Hi All,
I visited family in Des Moines for a few days recently, and retrieved the guitar that got lost there back in June. (I’ll be telling that story on my social media very soon.) Used to be a 12-hour drive from Nashville, but since it’s now all 4-lane except for one 20-mile stretch, you can do it in 10 or 10 1/2, allowing for a couple of fuel stops. The van’s running well (knock-on-naugahyde); mileage is at about 190K now. How am I running, you ask? Well, I had a little abnormality show up on my annual CT scan in early July, and had a biopsy of it done right before heading to Iowa. Fortunately, the news is good; as my ENT predicted, it turned out to be a benign growth (a “granuloma”) that’s related to inflammation, on one side of my vocal cords. Had a follow-up this past Monday, where the doc took another look via scope (yuck), and everything’s fine down there. He added some prilosec to my daily pharmaceutical diet, which should help with that inflammation and avoid a recurrence.
Hey! I’m playing a few dates in September—(all band shows except 9/23):
9/5 River Jam—US National Whitewater Center Charlotte NC
9/9 Five Spot Tight Tuesday hosted by Chris Frasco Nashville 8:45pm (trio)
9/11 Eastside Bowl Nashville (unofficial Americanafest show) 8pm
9/23 Bluebird Cafe Nashville 9pm (hosted by Paul Burch, KG in the round with Will Kimbrough and Emily Clement)
As ever, check with the venues directly before traveling to a show. Crap happens! Such as, last year when we were scheduled to play the Whitewater Center on the same evening when the hurricane aftermath flooded and destroyed so much of western NC. Had we made the drive, we might not have made it home for a while . . . .
In lieu of traversing hundreds of miles of asphalt over the next few months, I have plenty around here to keep me busy. The long-promised “Burning” album reissue is coming along. My team and I will be launching a pre-order campaign soon—stay tuned for details. We’ll be releasing the original album on vinyl, with supplemental content available digitally.
Speaking of recordings and such, don’t forget to check out my Bandcamp store, for official and not-so-official releases, as well as other merch: https://kevingordon.bandcamp.com/
About That Song: The In Between
“The In Between” is title track from my latest album, which is dang near a year old now. They grow up so fast . . . . I started writing the song on June 16, 2021, and it quickly became obvious that it was going to be very personal, and very much about “the now” (as it was then.)
It felt to me as if the pause we were all living through in those two years offered me the chance to go inward, to reckon with my own present and past, instead of someone else’s (something I do quite often.) I heard that phrase as the title—not exactly a fresh idea, but I thought that it fit what I was writing about well enough that it was okay, and if I brought my own stories to the idea, it might still work.
First verse was the first verse I worked on—the internal battle of good vs. evil—and how our lives are always somewhere between those two extremes. Once I had “just being born/Burns off your wings,” I felt good about it. The other verses came in a random order, including at least one that didn’t make the cut on the final version. In the final verse, the “ill wind blowing/Through the trees and truck stop signs” is a reference to all the dystopian political madness we were living with then—the politicization of an international health crisis. My favorite part of the lyric is the last half of the bridge—“feeling like Gary Busey/Playing old Howard Hughes”—not something that’s ever happened, far as I know, but imagining it provided plenty of appropriate absurdity for that middle-aged-eccentric-trapped-in-the-house vibe.
Now that the album and a couple of extra singles have been out nearly a year, what’s your favorite track? What sticks with ya? Reply with a comment to this post, or email me: kevingordonmusic@gmail.com. I always enjoy hearing from you!
Love,
Kevin
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