What? Music? Weekly

This one is from the cutting room floor. Ten years ago, I had started this project. It was big and musical and it was a group of friends and we traveled and played and it ran out of steam, and I chose not to continue to push, for many reasons. I had started working on what I was determined would be a record. It became Donkey Island. We recorded on and off for more than a year before letting it languish in digital silence for a decade.There are a bunch of songs that didn't make the cut for one reason or another-feelings at the time, changes in the metaphorical wind that might blind one to goodness.I wrote some advicey and explainy songs and some funny ones. If Andrew Brockman had got to choose what songs were on that record. This one would have been on.There were a number of things that, given the lense that is the passage of time, although I disagreed then, Andrew was right about.When someone is fussy it's the absolutely wrong time to tell them to calm down. You may have noticed this as well. A thing you can do is step back and process and then write a catchy little song about it, as a friendly reminder a body can carrying their mind's ear.I wrote this for one person to hear, but it is for everyone really. Here, take itAin't often enough said, but it's not he less true. It's the worry that get's you, not what's worrying you. So pull your hair back. Get the sun on your skin cuz the day's about over. The night's about to begin. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I wrote this song when I was 25. For the record, I got carded for cigarettes until I was 29. I was by all accounts a kid when I was 25. I did not have financial goals or complex responsibilities. I had to make rent and I needed beer money. The rest of my head space was taken up with dreams. Kids dream differently from grown-ups. The way you imagine the world as a young person is similar to a dream. You don't know enough to understand the world with any depth and you deduce the rest. It seems fully fledged but it will be decades before you realize how half hatched it all is. And your limited understanding makes your dreams seem almost as real as real stuff. Young people maintain that sense of whimsy and pass it around. Some people seem stodgey from the onset.This song is the story of an accidentally successful messianic figure. I knew enough to know I wouldn't want to continue to be observed as an authority about anything in the spring of my adulthood.I recently put the album this song was first on onto Bandcamp and decided to learn it and make a recording with gear from the 21st century.Mudfence Turnaround has songs on it, recodings that are more than 30 years old. It has promise. I found myself liking it.It's funny to look back and find yourself astute. Thirty years gives a piece of art long enough to lose the relevance of being “contemporary” in a specific time. This one still works. well I waited and waited for the word to come. I got tired of waiting so I started to hum. I came to a thought.wrote me a line. gave it significance and called it a sign. maybe it's me. I don't recall. called it the truth and said that it would conquer all. now people come around just to hear me give 'em that line. I got fat I got settled. I get laid all the time. I know I believed it when i first wrote it down, but now I don't go over to that side of town. maybe it's me.I don't recall. called it the truth and said that it would conquer all. they built me a city and they built me a road, and they built me a wall around the truth I had told, and I got three squares and a chair and the details are out of my hair. they call me an institution and say that you gotta go there. maybe it's me. I don't recall. called it the truth and said that it would conquer all. now, I don't wanna tell 'em that I changed my mind or that this kind of thing happens to me all the time, but truth as a vehicle has called it a day. now show me to the hole in the wall and thanks anyway. maybe it's me. I don't recall. called it the truth and said that it would conquer all.Ultimately, I escaped. Here's a link to the Bandcamp:https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/mudfence-turnaroundAnd a video link-https://youtu.be/pYflZR6WT8s?si=9z69T00JF_CxKfvU This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I'd say well over 90 percent of the time I'm entirely unaware of how much of a self satisfied, egotistical prick I am. I think if I knew it all the time I'd be crippled by the notion. Oh, and I am well aware that that's a deprecating limiting description intended to keep me from going on as I am that I regurgitate from having heard humans, trusted loved ones and or strangers describe each other that way. I know I'm not one, but for how I could be described as such, and only by me. That is to say, you can't call me that. You'd be wrong, but… I mean… we all know who we are dealing with here. A cool thing about art is we get to distill things with it. An even cooler thing about art is that we are all artists doing art all the time. Regardless of how regimentedly you present yourself, at a fundamental level we are all winging it out here. Trying to be present and process all the stimulus is too much. It won't be tried. So we build ourselves an artsy little style of perception with limits and guidelines and processes from within ourselves as a result of how we have understood what we've been through so far. We dress and go out and maybe try to be normal with only a passing understanding of what that means and we paint it as we think it should be. It's an art. Everybody out here is different from everybody else out here and some of us are faking it that we’re not.What does this have to do with ‘If I Leave’?I have no recollection of putting it together, and it's well pulled off, I think.It's a thing I did one time. I can hear the cigarettes and it feels both speedy and sloppy. I bet aderol and bourbon and weed and beer and cigarettes were all involved. I had the good sense to press record, but it has a sort of accidental and stumbly quality that I find (found) charming about myself and that- all of it is so unselfconciously gloriously blues-prick which is a thing that was wrong with me, a thing I have stepped out of and now shake my head to look at…But it's beautiful. Like finding a picture of some cute 80s rocker boy and not immediately realizing it is yourself. Narcissis snapping out of it.If I leave I ain't never coming back t stay again. If I leave I ain’t never coming back to stay. cuzThere ain't enough whiskey to keep that woman off my mind. Ain't enough whiskey to keep that woman off my mind. So there ain't nothin left to do but go away my friends. Ain’t nothin left to do but go away. See the moon is a key to every woman's heart see that big old February moon up there in the day. You can hide from the moon in a pint of whiskey. You can hide from the moon in a pint of rye.if you run from the moon you hafta keep on running, and whistle a happy tune while your life goes by.Cuz if I leave I ain'tna come back to stay again. If I leave I ain't never coming back to stay. Cuz there ain't enough women to keep that whiskey off my mind. Ain't enough women to keep that whiskey off my mind. Ain't nothing left to do but just go away my friends. There ain't nothin left to do but just go away. There ain't nothin left to do but just go away. The first collecting of musical things I made after the band Shame Train had ceased to be a thing was Re-inventing the Wheel which is available exclusively on Bandcamp at the other end of this link.https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/re-inventing-the-wheelIt is a nice collection of mostly me playing acoustic instruments with a few helpers and Circle Dance which is 100% the band Shame Train in the studio. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Sometimes things become more than what they were created to be. Maybe more often than not. That’s a tough one to guage… in a general sense… about created things.Lets go with songs. I’m not certain Bob Dylan wrote, Blowin in the Wind to be performed as a hymn for a generation in flux. I think he was just a kid who thought of himself as a man that was tired of being looked at as a kid. All he really wanted was a pepsi.*This song takes place in a real bar and describes real events. But like all bars the events that go on within this one have a serial quality like an ongoing television drama, a soap opera. The characters are the same. The roles they play have the same events but they are played by successive generations of bar people- regulars.You can go through any life in the bar, or from nealry any theater of events and select some hapennings that caught your attention or seemed worthy of it and nearly everyone will have had some connection to said event. A bar that the same 30 people go to every night has -24 degrees of separation. It’s an incestuous pit of repeating events.The song describes getting kicked out of a place you used to go, that you have returned to to see if someone you used to know is there.The bar itself is now gone. Kicked out as it were. It had been a car dealership and service place, then a restaurant bar with music in the back- a venue I saw folk club legends in before I even knew there was such a thing. I saw Eddy Adcock and Paul Geremia and Jaimey Maysfield in there. I saw Greg Brown in there dozens of times. I eventually saw some killer indy rock shows there. Things turn.In truth I was never kicked out of the Mill, but I certainly could have been.I got to be a rock star in there, and a total degenerate. And the hotel is not that far.And this song is now, to me a touchstone to a place that tons of people loved like a forever love. Once it was a story about some things that happened in a place that you could go. But now that that place is gone it's like a magic trick like a beacon so you can see a place that's not there but is still real… and not just to me.I can’t play this box of wood the way I usedta could in the history of this bar, plus it’s no longer where you are. In a minor way, I’m glad I stopped in there today. Bartender set me up again. Treat me like a friend. Here’s eight dollars. keep the change. Boy if our lives were rearranged, would you still be fine if you exchanged your world for mine. Yes I burned one in the john, but the fan was on so it seemed alright to me. Now you say it’s time for me to leave. Well, here’s a dollar more. I’ll just make my way toward the door. No one even bats an eye while some wasted guy pours himself into a car. I hope the hotel ain't too far. Ain't the moon a sight. I’m glad I stopped in there tonight. I can’t play this box of wood the way I used to could in the history of this bar plus it’s no longer where you are in a minor way. The funny thing is this- I have played this song regularly since before I quit playing and I always play it out since I started playing out again, but there are (were) no recordings of it and it’s not on a collection of any sort so here-The definitive one, I guess and a nice video:https://youtu.be/Jh7cvQJvOmQ?si=xnBRS73_ZQ8iKgT7Crackle crackleIt's free!