When I first moved to Maine, it was the tail-end of the pandemic, January 2021, and the little bedroom I made inside an otherwise disheveled apartment was a strange refuge. I only lived there 8 months, but there was a certain peace to the room and it was possible to cross a lot of mental distance in the 10×10 space. I’d go from the room to the kitchen, to the porch to the neighborhoods, and that little corridor of movement was where a lot of things started, including l-o-v-e.

As spring neared, I was recording things very offhand, just spurts of “feeling like it,” but they were turning out well. I’d add slide guitar accompaniment, drop a bag of white rice on the table for percussion, and a day later lip-sync and record my face on the laptop. These mini-projects felt more me than previous visuals, and more expressive than I’d felt with traditional songs in quite a while. I shared them on social media, especially in anticipation of releasing Raw Honey’s Riverbed album (see “Attic Stairs.“)

I captioned them “Saturday night karaoke” or similar, so now I’m calling it a karaoke series. Here’s another one going up on the Big Web today.