Moin!*
I got a new tattoo a couple of days ago. It was my first time getting the poke and stick type of tattoo and was given to me by my friend Emma from the band Potential Lunatics.** I asked her “Did you learn how to do this in prison?” and she flatly responded “I can show you how to make a shiv too.”***
Upon seeing my new tattoo, Tracy gave me a hard time about how random my tattoos are and how it's taking me forever to get sleeves. My tattoos are more like stickers on an old suitcase. To be clear, I have no intention of “giving up” but I really love the reminder, the persistence, the grind of, seemingly, everything I do - plus I can see it while I'm strumming guitar. At the end of the Glen Hansard song “This Gift” he often sings “Don't give up.” and that mixed with the angelic voice of Kate Bush in her duet with Peter Gabriel of the same name was the inspiration. You also might remember the last email had a picture with it too but now it looks different - that was a water based temp tattoo that I got to see if I liked it. This is obviously, the permanent one and it is my own handwriting. It's me telling me - don't give up.
On that front - I've been working hard trying to get my book into places and in front of people that don't know me. I am incredibly fortunate to have been building a community of fans here and all around the world through my music. Most first time authors do not have that kind of fanbase or have the flexibility of playing music while reading from their book. I still can't believe that I've sold 400 books in the past two months.
I've been writing to newspapers, literary places and book festivals trying to get some coverage and so far the return rate is roughly one email response for every thirty emails I've sent out. I've been accepted into the Twentynine Palms Book Festival and they've asked me to be on a panel about the enduring allure of writing about the road and road trips. I will also be at the Anaheim Indie Author day in November and I will be packing up books to take with me to Europe on tour this autumn.
I am blown away to be featured this week on the website Hypebot with a great introduction about me and my book from Ariel Hyatt. She is also the author of Music Success in Nine Weeks and her new book is called From Buzz to Bond and talks about how connection in music is where it's at - not chasing streaming numbers or fuzzy metrics. It's all about the human connection.
Weirdly this all ties in with a new song I'm trying to write. My great grandmother was born in the early 1890s and she passed when I was about 11 years old. Knowing all the things she lived through - cars, planes, moon landing - we would ask her “what was the best thing you saw invented?” And she would always say “The crystal radio.”
As a kid, radio had always been there. I mean - tv, cars, radio, planes - had always been in my world but to hear her explain how nighttime was quiet and lonely. When the crystal radio came to be - it connected people unlike any other medium had before. The outside world could come into the house. And I've been thinking a lot about this in relation to where we are now. We have the world at our fingertips and yet, we often still feel alone. We still need connection and people.****
Anyway, I don't have it all worked out but I have done something I've never done before - I've reached out to my mother to see if she'd like to help me write this song.
I got these new stickers made with Lena. Yeah, it's like the shirt! A new Lena sticker comes with every book purchased! (You can BUY the book here.)
Folks are always turning me on to new amazing music and when Emma was doing my tattoo she asked if I'd ever heard of Frightened Rabbit and we listened to one of their albums that had Swim until you can't see land. And I'm loving this song right now.
The free song in today's email is the album closer Not Lost. This was an interesting collaboration with the poet Kirk Diedrich and was part of the reason I split with my manager. As a song, it was just a snippet that I started singing in my head one night lying in bed. It wouldn't leave my brain so I waited until Tracy fell asleep and I got up and whisper sang and strummed it into my phone so I wouldn't lose it. When I was recording it - I loved it but something was missing. A friend shared a poem by Kirk with me that read:
“I'm not lost
I'm just looking for the last place
I felt like me.”
With just slight modification and repetition, it sat in with what I was already singing and playing. It was perfect. I did not know Kirk but I wrote to him and told him about the song and asked if it would be ok for me to use and we could split the songwriting 50/50. He listened, loved the song and agreed.
I had been working with a manager during that time and we had a meeting with another producer where we listened to the whole album and the two of them gave me notes. When it got to this song they were both bored. Said the song didn't belong. It's weird and it esoteric and no one will like it. I argued that it was exactly what was needed to close out the statement of the album about how music can heal when we feel broken. They thought I was being too much of an artist and indulging my weird side. Then he said I should write darker material like Craig Finn of the Hold Steady. I said “That's not who I am.” and he said “And how's that working out for you?” I decided right then to fire him and to eponymously title my album Bobbo Byrnes as a show of ownership.
Not Lost isn't a pop song. It's a small meditation of peace. A dreamy bit of beauty that finds itself within all the distractions of the world. There's a dissonance on the pedal steel that happens 24 seconds in that I left because the rest of the take was perfect. Hope you dig.
Ok, I have to go now. Writing this email blast was a bit of a procrastination away from recording my audiobook.
Oh and I have shows coming up:
Saturday, June 21
Day of Music Fullerton
I have three shows around Fullerton - details on my website here.
Saturday, June 27
I'm playing a Hi-Fi show in Costa Mesa, CA but I don't have any details yet
Tuesday, June 30
Campus Jax Songwriter Soundstage Writer's Round
xo
~Bobbo
*Moin is the greeting in Northern Germany. It's a lot like “morning” but is used at all times of day. It's pronounced like cutting the first letter from “more” and dropping the c from “coin."
**You may remember that I produced two albums with this sibling band starting when they were like 13 and 11. It's been great watching them grow up and grow as musicans.
***She's never been to prison. Her girlfriend taught her how to do it when they were teenagers and now she's been tattooing for over a decade.
****Through researching some of this I learned that the first radio station to be broadcasting in the Boston area was at Tufts University in 1921. This would be the same time my great grandmother would've been working in Cambridge at her job on Confectioner's Row making bonbons. The second radio station was from the top of a department store in Boston and they had Mayor James Michael Curley on and then there was WBZ - who are still on the air today.