Hammer Mill Days

What, raining again? Huh. Very well. Looks like it's rainy day schedule, kids. Coloring books and tunafish sandwiches. Except that we don't have tunafish. So ... I'll have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) make crayon sandwiches. Gotta make do as best we can, boys. Hey, what would you do if you were stuck in an abandoned hammer mill and the weather went all pear-shaped? Probably something similar. They say that musicians do their best work behind closed doors, removed from all distractions. They also say that more songs are written on rainy days than on sunny ones - the theory being that crappy weather makes songwriters want to stay home more, and home with nothing to do means picking up the guitar or banging on the piano. Wanna know what else "they" say? What the fuck, I don't know. Ask them . This might be a good time to write some songs. As I've pointed out in these pages before, Matt and I have different approaches to songwriting, so the time ma

Yeah, I know. California didn't go the way we'd hoped. But then neither did New York. Or Ohio. Or Pennsylvania. Or Massachusetts. Freaking Massachusetts ! Still, Bernie Sanders did an amazing thing. The last true progressive candidate, Dennis Kucinich, won maybe 20% in one state (I think Oregon) and that was cause for jumping up and down (or at least up). That was eight years ago, and back then we could never have imagined something like the Sanders campaign. This is a rising movement, as I've said before - it's political, it's generational, it's policy-focused ... it's freaking amazing. And it came within a whisker of stealing the Democratic Party's presidential nomination away from the biggest name in party politics. Anyway, Hillary Clinton has won; that's what the voters have said. I won't quibble with the numbers - the horse race is over. However, the real project of 2016 continues - that of pushing a more energetic progressive agenda forwa