*https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AdUBTE9JpgI&pp=ygUxc3VpY2lkYWwgdGVuZGVuY2llcyBpbnN0aXR1dGlvbmFsaXplZCBtdXNpYyB2aWRlbw%3D%3D This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Firstly, I regret nothing.Sometimes I tell people I didn't learn to talk until I was 34.It's a block off High Street where it used to be. Television and deadbeats out in front and free. Blowin’ down hallways of marching dust where the money never runs out and you don't know who to trust.That glass ceiling 's so damned appealing. I don't recall feeling bloodlust in the coming down…you learn to fight a frown with a psychic bust of yourself and just and leave it undiscussed. That glass ceiling is so damned appealing. I don't recall feeling bloodlust in the coming down.A lot of rock and roll and hip hop and country music and folk even is about fronting and flexing and showing off. There's music edging all of those genres that touches me because it's people laying their errored souls out to be observed, to invite whatever part of humanity that is within earshot to see, and holding itself up as humane and identifyable and fine even if it's fucked up. Art is a safe place to be a freak or a fool or different or broken and for beauty to be observed there with or there from or therefore or therein- sad and sweet.You get to sidle up to mistakes or tribulations without having to suffer the blows, like dreaming of falling from a great height.Cocaine gets you really high, but the overwhelmingly time consuming and under reported effect is that it makes you sad or depressed or joy challenged or however you choose to describe it. I'm not a doctor. I was just around a bunch of cocaine for a number of years and I got to know what it smells like.People I know have done way more and handled it better. I don't need to learn the kind of mental strength to be ok on that kind of hangover. I like waking up not devastated.High Street is five or six blocks from here. Cocaine won't kill you, but it helps.Clever and sad is what I was after. I could feel my life slipping away from me and had to just keep getting up and going to work. The band was essentially done. It's dramatic, but really it's a normal part of a normal regular human world. I hope you don't find yourself clutching your pearls. I've been standing here the whole time, same as you.Hard to hold onto, cuz it's a magic bus and it’s better to burn out than it is to rust. Heart of rock lost punching the clock to keep the dollar down; it's a bust. It's a bust. That glass ceiling 's so damned appealing. I don't recall feeling bloodlust in the coming down.That glass ceiling is so damned appealing. I don't recall feeling bloodlust in the coming down.It's inverted reality. The glass is in front of you, below you. The volumes are all distorted. You can't feel. It's dreamy and a little psychedelic and exhausted and dissonant. But it's human. It's humane like how people treat each other and I have never been told “I love you, man.” more heartfelt and often than by a room full of dudes doing coke.I believed it every time. I still do.Here's the video:Here's the link to the record on Bandcamp https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/splendor-3I love you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Man, I have been broke. I grew up not poor, but not well to do. My dad's dad was a farmer and my mom's dad was a musician. I mention this because it creates a normalization of not being able to afford more than what is necessary to grow up without. It creates parents who tell their kids that love is more important than toys. It creates kids who grow up thrifty in a world that advertises flashy and new. It creates people who can't afford to give a f**k about trends or fashion or the latest thing, who stand by statements like, “if it ain't broke don't fix it.” because fixing it isn't in the budget, people who love an old shirt and each other.Having to make your own way gives one the kind of undupeable quality that long consideration of the pros and cons of your expenditures bolsters.I've generally always had enough money for drinks, or knew where there was a party. Being good company is an asset in the drinks economy. Often however you need a start-up amount, a little something to take the edge off as it were.The world in which everyone is going out for drinks is a real place. It has everything that the real world has in it. Everything. It has been the hugest transition in my life to go from that world to this one.I wrote a prayer to it once: that world where the drinks economy is the focus.The first thing I put on Bandcamp was a thing called Re-inventing the Wheel. It has this song on it, but almost no one bought it, so I made no bones about putting it on a later release, Donkey Island.The recording here is the Donkey Island one, but I'll leave a link to both after the lyrics.This is a prayer for the downtown, ‘cause it's someplace to be. I've got something I've been meaning to show you baby, and you've got something I've been meaning to see. I ain't seen much of it lately. I ain't had no money to burn, but tonight I've got two dimes to rub together and it seems like it must be my turn. So when you finish your cocktail, if you're in need of a ride, I'll be in the back seat of that great big yellow taxi that's just about to arrive outside. Me, I can talk to a cabbie or you and me can leave him alone, but my skinny ass taking up the whole of this back seat is just about as useful as a dime for the phone. So this is a prayer for the downtown sung to a rearview mirror, through a car window, through a bar window, because I can't tell whether you're settling up or ordering one more beer until you turn from the window and I say, “Fever, take me home.” And he says, “Awe man, this one is on me buddy cuz what's seven dollars worth of being alone.” And as the cab rounds the corner, you step out into the street, and you curse my name into the night wind and walk away from where we used to meet…toward someplace on the alley where nothing ever goes down, and you can sit there and stare into your cell phone and order round after round after round. My sweet love, where do you roam? If it wasn't just me up in this place, you and me we could call it a home. Oh my love, where have you gone? You left me here all tricked out and dirty tryin’ to raise some attention with this fifty cent song…. Which is a prayer for the downtown, because it's someplace to be. I've got something I've been meaning to show you, baby, and you've got something I've been meaning to see.I wrote the lyrics while walking to the bar from the east side. I can feel the walking pace in ‘em still. Here's the links:https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/track/a-prayer-for-the-downtownAaandhttps://samknutson.bandcamp.com/track/a-prayer-for-the-downtown-2The first one is nsfw. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I have been asked, How do you write? Sometimes, I have been asked in a journalistic way, sometimes a conversational, non chalant, how-do-you-do-that? way, sometimes by other writers. I have gone long periods of time without writing anything, nearly a decade quite recently and in those years I sometimes asked myself. I have judged the songs I write as good or bad or worthy of keeping or throwing away. As I have in the last few years come back to the practice I am aware that songs I haven't played for a long time become inaccessible. I forget them. When I practice often it becomes easy to remember the ones I once knew and to learn songs. It becomes easier. Its a practice.I think writing songs could be a practice, but when recently asked I have defaulted to saying, “I try to write from a stupid place.”I think melodies and even ideas sort of exist around us not in a Victorian conciousness-floats-in-a-cloud-above-your-head kind of a way, more….You can be aware of what is good without that thing already existing. It is recognizing what you have imagined to be a beautiful thing. It is as a practice perhaps more like catching fireflies than it is like shooting rabbits from the truck. Things in your imagination are perhaps more like occurances and weather, or something flying through the night that is seemingly, at its own will occasionally alight, and only capturable then.Sometimes I will hear people humming quietly to themselves at the grocery store, not a melody I recognize, just a rambling succession of notes for pleasure. Words and melodies run through me like that all the time.I don't find it hard to write words. It's easy but finding melodies and words that work can seem hard. It can seem important in a stifling way.If I capture something that just occurs to me I can feel free of the responsibility of having invented it. The things I have put my name to and sung that I most like have felt accidental.And this one captures that style of capture.It had been nearly 80 degrees and then there was a cold snap and a bunch of snow. Spring in the midwest- full stop.I had already started. I had the lines, ‘Song’s come out of the silence if you lend an ear. It’s when you go in after them that they become hart to hear.’The rest of it was just describing my world. I sleep by an open window year round and strong winds wake me. When it’s howling at night, I know I might not have the best sleep.That's enough. Songs come out of the silence if you lend an ear. It's when you go in after them that they become hard to hear. So don't you make a sound. Baby, don't you cry, and a song will sing you off to sleep, baby, right there where you lie. And when you close your eyes a song can be the light. Just breathe easy. Everything is gonna be all right. Just breathe easy. Everything is gonna be all right. The wind is gonna blow all night. Snow is gonna fly. The wind is gonna take the low ones, and the snow is gonna sing the high. And when the moon comes out the snow is gonna shine. Close your eyes and pull the blankets over as you imagine it in your mind. And when you close your eyes a song can be the light. Just breathe easy. Everything is gonna be all right. Just breathe easy. Everything is gonna be all right.It's me telling myself to just breathe easy, but I am saying it out loud. I have often said, Anyone who tries to tell you the future is after your money. I suppose I stand by that.It's your present moment that is real. All the rest, all of it is in a sense imagined.This song is not for sale.Here's a video. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Gentle on my Mind is a great song. I have loved it for a long time. It's notoriously challenging to play and it's one of those American classics like Paul Simon’s Graceland and Woody Guthrie’s This Land.It repeats funny. It's irregularly regular.I had learned the shapes and the changes and got part way through learning the words then quit.The guy that plays the mandolin parts is great and he probly recognized the changes as some cropped and regularized version of Gentle on my Mind. But, as is my way after I'd quit trying to learn John Hartfords words I started some of my own.Later, after the record this song appears on was out and I decided to learn Gentle on my Mind as a sort of consolation I had a conversation about the song itself with my girlfriend, who said, “That song has always struck me as one of those seventies chauvinistic, I-can-f**k-whoever-want, rambling man ballads” which before our conversation I hadn't realized was a category, but it is.I know someone who spent part of a summer working on fiddle tunes with John Hartford on the Julie Belle. When I mentioned the conversation I had had with my girlfriend to the woman who spent a summer with him, she said, “Oh, that sounds about right. When I first met him he tried to kiss me on the mouth. I was 17 years old.”I never did learn Gentle on My Mind, but I don't feel as bad about it as I used to.When you're walkin’ on home, you think of me and you want to let me know, and you're touchin’ your phone, smile baby, I'm already gone three miles further down the road toward that place that I call home where all of my good things are stowed and the nights are always warm. I'll be walking all night down roads where no one ever goes. I won't need nothin where I'm gone. It's a place that no one knows. So, if you sleeping by the road it's toward that place that I am bound. From you I will need nothing more and you know where I'll be found.It might seem like it ain't time to go, but everybody leaves at the end of the show. At the end of the show I will be already gone.Buy a download of Donkey IslandHere:And there's a video with some trout fishing spots on it here:https://youtu.be/GFlVMOBAmfU?si=jmx5UmTmYIZypqDDI play tenor guitar on this one.The mandolin player is Joe PetersonBanjo is handled by Matthew Wilburn SkinnerRyan Bernemann plays upright bassAndrew Brockman was the recording boss and master of the tapes and boards. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

