Last Exit In New York

Arrive whenever, stay never

I was thinking about this residency I did a few years back, at the Hi Fi bar in Manhattan. I played every Thursday for the month of May. It was scary and daunting, especially as I’d hardly played any solo shows in years. Eric and I got together in 2006 and started our duo thing and made albums and played dozens and dozens of gigs but to get up alone in front of an audience was suddenly new again.

A few years back? It was 2015— my friends that is almost ten years ago! How can it be that the last decade, the teens, is now firmly in the rearview? I still slip and say 199- when talking about things that happened in the last few decades. The HiFi bar, that had been Brownies, became another bar (closed now?) and those peak Covid years accelerated the passage of time.

All this went through my mind as I headed to New York City to play as Eszter Balint’s guest in her residency at Barbès in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Residencies are a cool thing, a way to create your own living room in a public space. I felt like we were going to have some tea or a drink together with songs, voices and instruments, in front of an audience. I was pleased she’d invited me—I knew Squat Theatre where she grew up and remembered seeing her out and about in the late 70s/early 80s when she was the youngest teen on the scene. Her acting is enticing and so is her songwriting and performing. So this was a nice chance to get to know her and her music a little more, and a good way to play a New York show without the pressure of relentless promoting to sell tickets and fill a club. Going through songs together a few weeks beforehand was a nice kind of homework, it worked muscles that can get flabby : listening, memory, jumping on board someone else’s train. What kind of musician are you without these basic skills? Playing completely solo as I’ve done often the last years, you become an island, good at chopping wood and building your own fire, you rely on the audience to supply the oxygen. Learning someone else’s songs changes your own writing DNA a little bit - ooh, you can put those words together like that? These images with those chords and a melody that slinks in here?

thanks Mary Lee Kortes for the photo of me with the lovely Eszter

Going in to play the gig reminded me “I do this — drive into cities, with my guitar in the trunk…find a place to park. Grab food. Walk into a room I’ve never been before. Set up my stuff. And even sometimes work with other people.” It was a welcome window into a world I’ve got just a glancing relationship with this new year, saving my resources for touring in the fall and meanwhile working on our house. When I’ve seen friends posting from gigs in California or England or fab festivals I think oh I want to be out there so BAD - but if we can just sell this house and get something more suitable it will set us up for the next decade (or more?) of continuing to write, record —work making art. I never ever thought about this kind of thing before except in an immediate “I need a place to live, that I can hopefully afford, now” way.

Things unfolded in their own organic time at Barbès and I loved hearing Eszter with her cool combo, and getting to play, and see some friends and family too. Then I was getting back in the car to drive upstate on a rainy night (could be worse, could be snow?) I’m so used to driving in and out of Manhattan, Williamsburg and now— incredibly— parts of Queens, but getting out of Park Slope was a little bit alien and I suddenly found myself heading towards the Verrazzano Bridge. Maybe the GPS had been trying to send me through the Brooklyn Battery tunnel (or whatever it’s called now) and I’d missed something, but here I was hurtling towards…Staten Island, the oddest NYC borough, AND over the most breathtaking of all the bridges around the city. Maybe it’s that terrifying, awful scene in Saturday Night Fever but this bridge freaks me out every time, and this of all weeks, after the awful collapse of the familiar old Key Bridge in Baltimore - well I practiced my well-honed deep breaths, perfected for childbirth over thirty five years ago and still relied on at the dentist, doctor, during panic attacks and…going over the Verrazzano Bridge.

I felt like the GPS was putting me through my NYC paces — does it know I’m leaving? A road sign flashed by as I headed towards the Goethals Bridge, conduit to New Jersey: LAST EXIT IN NEW YORK. It was like a scene card in the movie of my life. This great big mess of a city and state will always add up to home in my mind, at the same time I’m perfectly capable of —not exactly turning my back but…sidestepping away. I knew ya and I loved ya and I still do but you’re different and I’m different and can we just meet every year or so for a big lovefest? That feels nice to me, cause just hanging out, in the city at least, doesn’t compel me so much anymore. I think it all changed when my daughter moved to L.A.  I only have so many hanging out units available and I admit I save a lot of those for her, and I’m lucky - I love L.A.

But shhh - don’t tell New York, I thought, as I made my way back home up Route 17 in New Jersey. I consider every place I’ve ever lived my home forever even if I’m no longer there. When people say goodbye to me as if they’ll never see me again cause I’m moving I just think “I never really leave all the way!”

It was after midnight when I hit the Thruway and the O’Jays Love Train came up—I pictured the whole world joining hands and felt tearful: “Why can’t we all get along? Why is it always war and fighting?” There’s no fleeing to another country to get away from trouble and strife, I know this.

I felt like I was the only car on the road. Kept seeing ominous light-up signs that suggested or maybe implored: “Arrive Early, Stay Late!” I remembered there’s a total eclipse headed this way in a little over a week. I pulled over to the old Platekill rest area that was closed last year and the year before, now it’s all spruced up. There was only one other car in the parking lot and I felt a little nervous, being alone. Did I used to worry and feel vulnerable like this? It was fine in what is now called “Applegreen” (I have a song by that name! Maybe I should get in touch and they could pipe it through the PA?) I was glad to get in and out and keep driving on up the road.

Between Saugerties and Catskill on 9W, a two lane road, I ended up driving behind two fuel trucks. They were going slower than I wanted to go but I was listening to music and tried to just be calm and go with the flow. There was a sticky moment when they approached an underpass with twelve feet of clearance. At a stoplight the driver in front of me got out, came around and looked at his back tires, maybe thinking of letting a little air out just in case he didn’t fit. I really hoped they wouldn’t get stuck, for their sake and mine. I wanted to get home. It had been a nice night, and a welcome change from painting the house. The band Nazareth came up on shuffle and i made a note to ask Eric if he knew their work - I remembered they always seemed to be playing in Pittsburgh when I was a teenager, I’d hear the ads for them on WDVE the FM radio station: DiCesare Engler Presents!

This is where I start feeling nostalgia in advance of being gone. Nothing will ever feel as familiar as right now, I thought. Me in my Subaru, after a gig, on roads I have imprinted in my limbs, the turns, the braking. The at-homeness as familiar as the fretboard of my guitar, me behind the trucks, uneasily at ease. I didn’t know who was driving them but we felt strangely connected in the night and when they turned off to the plant down the road from our house I almost wanted to honk or flash my lights to say goodnight. “You guys! You don’t know what this meant to me!”

My ease goes back to childhood, it’s being an American in America. The comfort and the shame of it.  I remember living in France and feeling essentially alien, even as I got to grips with the language: they’ll never know what it was like to watch OJ in his Bronco being chased by the police. Of course I’ll drive in England and do gigs and just keep on keeping on. I’ve loved the place since I was a teenager and feel at home there in a different way. Relaxed but also with my senses on alert. Different greens, but the same dreams: peace, home. Work. A spot of gardening?

“The next stop that we make—will be England.”