One of them a lap steel guitar (which you can hear on the new album).

   

8. All this to say, he’s been writing songs pretty consistently for twenty years. He’s painted, too, and written poetry, and when I asked him why songwriting was the artistic medium he keeps returning to, he said it’s the only art form in which he knows enough to know what conversation he’s entering. And he does know enough. One year, he made a spreadsheet of albums from the year of his birth and listened to all of them, methodically, taking notes. When he realized that the only genre he hadn’t developed a real appreciation for was country, he created a podcast investigating the earliest country music stars. You should see the bookshelf in our house that just holds music biographies; you should see the amount of money we’ve spent on concert tickets in the last year.
   

9. But two years ago, something changed, and he entered a creative period I’m pretty jealous of. He’s probably written fifty songs in the last two years. He’s always in the basement with his pedals and his notebook. And this summer, he recorded some. In an email to friends yesterday, he told the story: “My friend Dan Bowman encouraged me and connected me with musician and producer Jesse Sprinkle (Poor Old Lu, Dead Poetic, Demon Hunter, etc.) and musician/visual artist David Stith (DM Stith). The four of us spent four days at Jesse's Bluebrick Recordings in Avon, NY in late June and recorded eleven songs. What you hear on the album is nine of those, plus one home recording.”
   

10. My favorite track? Changes day to day, but maybe July, or False Alarm, or The Year that We Survived (if you want to know his musical influences, they’re on this song).

    

    It’s entirely possible that “July” is on my favorites list just because of the beauty of the first moment I heard it, practicing with Dan just as we were moving into our house.

    Jack also said, in that email: “Buy the album on Bandcamp. Right now it is set at "name your price." Whatever money is made will be used to 1) release the album in a physical format and/or 2) record more songs. If you have the ability, please give generously. I'll make it more widely available on streaming at some point since, as Gillian says, "everything I ever loved, gonna give it away." Share widely. If you know someone who might be interested in hearing and supporting this musical endeavor, please send them this email and/or the Bandcamp page. If you are local to Asheville, share with other music people. I would love to connect.”
    
    

    

     

Enjoy!

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Three things:

• At Mergoat Magazine, Veronica Limeberry describes her visit with elder seed-saver Jim Veneto after Hurricane Helene. At the end, you can also watch him perform a traditional Appalachian ballad he wrote the night after the storm.

• The emotional life cycle of a disaster can take up to five years to work through. This is a helpful diagram from Episcopal Relief and Development.

• The first book of poems from my friend Michael Dechane was published the week before Helene. Here’s the first stanza of “Three Times She Peels a Grapefruit”:
  
  The dimpled peel comes off in patches.
  There is no sound like this sound, being torn.
  My lover’s hands can pull apart a sun.