The way I remember it, and I have never found it, the first line is a smarmy cute thing David Bowie said in some TV interview, “pretenders borrow, artists steal.” After recalling that to a thousand strangers in small groups it came to light that it was Stravinski who said it. There's a thing I do. I start to learn someone else's piece that's a little out of my skill set and I get partway there and then quit. Later I find the half completed sort-of cover and write new lyrics. This is one of those from trying to learn “Son of Sam” from Elliott Smith's record Figure 8. How appropriate for me to steal. I did the same thing with John Hatford’s Gentle on My Mind with a song called, Already Gone that I will explain next week.This one includes evidence of my free form Buddhist practice in it from ten years ago in the teenies. “Fight no battles. Fly no flags. Walk the earth with what you carry in your bag.” There’s not much else I remember about how this one came to be.People I know have had insights about what it means that have surprised me.I called it Smith because of who I stole the first couple chord changes from. SmithPretenders borrow; artists steal. Hipsters gather at that broken Ferris Wheel. True believers roll deep. And you've got promises to keep.Fight no battles. Fly no flags. Walk the earth with what you carry in your bag. Freewill will provide if you're willing to let it slide. You've got to feel it for someone else to feel it too. S**t is up to you. No one will fight you if it’s true.Repeat first versePromises to keep x3.-fin-This was the first song I invited Justin LaDuc to play on. We played it live in the studio as a group for cohesion. While he was in he added a percussion part to the song Abandon (What? Music? 12 ) which I had given him to listen to a year or so before. It was a great session. Smith Starts the album Donkey IslandBuy one here: There's a video.https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DFJImBI8dWc&t=2s This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

It was 1999. In the 90s I’d made a bunch of cassette only records and tried to get booked at all the places that'd have a guy that played guitar and wrote his own songs. I recorded stuff at home on a 4-track. It was a heady time. I had long hair and I could drink.I followed a girl I was into out to the west coast, Seattle and I wrote letters home. There were rock stars in the bars that were my same age. One of the people I wrote home to got inspired and when my relationship ended and I came home with my tail between my legs, my friend was three days from moving out to Seattle to join me. When he got there he was more successful than I was. He got a job booking shows at a big club and some bars and he invited me back out to play and make some money. I went. I did make money. I made one of my 4 track tapes into a CD. I partied and mingled. My friend crashed his car a little onto one of those brick planter medians in the University district careening home from downtown. The car ground to a halt in front of the place he rented a room and never moved again. The bus from downtown to the U district at the time was the 44. He took to calling it the shame train. I named the band after what he called the bus. I toyed with the whole idea. The success I came to and the attention that lead to me making a record with a band was all due to him in a certain respect.He talked me into brewery gigs and hanging out with up and comers who were around on the scene- Pete Krebs, Elery Jett… I can't remember who else. Anyhoo.I wrote this song and it went on the first band album. I didn't know how he felt about it until the night after having played my first show in nearly a decade. He drunkenly told me. It felt to me like his deal was this, never expressed, parasocial, revering, like I’d written it for him. He was hammered. It was a little weird for me. Years later, rather recently, I learned it and played it in a couple shows. The audience told me it was good. You're a StarI'm the one who convinced you to buy my line. Though it seems cruel to say so señorita gave up the peso. Now baby here’s a gun. You can’t say you're afraid of flyin’. Check your watch and recall who’s buyin’. You're a Star baby say the line. And when you're taken with fits call in sick, and take the 44. You're lucky to be alive. Who gives a s**t about the car. Play your hits in some roadhouse bar. Tell yourself it's the way you are. It's a gift that you got this far. And when you're taken with fits call in sick and take the 44. You're lucky to be alive. Who gives a s**t about the car. Play your hits in some roadhouse bar. Tell yourself it's the way you are. Say the line baby, you're a Star. Baby you're a Star. Baby you're a Star. I made a video. You can by the whole album from Bandcamp here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

There are so many debts of gratitude I owe. It can get hard to remember gratitude when the kind of compassion you have to practice involves forgiving things that have aspects like, they had no choice or they know not what they do. So today and in the context of this song, I’m drumming the gratitude drum. I have gratitude for inspiration and comfort and the ways I have defined home and community. It helps me see the whole thing differently.Firstly, songwriters who have inspired me and from whom I have stolen choice lines in songs because, as a result of having listened to the songs and enjoyed them enough to listen enough to get the lines stuck in my head like words, sometimes my brain goes, Oh! The thing that goes right there is that one line from that one other song. I do that. I did it in this one. I am thankful for the music of Greg Brown and Paul Simon specifically within the bounds of this piece.My mom’s brothers and probably her dad were all bar regulars. My parents drank every day. I think that’s normal. My dad’s dad’s dad died from drink when my grandpa was 11. That’s when grandpa Melvin took over general operation of a farm, his older male siblings having dispersed to escape the madness. I was a bar regular before I was old enough to drink. I have since quit, but during what is still the majority of my adult life I spent part of every day drinking in a bar. It's what grown-ups do, I thought. As it was the place I was, the evidence bore this theory out.Bars are amazing. Going to the same bar every day is like being in a show. The actors are real if slightly removed from their responsibilities. And they become funnier and more attractive and loveable over the run of the show, each night. Bar regular life has all of the drama and reward and tragedy and ecstacy and agony that real life has. It’s a sub culture as old as time. It’s a real community. It's a common, enjoyable drug experience. I have theorized that the yeast that makes alcohol, uses the humans to favor carbohydrate baring plant species to feed itself and we drunkenly and hungoveredly oblige it all over the world with corn and wheat and rice and sugars from fruits and cacti, similarly to how house cats train their owners to rise and feed them in the morning. We are simple like that.It raised me in its hearth -the bar, alcohol did. Like a town raises a baseball player. It rewarded me for being a good steward of it’s consumption and for that, I am truly thankful.I think being hung over every day at work for more than 20 years may have been a hinderance, but today that is beside the point.I experienced all of the joy and love and community and inspiration that lead up to the last 12 ish years of my life in bars and I am thankful to be the alive person I am. If I had a drink in my hand I would pour some of it out on the ground because there are people who were loves of mine who are in the ground and likely would prefer to be having a drink.This Town, The BarI’m rough around the edges, and I’m fat on the inside, and I could light up a baseball park just walking around without my pride. There’s angel’s floatin’ over the north side black as the night and railroad tracks got the south side sewn down tight. Travelling companions and lovers and high water marks are stacking up like rainwater in a champaign glass in the dark. And the radio’s blasting me into obscurity. Every one knows my name and no one knows that it’s me. This town’s given me all that I’ve had so far and I beleive that I could love you. Won’t you join me at the bar? The bar, that’s where all my people are. Where my music always plays. It’s where everybody stays all night long. When I have had my fill of this place you can have my stool. I’m gonna take my crack at living by the golden rule and when I’ve had my fill of holding onto strangers in the night, I’ll be cracking one on the front porch at my place playing guitar in the fading light. This town's given me all that I’ve had, so far. I believe that I could love you. Won’t you join me at the bar? The bar, that’s where all my people are. Where my music always plays. It’s where everybody stays all night long.The bar.Its got quasi paraphrasing from Greg Brown’s song Small Dark Movie. There’s champaign and deception. When I wrote it, the albums a band and I made were in the juke boxes in the bars. Sometimes I would walk in and a song I sang would be playing. There’s that Paul Simon song called Homeward Bound - “Home, where my thoughts are sleeping. Home, where my music’s playing…” etc. It’s more homage than theft in both cases. And then Iris Dement’s Our Town, I mean…There's probably more I absorbed and passed off.Anyhoo here's a video which includes the song:And here’s a link to purchase the track on Bandcamp, please do: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Man, I could get philosophical on this one, but I don't think it’s the right move.If you are willing to overlook things like eating meat and not really having studied Buddhism per se, I am a secular Buddhist. I like the ideas in it that I have come across and I don't have to go to any meetings or throw money at it. I like the idea of trying to be present, because I struggle with it, and that’s where this one started. The neighbor’s chickens were in my front yard and as is common, some deer were napping between my back porch and a hank of raspberries that is sufficient to obscure their kids from the neighbors. I’m reminded of that scene in the movie Anchorman where the dim whitted weather man just starts naming things around the office. I love lamp. There was a bowl of apples on the counter and a 20 pound bag of basmati. It spins off into a fantasy of my life from there.I have this romantic notion of what it must be like to be a touring singer songwriter lifted from road songs by Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell and Greg Brown, songs that pull back the veil from the rock star myth and humanize the thing. At one point in time the whole rockstar lifestyle appealed to me, but my interests and needs have become simpler. Maybe it’s buddhism. I can see the notions I hold with a certain remove. I can accept their transient nature, their impermanence… sometimes easily.And I don’t feel odd about putting a premium on talking about my dreams out loud, like they might be already real. I imagine myself to be. It’s like praying a little, to examine ones notions in unromantic relief and out loud.It came out very quickly, this one. The rhymes are easy. The images logically follow. Once I had placed myself I could run into the images and go where they took me.In a real way, the image of me that I have as a guy with a guitar is a crutch.It is a crutch I intend to keep.CrutchesNeighbor’s chickens in the front yard, deer in the back, apples in a bowl on the counter, rice in a sack, low and outside the sun is making it’s winter way. It’s laying down on the kitchen floor in the middle of the day. The hillbillies all went home once the barn was up, sawdust swept into the corner, whiskey in an old tin cup, I thank gor I’ve got a place to keep my too danmed much. Throw a bag of clothes over my shoulder, and pick up my crutch. Two lane blacktop in the morning, diner lunch at noon, I show my crutch to strangers and I tell the truth too soon. Birds are circlin’. Maybe I should not go. I think the worst thing I ever did was to believe I did not know. Pick a little. Talk a little. Pick a little bit more. Take a handful of twenty dollar bills. Turn down a chance to score. Sneak off to a hotel and lie down by myself. Fall asleep with the TV on and contemplate my wealth. I just do what the birds do. I do like the sun. Come back to the same place next year claiming to be on the run. Same people in the front, same twenty dollar bills. If I want to feel my spirit rise, I just crutch up into the hills. Throw my crutches down and run, cuz that’s how good it feels. I recorded this within a couple days of having written it. It's on the record called Where the Cover's Deep you can buy on BandcampHere:https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/where-the-covers-deepAlso there is a video: https://youtu.be/tcFPbI7K9qU?si=2WmQLqXMeYi6ZYde This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

It's been good to try to remember what was going on in my life at the times this one was written and then when it was recorded. The Iowa Opera House Project was just a twinkle in my saucey, bloodshot eye. It had begun, I suppose the IOHP, but was not yet under full sail.I am listening to it now for the first time in a long time..I finished it at Helmer’s house on his gear during the pandy shutdown. Me and Dave did little EQ fixes and some subtle averaging FET compression. He was hands off, but it was his toys and his time. Andrew Brockman and I started almost all the songs on what became Donkey Island with just me and a tenor guitar, singing and playing, then added everything else.Bob Black picks banjo. I picked him up and drove him to the studio from a gravel lot at a crossroads near Kolona where is wife drove him. He told me a story about the guy who replaced him in Bill Munoe’s band playing Jimmy Carter’s inauguration on acid.It was the beginning to what is now a beautiful friendship with Alma Drake who's work I knew from long ago and recently. It was 2010 or 11 or 12- right in there. I wrote it sitting on the porch where I live now, downing cans and smelling the restaurant smoke blowing into my neighborhood and hearing the summer frogs and bugs and stumbling.Sometimes you can't tell how good you have it. You assess at the end of a rough trip and it might seem to have all gone wrong. But we are walking a path. We are all approaching, knowingly looking down in and then getting back into the ground from which we all have sprung by whatever means you believe are true. It's all true, what you believe.You don't always get to, but when you get to, make it nice. Everyone else is coming.Denison is a real place. Donna Reed is from there. I had lunch with her daughter once. But I have never been.Denison is beerese for “a den of sin”.*clears throat*Inna gotta davida baby…DenisonAs night begins to fall, smells of town are on the wind. Hello, goodye cicadas call. We fly so life begins again. I start to walk along the road toward where lights shine up on the clouds. Denison, I have been told, there's more than gods law will allow. I hear the frogs up in the trees..smell the dust up in my clothes. Below me I see lights and streets. My bride awaits me there I know. You can treat me like fool. I’m told that is what you do. Just love me like them girls from school, and I will stay in love with you. As night begins to fall smells of town are on the wind. Hello, goodbye cicadas call. We fly so life begins again. We fly so life begins again.Nothing makes me more confidently poetiphylisophiclish than being alone and in the bag. Here is some evidence that it occasionally can bear a little weight.. maybe helped me attain a long clear vision of a metaphore made up of the things in the air around me.Ryan Bernemann plays lovely, rooted well-spaced upright bass.Bob Black plays banjo great. Every time I listen to it I remember us confessing to each other about acid on the drive to town.Alma Drake sings her fiddle over top, just right, right in the fiddle holes. I plunk a harmony tenor revisiting the bag on the porch from the bag in the studio. adeno’sin.Thank you Andrew Brockman, for putting up with my bad dance-dad attitude. It turned out great.Buy one:https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/track/denison-2 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

America is a vast place. I read last week that barely 30% of the land that in the contiguous United States has people living on it. I have no reason not to believe it. Depending on where you are I supose one could think there is a place you could go if where you are isn’t safe, or if you needed to run, you could escape. “The West” can be visualized as rolling short grass prarie with mountains in the back ground. It can feel like you are the only person in the world out there.I like that feeling. I need to be alone to do some of the things that feel essencial to my being. I woodshed with a little pile of guitars and a typing machine and a recording machine and come up with things that I think are good, things that it might benefit the world to have, but the whole thing depends on a quiet place I can get to.I guess I'm lucky. I grew up in a town I could walk to a deep woods from. I live in a town where a relatively short bike ride can put me at a crossing of dirt roads with no houses in view, or a long unimproved hill of old trees with a walking path where I might only meet a person or two on a sunday when the weather is nice.Maybe not everyone has thought to themselves, where would I go if I lost access to everything?. I’m not prepping for the end of the world, but I did grow up in the cold war 70’s and 80’s and I did have teenaged nightmares of nuclear holocaust. It's back there in my mind, and it’s not uncommon in my generation. The preppers are out there, buying big Tupperware tubs of MREs and checking the dates on their flares and piling up ammunition.The history of America starts with a few bands of hillbillies with rifles that shoot straight and a working knowledge of the land chasing off the most powerful army on earth at the time. The hillbillies were all immigrants and first generation folks who got it in their heads that how they were being treated by their government wasn't right.If I had to I’d go where there aren’t any people, or where there aren't many- the Driftless. I’d eat a lot of trout and move around a lot. The creeks are the only flat thing out there. The bears are small.I’d come out tho. I’d come out and play. I’d make a good show of myself when I came to town.When I am sad about how things are going and I don’t know what to do I imagine myself thriving there but when I think of it for long I imagine coming to town, then being in town and having town things and then living there. I’m a townie through and through, a nature boy.I like to go to the woods and then have shells with pesto artichokes and speck and a pear and a nap with squooshy pillows.Safety is a many splendored illusion.Where the Cover’s DeepPack up your supplies and run to where the cover’s deep. Turn my head to make your fun my heart your soul to keep. A paper boy delivers the news. Sweet and loud, guitar playing slow, some old man tucked behind it who ain't got no place left to go. He makes a parade all by himself, better than the 364 days he spends up there on the shelf. Maybe it’s you exactly where you’re supposed to be..It’s no mistake that I am here. I am exactly where it is I’m s’posed to be. How about you. why are you here. Maybe the ris something you’re supposed to see. Maybe it’s me. Pack up your supplies and run to where the cover’s deep. Turn my head to make your fun my heart your soul to keep. A paper boy delivers the news.. You've got to rise up singin’ like in the old song. The old man says its a new song, but he’s done said his piece and gone. King of the road to where you can’t go. Drivin’ like a bat out of hell down the back roads and pullin’ up slow so everyone can see exactly where you’re supposed to be exactly where you’re supposed to be.. Pack up your supplies and run to where the cover’s deep. Turn my head to make your fun my heart your soul to keep. A paper boy delivers the news. Maybe it’s you exactly where you’re supposed to be.. Maybe it’s you exactly where you’re supposed to be.. Maybe it’s me exactly where I'm s’posed to be…exactly where I'm s’posed to be.Justin LaDuc plays drums..I did all the rest of it. I am the whole choir singing to microphones from the other side of the room.It is the title track to what I guess I am calling an album that you can buy on Bandcamp. It's good. You can click on it and just listen for free. Then, if you like it enough to want to be able to download it and listen whenever you want without going through the whole process of going to Bandcamp or calling me on the phone to send you links you can just have it in your devices forever by paying for it here:Sometimes continuing to do the work fells hollow, but singing feels good. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Everybody quits eventually, is a statement that is true. You can argue it’s not, but eventually you will lose.Metaphores are fun, huh? They are the verbal punctuation reality needs to be properly understood sometimes. They ask a reader or a listener to look at what they are seeing from a different angle. A broader understandong can stem from a metaphore. A secret you might need only some people to understand can live in a metaphore. It disengages the language from specificity without losing the meaning of what it’s trying to say, if it works. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.This one is about recognizing that the end is not the end, and indecision and addiction and love. Love remains simply what you may have seen out the rear view mirror of the American representation of financial freedom, the car. Love is the addiction that causes humanity to look into time and ponder itself and recreate itself and hold itself together when it might come apart.It’s the thing that you think you might be able to give up, because it’s just too damned hard to love someone after you have really seen them.It’s hard. It can be hard. You should be ready for it to be hard and for yourself to give up and un give up in cycles, because for as clear as things can seem to you even things that are truly true can both unwind from and rewind themselves into the notion of truth. And though you will never know what is in another person’s mind, you can still love them. You choose it. You even choose what it means. English is weak on the notion. Greek has seven or eight words for love. The English way is both good and bad. It's bad because the OS that is language has weak code for the thing that holds us together. It’s good because it allows us a kind of open poetic reconstruction opportunity. And seven or eight types do not a more whole whole make. Language doesn’t fit love in it very precisely. There are a couple poems about it, a number of memorable songs, some plays. You can see it all around you. The evidence of it if not the thing itself cannot be spared the impact of randomly tossed stones. Were it a venomous legless reptile, you would be envenomated. It is you and you are it and also the whole of everything. We need to tell each other sometimes that we love each other, to remind each other that we still do, because it can be hard to see it through a lens clouded with doubt and fear. It’s more important under those circumstances than ever. It's easy to forget.Tell someone. Even if you are not sure you want to anymore, because you will again. It's all still there. It is not very effectively left behind. You are not, so it is not.This time I used a song. And I am in it, but so are you.The Last DragThis is the last drag- cherry bouncin’ down the road behind the car, the county line, the bar. This is the last drag- comin’ back to where you are. And I don't wanna be in love anymore, but I’m the one who left the spark half goin’ last time. And showin’ me the door must just be a pastime. The way you hold it open seems like a come-on. Come on in. This is the last drag. And I don’t wanna be in lobe anymore, But I’m the one who left the door wide open last time.Chase spark back around to the first part. [I] sing a song ‘cause it rhymes with my heart. Catch flame and you run with a new name. That's the roud-about part of the spark game. And I don't wanna be in love anymore, but I’m the one who left the spark half goin’ last time. And showin’ me the door must just be a pastime.Sean Haskins Plays DrumsDarren Matthews Plays Lead GuitarRandy Davis Plays BassNathan Bassinger Plays Hammond B-3 Organ through a Leslie CabinetI play guitar and sing.This song is on a record called ‘She Knows the Score’ that you can buy… right here: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

My girlfriend has a horse.It's amazing for people to get what they always wanted. It is complex to succeed. Most of the examples that come readily to mind of people getting what they always wanted fall into a regretable midlife crisis variety or a make a wish foundation variety. Rarely do we get regaled with tales of the ordinary I-saved-up-for-a-bike or I-have-paid-my-debt-completely variety. I talk like I know you. I’m talking about myself I guess.I take the stuff I see sometimes and I dress it up with melody and lies to make it seem, you know, cool. It all comes from someplace. I have said the songs I write come from real events and that is true in a vague enough sense. I’ll walk you through this one.Talked to old Bo at the counter getting lunch the other day.There’s a buffet style Indian lunch place and there’s an older famous guy who eats there sometimes when I am eating there. We are neighbors so he’ll generally come over and say, Hey. He’s a good dude. I had played this place in Wisconsin and they had remembered him playing there to me [Cafe Carpe in Fort Atkinson Wisconsin]. They’d said it was the perfect thing for them- right room, right vibe, nice easy going crowd who drink beer and eat. He said something to the effect of, I don't wanna do road gigs anymore in a it’s-the-end-of-that-part-of-my-career kind of a way. When I reimagined the conversation in my head it’s a diner with a lunch counter and he’s just saying he's done.F**k, this could get long.He said he could see the end of a long road comin’, but it won’t show up today.I get obsessive about a riff I like. I’ll wander around the house in ug knock off slippers and strum like a f*****g looney. The chorus came in as a set of things that people say to help each other go when it’s hard to.Take it easy. Keep your head up. Walk the line, even if your fed up. It took a walk and a smile to get you what you’re standing on today. Brother it’ll let up.The lady that boards my girlfriends horse came up in conversation a fair amount for a while. She's a wise old woman on a ranch in the mountains with horses out where there are bears and mountain lions. She has big Belgian dogs to make it safe. She is easy to idolize as a whole simple thing. She said once, “The fastest way is to take all the time it takes,” in reference to teaching an animal with a will of it’s own to do a thing with you, a person with a will of your own. Things wont be rushed. Pushing doesn't make it go faster. All of that, which my mind remembered as, “It’s gonna take the whole time.” To which I added, “if you don't mind,” and then the opposite is also true.Then it turns into a stereotypable old man in a cafe thing many midwesterners have seen a thousand times from the next table over. The cafe is the Public House of the god fearing and the soberholics.You can’t tell me nothin’ I don’t know. I wouldn’t pay them taxes if it wasn’t the law. Drive em up t’move me out. You don’t wanna see me go no lower.Long silence at the lunch counter. Refocus. Zoom out.They’re gonna pave the road to Downey, put up million dollar homes. It's the best view in the county. I wish they’d leave our ass alone.Well, I got roughed up on my way in so I ain't got all I had. But I made it so you owe me and it won’t be all tht bad.I ride my bike on gravel roads sometimes. They tend not to pave the ones that aren't going somewhere with a grocery store or a gas station. Downey has neither. If it had great views it might get paved. There's nothing wrong with Downey or the road there, but it’s not sought for development. I was seeing a fair amount of protest. The world of two or three years ago seemed so moderately dangerous. Getting roughed up seems tame.ChorusUplifting refrainChorus Maybe it’s about making friends with something you can’t talk to. I truly do not know. Sometimes it’s beautiful to accept the process unfolding, things slowly becoming better. Setbacks to progress are pretty disheartening.It’s hard to read when everything sounds like dog-whistle as the result of disastrous politicking, and all the time it takes is too long to wait. Post truth morality is a roller coaster that throws customers off it at deadly heights. Hold on to the the human being next to you. The roller coaster is an indifferent tosser. Uh..Buy my record. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I hope you make art. I think everyone does. Some people put effort into conforming. It's a natural inclination to be in the pack you're in. But you can't do it exactly the same; if it's not flattery, it’s copying. That difference, that flare that makes the group member an individual- that's art. Everyone does art. All the things you try are art.When you look back at old pictures or videos from years ago often there's some appalling, tried nature to the thing or an aspect that's over now that was pertinent for what seems like no reason at all today. But sometimes there's something perfect. Sometimes when you look back you see something that works as well now as it did then- your mom smiling as a young woman, a landscape, a thing that can be appreciated as it was in its time or more, stuff nobody saw or nobody liked that, once it got out, it clicked. People got it. Maybe it applies to something that wasn't even real yet when the shot was snapped. You make art, but you never know. Nerves of Steel I am awkward with reverence as a sign of praise. There's a gush and there's a white dam wall gonna come down one of these days. I'm gonna make myself a wishlist. I'm gonna put your number on it. Gonna pick up everything I left behind. I'm gonna go downtown and pawn it. Cuz I could really use a five dollar bill like I used to need a glass of shine. The room’s still empty cuz the jury’s still out and you're still mine. You must have nerves of steel to say the things you say. You take a stand in your incendiary words and you just wait for them to go away. Cuz you believe that mutual assured destruction’ll keep the oppositions points under it's breath. And you're holdin’ your last bullet in your teeth so you don't laugh yourself to death. And I could really use a five dollar bill like I used to need a glass of shine. The room’s still empty cuz the jury’s still out and your still mine. So here we are, someone like God and me. Stopping the end of the world seems like a good idea, but my advice is free. And being as we’re fighting for the liberty to spend free advice will likely go down in the fray. And I think I'm gonna cut myself off short cuz I don't have a thing to say. The day this video was shot I was a mess. I'd been out late the night before and the night before that and I was broke and I forgot a film crew was coming and I was high and hung over and painting the house I was renting on the back side. Darren came around the corner. He'd come to ask when was practice or something and I was up on a ladder. He said, “There's a TV crew in your front yard.”I remembered them saying they were coming. I was like, “Oh s**t!"I went in and washed my hands while they set up. Then I just played them some songs. I wasn't self conscious about what a mess I was at all. We did the shoot. They packed up and left. I don't think it went on TV.I was certain that I was well and fine. Certain. Close your eyes to the disaster of a human I was at the time. The song still works. I'm still certain I'm fine, but less so that I was when this video was shot. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Two-year-olds don't know the danger inherent in ambition as it lays itself out in the wake of a course of action (you will know us by the trail of our dead, the path of destruction, the thing that the last two dipshits bent on global domination forgot before campaigns into Russia dragged into winter with the lights of Moscow somewhere over the horizon reflecting off the clouds at night in the snow) is the question, why[?].If you're climbing a long hill, you can be strong and focussed, but when the tired starts to weigh your pace, when you start to falter, it coincides with that very question. Why?When you play through a cute little P.A. system in the corner of a massive, empty hotel bar outside the beltway for the $300 check in the drawer and two drinks, you sing the songs and tell the jokes, but why?You can believe what you're doing is true like an arrow flying or a straight wheel until the question makes you look and you decide to carry on or stop based on the assessment. Assessment. I think the playing on the record is a little fast. I was probably eating adderall I bought from a girl that worked at the deli in the corner store.There was a public service announcement about driver safety with Danika Patrick in it talking about loose hands on the wheel. I was regularly going to the church of hardly any bourbon all afternoon. My uncles had regaled me with stories of hitting every bar in a loop around lake Charlevoix, one of the finger lakes north of Traverse City. And I was finally in the kind of shape I needed to be in- to drink all day and still be in control enough to drive safely. My body coursed with the antivenom of persistent exposure and I was barely 40. I was strong and clear eyed and rail thin.The tenor guitar was my obsession.I recorded the version in the thing at the top this morning, but I wanted you to see this video is why I picked this one, because the show on Friday was great and I believe in the show again.The video is me closing my set, opening for Iris Dement at Wooly’s in Des Moines. The kid I'm talking about was an up and coming independent talent buyer, who got me the gig and advised me to play this one because he believed in my thing- that it could grow if it got in front of the right rooms. Lindberg. I mention him by name in another song, “ Why Simple Folks Don't Seem to do Nothin’”, but that's for a different day. Srsly..like, watch the vid-e-o.like, after the lyricsThe Danika Patrick RagLoose hands on the wheel. Both knees on the bottle. Take a quiet road home. Take it easy on the throttle. These are dangerous times. You've got to steer clear of dangerous men.Dangerous times tend to crush your ambition. Put your hand out the window. Make happiness your mission. If you start in to thinkin’ put your hand out the window again.Let loose of the wheel. Take a nip off the bottle. Look all around. Push down on the throttle. Put some road behind you, and have your motor moment of zen.Play the song on the radio loud.Never find yourself too proud to call out who’s right, and who’s wrong. In the end write me a song. Video:Online Album, via the track:Keep your stick on the ice. It ain't Nascar. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Hill country isn't the mountains. There's a whole different kind of snow at elevation, but in the planes, in places where there's hills the snow drifts out past the edges of things. Shapes change. The landscape may no longer be represented by the shape of the ground when it's all blown snow. It's beautiful, but it ain't true. It might be inches deep. It might be four five feet and you won't know til you're in it.Love might be like that in these modern swinging times. Who loves who you love? Is it the whole of creation? Probly is. You might put your foot down thinking you are on the solid ground of real love only to find out you've stepped into a world that's beyond your understanding, overwhelming, sallied toward desires unseen, at the whims of an unfamiliar nature.You might fear for your life out there in the cold with only poetry to hold on to.If you're lucky you can tell where there's a creek and go downstream until you get somewhere. It'll be the ocean eventually and that's really just a border between you and the horizon. Whimsey blows across the top of all of it. The wind tries transience into the shapes of everything that isn't indoors. You think you can have what you have, but in your deeper thoughts the transient nature of all things howls through the branches like the wind before a rain. You have what you have, but you hold nothing. Wind is more effective and less involved. The metaphore you know is over simple. Really you're just lost.You take another step. It might be deep. It might be the ground. Look for the creek. Trudge on. The moonlight makes the whole thing sparkle. And that's beautiful too. But you can't follow what the moon does to the world. You'll drown. Hill country snow is shallow and deep. Makes goin’ hard and easier keep. Night moon sparks diamond temptations’ll coat you, and take you down slow. Tops of the rushes pokin’ through means water down below. Water down below.Wind is an old man shoveling the tide, burying and changing and undressing his bride. He need make no attempt to run she need make no attempt to hide. Blowin’ snow off of her furrows, hill country has no pride. Hill country has no pride.She is at my feet saying drink my water and keep me and all I hear is him screamin’ in my ears. I am incomplete so I pray she don't defeat me, lie beside her, while away the years. While away the years. I am a wreck next to her beauty as he blows her into fire. Tearing the leaves down from her branches and shunting my desire. That ribbon of highway below me all sided up with wire. That endless skyway above me all sooted up by the pire. All sooted up by the pire.Repeat first verse.It's just a walk in the snow.We fucked around with this one for a long time in the studio adding little sounds that came up in shows. The album GONE is where I fell in love with Randy Davis’s guitar playing and this song has my favorite guitar solo of his. Everybody on this recording is great. Buy our abum! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Sometimes you start to make something and you don't see what it is until it's out, as it were.I believe that often a song isn't something you make so much as it's something that reveals itself to you as whole cloth if not in meaning alone.I'm not retirement age but the first line sang itself out, “I’ve given up days down at the place.” And then, sunshine on my shoulder makes me happy, seemed an apt enough follow up. I stole that from John Denver. Then there was a character, a sensible one. One who’d retired and new what made them happy.“I'm takin’ in things. I'm finding my pace, looking out over the valley.”I still didn't know. But by then there was a place, a valley to look over.2nd verse. “I ain't in line. I'm just standing by. And I don't need what you're havin’.”That's how some people I know talk. Where I work, because it's departmentalized work all done in the same space, there can be a fair amount of standing by. And almost nobody retires.The rest of the song just came conversationally out. By the time I got to, “Just standing by…” I knew who it was and where it was and it could all just come out.It was someone who used to do what I do who lives in a valley and is retired.Mad Woman Gulch is a real place I have never been, so it got to remain as a thing in my imagination. I know a guy who lives there. He used to drink and fuss about the kinds of things people tend to stop fussing about and knuckle under eventually. There are all kinds of things in this world that don’t make any sense or are not fair or are unbeleiveably weighted against the common person. If you stop keening against them you lose, but it’s a common loss. It’s the kind of loss everybody suffers and then you have commiseration.It seems incredibly unlikely that if you were to keep going on and on about how your world would be if it was fair that the world would just turn over and let you scratch its belly and snuggle, but sometimes it does I guess.The place of peace in song is often a metaphore for heaven, some place of eternal reward, the thing you get if you did everything right. I posit that maybe it’s just a place where not only is everything tolerable, but there aren't any of the common unfairnesses everybody knuckles under. Maybe there’s a quiet place where you can get all your needs met, a place where you can smoke on the porch and look out at the world and see that it’s beautiful and know that’s enough.Some people are just that lucky. Some people are only lucky enough to know someone who is.You know who you are.I’ve given up days down at the place. Sunshine on my shoulder makes me happy. I’m takin’ in things. I’m finding my pace lookin’ out over the valley. I said I ain’t here to get mine. I meant I ain't here to get mine. I ain’t in line. I’m just standing by, and I don’t need what you’re havin’. Naw, you can keep that yourself. No, I don’t mind. I’ve got some out at the cabin. Hang your head over the valley. Hear the wind blow. Hang your head over the valley. Hear the wind blow. Things ain’t the same lookin’ up close. But out here at night it’s heaven almost. Hang your head over the valley. Hear the wind blow. Hang your head over the valley. Hear the wind blow. Hear the wind blow. Hear the wind blow. I’ve given up days down at the place. Sunshine on my shoulder makes me happy. Sunshine on my shoulder makes me happy. Sunshine on my shoulder makes me happy.Dustin Busch plays pedal steel. He said coming into the session, “I’m gonna try some Daniel Lanois s**t.” It works.Justin Laduc of course played only cymbals with mallets. That works too.The most important players to me on this one are the birds. In the early spring when the ground thaws and the bugs start moving around again the birds come back and the still cold nights of winter lift. Just as soon as there’s a hint of blue in the morning sky the birds start to sing. I got up at dawn and recorded four minutes of birds in my still asleep town in May. As the summer goes on you forget there are bugs and birds singing all the time until you are trying to record something, unless what you are trying to record is four minutes of birds at dawn.A buddy I run things past to see what he thinks said the song was great, but get rid of the birds.No, I said.Its on an album that came out on December 18th on Bandcamp and will be on all the streaming and purchase services in January when the elves get all caught up with their other records. Til then you'll have to get it here, on Bandcamp.Also there’s a video. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

This particular song ties so many things together.During the last century there were juke boxes in all the bars full of 45 RPM singles. The place where you interfaced with the Juke box might be all full of mirrors and you could see the little records mechanically take their place on the turntable. Kids in pizza joints used to get quarters from their mom and go pick the same song over and over.I used to day drink in this place where I occasionally worked as a door guy. Iowa City is kind of a famous writer town. One day I met this guy who, when I walked in the door was hanging his face over the juke box with a pitcher of beer in one hand, playing old country tunes and crying, and swaying. He eventually came and sat at the bar where I had posted up and told me who he was. He was a little older than me. He’d had a newspaper career and then published a book that had done pretty well. His literary agent had talked him into coming to the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop to make connections with people who were going to be the famous novelists of tomorrow. He hated it.Years before that I had worked at this restaurant/bar that tolerated the staff staying locked in all night to drink and listen to records. We listened to this record called Maxinqway by this British dude who went by Tricky. Built into some of the beats was what I assumed was the scratchy middle of records. When the music is over on an LP if you have a player that doesn’t return the stylus to the start it stays in the middle of the record and spins and spins the same little set of dust bunnies and scratches over and over until you get to it and lift the needle. There were these scratchy bits buried in the beats on that record that I assumed came from that spinning phenomenon. Anything takes on a groove you can rock to after a high number of repetitions. The skips are the time.There was a revelation in there about the distinction we probably all make between music and noise and how it was arbitrary- the distinction was arbitrary. I bought records of bands I liked and played them drunkenly and scratched the ones I liked to play the most, because drunkenly. But I loved some of the less interuptive scratches. They became part of the music.I imagine a couple both putting their drunken heads into the window of the jukebox and seeing each others faces reflected from odd angles, picking something sweet to listen to and swaying there. And the thing they pick to listen to is a 45 that is a little beat from living in a jukebox in a bar where people bump around it dancing or heading to the pisser.In a perfect world all the scratches on a 45 like that are the result of pristine timing guided by nothing but the music itself, like a landscape scalloped with the evidentiary trails of human traverse.A 45 with Every Skip in TimeAre there things you wish you’d left to do? Are there things you’d left undone? ‘Cus my life begins and ends with you and I have just begun a 45 with every skip in time. Well it’s ring around we used to do til the lights of closing time. And the juke box mirror shows me you and we play it one more time- a 45 with every skip in time.I had at the time of recording this just started playing with Ryan Bernemann. He was out of college and starting to get things going for himself and he had this recording gear, nothing too fancy, but he had it, and I was writing so I asked if we could do some recording at his place.We recorded this one and then his girlfriend [now wife] and one of her friends were recruited to put on a string part that he wrote. Laura Goddard and Laura something else. I no longer have any copies of this record. I purchased the recording off the Internet this morning. I bought and downloaded the whole album. It was cheap for me because the money I spent on it mostly just deposited back in my account. It will be more expensive for you, but if you are touched by this recording, and I mean.. how couldn’t you be… you should go to the Bandcamp link on this page and buy yourself access to the whole thing.The first one is always free kid. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Sometimes I like it more than you do and sometimes you like it more than I do and English isn't sophisticated enough for us to know the difference in any real way. You have to believe it’s true in order for the truth to be true. When an english speaker wonders, they wonder in English.Is this any good?Someone might answer yes and that yes can be the truth to that person but in a very real way there is a pudding that the proof is in.Who says?Well, everybody does.Who’s everybody?Everybody I know says so.Is that so?Yeah.Well, this one is here for this reason, and this reason alone. I think it’s good. I like how it goes. I like how it was recorded. It's just good. It’s from the middle of the process of recording what became Donkey Island- probly 2012.I was in a mild state of fame. I believed in the goodness of the tunes and that there would be a place where people and these songs would come together. I was imagining myself in the blossoming fame, walking in to someplace like home after being gone and showing off.When I showed up at the bars people would still turn their heads to see me and then whisper my name, but I had mostly stopped going.It wasn’t like I graduated from the bars to some advanced placement; It was like I had quit, and not long before. I no longer rolled into the warm embrace of a public house. I had to start developing a sense of self that wasn’t me there.I was occasionally gathering my girlfriend from a bush she’d decided to lie down on or near and pouring her into a cab. I was encouraged to be over the whole party scene. I was over forty, worst of all. Where we were recording good work was happening. In my mind good songs were coming, and soon enough I’d be able to show them around. I could do another run on theaters with this little project all messy with human artists.And then I just didn’t. I got out of the relationships. I quit making a record. I ceased to want any fools to turn to see me if I ever walked into the bar again.I was raised by bar people. I have no Idea how to function in sober society. There may not even be such a thing.But I wrote this good song one time and then I had the two professional fiddlers I knew come in to the recording space separately and record, “parts”. One got to go first, the other learned the first part and augmented it. I forget the order.It’s Alma Drake and Kristina Priceman.Ryan Bernamen plays upright bass, and I added the Mandolin part as an afterthought. It’s good. I relearned it the other morning and put a version of it on the interwebs immediately. I love this one.Push push.Buy one.Here, have a nother free one.Just…Tell someone else to watch it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I got these new bar clips to hang stereo pair bars from theater battens. I had to make sure they worked so I made a little recording spot right where I take my coffee in the morning. Then I laid out this chestnut. It's on the album Donkey Island with dueling fiddles. Worth a listen. I checked it out to remind myself how the lyrics go. https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/track/as-night-fallsBuy yourself something nice. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I wrote this song last week.Sometimes I write songs because it's an elegant way to say something you can't really say. Sometimes the example a person is in your life is a gift, something that broadens your understanding of yourself as renewable, as someone who doesn't need to be what you have always been. It's hard not to be what people know you to be. It's hard to alter how you enhabit the way you are perceived. It might seem impossible not to be what you seem to someone else to be. It's even harder when you're old, but sometimes someone shows you it can be radically, well and completely done. You can decide who you are and be that thing even if the world you are walking into will not immediately acknowledge you as yourself. From the perspective of not doing it, it looks impossible… perhaps only until you have seen it bravely and well done. It's not always a revolutionary act to be yourself, unless of course it is.newmanWhat if I stay up all night, never come in out of the cold? I'd be the only one left in the fight, direct result of never doing what I’m told. Sit around a fire. Get a little high. Pick a couple songs I know. Sometimes I try to be a man. Sometimes it makes me low. C’z what’s a man,? What’s a man? I've been trying every way I can. God bless you if you do, but I don't know. Sit around a fire. Get a little bit high. Pick a couple songs we know. A man says, whatchoo gonna do about it? A man who starts a revolution has to do without. Knowing everythingll be all right. Having a safe place to go. Somewhere you can walk the streets at night, and never wonder if it's right to say hello. Sit around a fire. Get a little high. Sing a couple songs we know. The rest of it just repeats. And it doesn't matter if the message gets back to the person who inspired it. A song by the fire is as important as this all needs to be. Keep each other safe and love each other. They'll keep growing up the whole time if you let them and it all helps. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I used to do these in- studio spots at the college radio station where I live back when radio was still a thing. There was a DJ there who had worked at a public radio station in Chicago the summer before he started college. I had long curly hair. I was always hung over and a little high on weed. And unbeknownst to me the staff at the station all referred to me as “Stinky Knutson” behind my back.The kid who'd worked at the Chicago radio station and hosted the folk music show that would have me on had this tape as I recall it of John Prine. Once. When the kid was doing a shift at WBEZ (I think) John Prine walked into the station. He got on the air and he told this story about running into this girl he knew in high school the night before. He was probly in his 40s. It was the nineties and I haven't checked the math. This woman had been drinking semi professionally since high school, as had John I imagine. -Remember all of this is remembered from a morning show spot in excess of 30 years ago.- John had written this song, Ain't it funny how a broken bottle kinda shines like a diamond ring, or something close to that and the kid had been in the booth when John came in and had the good sense to record the story and the song.I didn't really get it at the time. I had some good songs, but I wasn't really doing the work most of the time. I knew how to catch things out of the air, but I didn't know having them whole or keeping them alive was a thing. I just knew good-not so good, and catchy -not catchy. I was an aspiration to a mess, personally. People will slow down to see a wreck, especially if it's on fire. I may have been on fire. Sometimes you write about something that really happens because it made you feel. Sometimes you write how you feel and maybe you don't know what really happens. There's light and heat and if you keep throwing flammable s**t in there's more light and heat… and apparently an odor of some kind.Sometimes there's a thing in the world that shines. Sometimes it's another mess of things on fire. I recorded this on this Boss digital 8-track that saved to zip disk. When I hear it I hear the zip drive spinning up in the back ground and the noise gate closing up on the quiet noise and I hear this swoony drunken fire swaggering along a beach like it's an alive thing along the tide line with the water coming up and the sun coming down …like a set of snapshots from a beach encounter in a disposable camera I forgot where I put.I half stole the name.Broken Bottle ||: Girl you let me know that it's true and I do find you o, so incredibly lost to be having our fun. But I know that it's you and the way that you do what has never been done is my bane and I break like a drunk’s code of silence. An island’s a bottle in somebody's sea, and your secret 's in me. Come near in the shallows and gather me. Anyone could take me home. My dear, you are scattered in me like the white sands are scattered in foam. Come take me home. :||Cryptic, I know, but outside of the reference to the John Prine song I maybe heard and maybe didn't on a tape at a morning radio spot 30 plus years ago, there isn't anything specific I recall about the inspiration for this one. It sounds boozy and sweet.I caught this one out of the air and I can still feel the bourbon and the heartache of an ameture Casanova.I put it on an album. Splendor.Buy one from Bandcamp. Track 9. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

This song was written and recorded 25 years ago for an album of the same age. I was old. I was 30. I was thinking about the wrinkley old b******s who I had split bills with in coffee shops when I was in my 20s, the small town players who never ammounted to anything and got old, the hapless weirdos who kept on keeping on after it was no longer even remotely possible for them to come to any quantifiable success, beardy burn outs with great guitars and no following. In coffee shops and little music bars in Northfeild Minnesota and Lacrosse Wisconsin and Prarie Duchein and Waukon, places I said I would be done with when I moved to the big city… Iowa City, and started a good band. I got to start a really good band after a few years of playing out with other singer songwriters. I don't even remember how the whole thing started. Some college jazz players were the people on the first record and the line-up kinda broadened as the players were not always available. There was a little roster and by the time we were making a second record, 25 years ago, it had become a pretty good thing. We chipped away at a record for a year adding things to it that came up at gigs and crafting new songs as they got written. At a certain point in the process I started thinking about how old I was and what would become of me. I was 30 after all. Hippies were no longer allowed to trust me. I wrote this one.Today, looking at this song is an ald guy (me) looking at the perspective of a young guy who thought he was old (me at 30) thinking about what it would be like to be a washed up ACTUALLy old guy. It’s a fun house mirror with young me looking ascance at what it would be like to be old disgruntled washed up burned out me from what was the height of our fame. It’s a great record GONE. It’s the only one we sold all they way out of print. I don't have any profound thoughts about what it means. The last time I played it live someone in the audience mentioned that they liked this song better when they didn’t think of it as a song about me.…f**k, man… really?It always was.Used to PlayHe used to play most every Saturday. He used to know just what to say til the words got in the way. He used to play. He never found himself a home. He never got back from alone. Never found time to himself, so he put it all up on the shelf. He used to play these songs for you. He used to tell you what to do. You’d play along, but now you say, “He used to play.” I never did believe the line about what you did with your time. You never pulled it off to me ‘bout your struggle to be free. You used to be. I could look up eye to eye and time would not go by. At 23 you’ll never die and you were older still than me. You used to be my only love. You used to shine down from above, our waving hands would make the sea. You used to be. You used to be. Was it the holy smoke or trumped up accolaides? Was it that last handful of reds the feds or razor blades? You used to say, “Thanks very much to all of you…” and think, ’…for what you put me through. I gave up everything for you. Is that the best that you can do?” You used to sing, “I love you so.” We used to shine up from below. Our waving hands would make the sea. You used to be. You used to be.again, Randy Davis was clutch on multiple guitar parts. Nate Bassinger understands the cinematic effect of the accordion. This was definitely Marty Christiansen on bass and Adam Bernemann on drums. Again my accoustic guitar is superfluous at its best moments and gone the rest of the time. John Svec absolutely nailing a ready for radio mix that still stands up. It has not become dated to my ears, but I am burned out and old. You tell me. And while you are at it.Buy one right here:Its track 12 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

This one was kind of a throw away song. We played it live, but I’m not certain it’s about anything. It’s simple and catchy, and I have had people tell me, “I know what you meant there.” But it’s been forever and I truly meant to ask, what I meant because I am not certain.I suppose it starts with my unwillingness to be observed. Maybe you are like this. I wish I could be invisible sometimes, not so I can get away with anything, just… I am uninterested in any kind of scrutiny. I am my own worst critic. I used to think of it as an asset. Now I am not so sure I wasn’t beating myself up over not being perfect. I was a line cook going broke every two weeks waiting for the kind of paycheck you can make being a line cook who doesn't want to be the boss. I picked this one because it’s super catchy. To me it’s hooky. But it doesn't go anywhere in particular. I am amazed in listening to it now, 25 plus years after it got recorded how tight it is. Noteably my guitar part is mixed mostly out of the finished version. Like always I am outclassed by the band.Guitarist Randy Davis’s simple perfect s**t steals the show. Adam Bernemann’s drumming is the perfect compliment and there’s this double kick moment near the end of the first verse that slays me. Listen for it. Nate Bassinger playing B-3 and Rhodes keyboards like it’s a real pop record never hurts. I’m no longer certain whether it was Marty Christiansen or Wes Phillips just hitting the notes most of the way through and then throwing a melody into the bass line for the crescendo .. jesus- I am outclassed.There's this through line in the records of me imagining that I am successful and can get around, but the reality was I was just too broke to do anything. And stasis is easier than anything. I liked my life at that age- thirtysomething. Not famous, but .. not popular, but locally famous. And realistically just kinda barely going for it. Taken with the image of myself as impressive to the point where I believed it even if nobody else did and oblivious regardless. Still taken with the notion of DIY and not selling out, but needing the money. Every dollar I got at the time got spent like windfall, like it was a surprise to have it, liquid- like water in a funnel.Randy said about his dog, I can’t remember the dog’s name but it always seemed afraid to see me, “he’s a good boy-pause for effect- when he’s sleepin’”.Stole it. She’s a Good GirlCan’t stay out front too long. I cant write a directed song. I pull up too soon, and radio I didn’t wanna… She’s a good girl when she’s sleepin’. She’s a good girl now. It’s the evenin’. I’m Just leavin’ town. Too bad it worked out wrong. I like to sing a highway song. Get the good broom down from the ceiling. Close up the shop. Polish the wheels. Im dreamin’ I’m just leaving town. Can't say the words out loud. The songs all come out wat too proud and become me. It's a feelin’. Close up the shop polish the wheels. I’m dreamin’ I’m just leavin’ town.How did I get so high? When did I start to stop and wonder why?This one is on the record ‘She Knows the Score’ which of course you can buy right here- This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Man…I’m not sure how to approach this one. A song is a lot of things- It’s like the social media version of yourself, a shell, a presentation. It can be like a prayer or a wish. A song can be a confession, the kind of utterance you make to clear your soul. I think there’s a certain amount of magic in a song, not unlike anything you give your focus to. There's a term for when you learn a new word and then it seems suddenly to be in everything you read. Having a musical set of words you play to yourself in your head can be like a lens. Don’t Worry, Be happy. Everything is Gonna Be All Right.Lets skip back a couple to the one where you bare your soul to be free of its contents, or to share them, like a public confession. You can show who you really are to strangers. It can be bad. And if they don't stone you, it’s probably not as bad as you thought.This is one of those. As I wrote it I at once thought, “Should I say that out loud?” and, “This shit is great.” We probably all have these orbits in our lives where certain things pass that wouldn't pass in other orbits. I have never sworn around my parents, for example. It wouldn't be proper. But I think it’s ok, or maybe even important for kids to know how to swear. When you get to be my age it’s a pretty handy way to let younger people know I’m not their parent, but their peer…. God, that looks shitty on a page. I am pegging myself with the faux cool high school teacher who said shit like, “Mr. Knutson? That’s my dad’s name.” to let the high schoolers know that he was down. I have chased cool and found myself at it’s antithesis. But this song IS that.I have found myself comfortably in the company of criminals and hillbillies and racists and homophobes and mysogenists and losers and drunks and druggies and famous people and..nobody wants to hear that all the humans deserve the same level of compassion and honor. It’s the fucking human condition. There have definitely been people in my life I should have kicked out of bed for eating the metaphorical crackers. I do tend to let things ride and for all the opportunities there have been for things to go the other way, I am still here and relatively intact. The thing about stupid might be to not stop at stupid. Just keep going. I think it’s important to give people all the chances they need to do right. Some people don’t know they are supposed to. The evidence for the benefits of doing right are pretty obvious. Most people who start out down the path to destruction and mayhem get their shit together eventually. Some shitheads turn out to be the sweetest gentlest old fuckers. They know what wrong is. They tried it. It's a special right that the wrongheaded come to when they do.I got fucked up and lost this song entirely, and it came back to me. I remember writing it, and recording it, and forgetting it and remembering it and looking for it and not finding it and then years later having it sent to me in a, remember this creepy fucker? Beautiful, right? Kind of a way. I have had poison ivy covering my torso and thighs and have learned to breathe through a nearly overwhelming need to scratch. Im an alcoholic. I’m a cocaine addict. My religion was practically to lose control, to give up the reigns and let the scene and the mood and the spirit of the night and the fools around me and the emotional gravity run me like a hanky in the dryer. It’s a kind of freedom. It’s one of the innumerable ways there is to find your way. I made it. But before I got here, I unironically wrote this song-ScratchIt’s a cherade. It’s a shadey business. There ain't a thing to witness. Woman I’m comin’ around. When I get paid, there’ll be full forgiveness. I’ve got no problem with this. Woman, I’m comin’ around. I could give myself up to the bay of funding couldn't I? And make a living out of leaving well enough alone. I’d have to change just to keep things the same now wouldn’t I, baby. If I explain it’d be like books to witches burn and rock stars in the ditches. Woman I’m comin’ around. And my cocaine, and scratching where it itches and giving in to bitches, woman I’m comin’ around. I’d have to change just to keep things the same now wouldn’t I?.. to make a living out of leaving well enough alone. I could hook myself up to the bay of funding couldn’t I, baby?The funny part is that both Joni Mitchell and Neil Young mention The Bay of Fundy in their lyrics and in my special junior rockstar bar guy mind I heard, “Bay of funding” and interpreted it to be this metaphorical we-know-david-geffen music industry money connection they had both landed in LA in the sixties with exactly zero real info other than the phrase itself to lead me there… to the bay of funding. I believe my own bullshit. It's a dangerous world.Anyhoo, here’s where to buy the record this song appears on on Bandcamp. You can listen to it over and over again until you are a total sick-o.it is track 5 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I have uttered the phrase, “..because my momma raised me right..” in response to being asked why I did something the way I did it. I think that that is probably true, but I have still managed to acheive the status of situational shitheel enough to wonder if I am not defined as one to certain individuals.I have been short fused. I have at times even decided to operate with enmity, which, though thrilling is just dumb once you know what the fall out is like.I have done innumerable stupid things which I shall not list here. I have fucked up, but I am not a f**k up in that W.S. Burroughs way - permanently observable as such. A person has to love themselves. You can write yourself off. The world is on fire, but writing yourself off doesn't lead to anything good. It allows you to abandon your limmits and disregard the rules. If you write yourself off the road to hell is in your observable imagination so the paving of, and with what intentions become immaterial. It is downhill to hell.Sometimes, regardless of the fact that I am knowingly worthy of self love, I compile all of the evidence from the bad part of memory and close my eyes and shake my head.When I look at this song, The Kelly Moore Estate through that lens, I’m the guy that runs away when s**t gets complicated. I’m the guy who f***s around and takes a powder instead of waiting to find out.But I do love myself. The guy that wrote this song is me, bumping up against my emotional limmits and choosing not to hang out. I’m the guy who at one point thought that this would be cool stuff about my life to share because, for as singular as I see myself, I still want my experience to ring as universal experience. One of the things about art that is performed is people get to have it.I’d sung in front of people enough to know that that was true. And I was having the rock and roll things for myself, not in an I'm-actually-famous kind of a way, but in an I-am-more- famous-than-you kind of a way and thinking I was famous.I’m not sure at the time I would have known the difference I know now. Compassion can be learned, but I'm not certain it can be taught. You may have to come apon the sense it makes like a theorem that suddenly clicks after hours of fruitless struggling. Disjointed logical parts and paths at a certain point line up and an impenetrable chore has come to some sensible, workable and maybe even obvious functionality.This song doesn't mean what it meant 20 years ago. And though I was s**t heeling when I came up with it, it still works. I love the shitheel that wrote this song. He was learning. He still is. He can't judge a shitheel into permanent shitheel status any more than he can judge himself as such.The Kelly Moore EstateWhen I start to back away, city lights like an island in the sky slowly fading into black, while I'm still looking back, comin’ down but still high. I go to the Kelly Moore Estate and lay low. Old girl don't ever stay up late, but you know you can stay there for a song. Skinny girls with runny noses, flirty clothes and car bombs, staying open til she closes, give me all that girl opposes- quiet country nights and new moms at the Kelly Moore Estate to lay low. Old girl don't ever stay up late, but you know you can stay there for a song. Downtown will tell you you're her in between, when she's sees you start to fall ‘cause she knows she's just your b*****b queen and you won't ever make the scene till you can stand back from it all at the Kelly Moore Estate you lay low. Old girl don't ever stay up late, but you know you can stay there for a song.Repeat first verse. Guitar solo. Vamp on chorus. Rock and roll things.Darren Mathews played all the killer leads. Sean Haskins played drums and Randy Davis played bass. I played electric guitar on this whole record. It's a pretty great record.You can buy it here:https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/she-knows-the-score-2 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Recording to an 8-track reel to real machine when everyone had time, I had laid down a number of things performed on this unique sounding harmony tenor guitar. The top of it was split. One of the ladder braces under the front, under the strings was not just broken- it was gone. The string tension was loosely goosey and the action was low and it needed to be played sweetly. It was touchy. I loved it. If I played it with my right hand over the top of the fret board, when I did what would just be a rest on another stringed instrument the strings laid down on the fret board making a click. We mic’d it super close. I had distributed the recording of the tenor guitar part and me singing to some musician friends in a here’s-what-I’m-working-on kind of way. Fiddlers had been in, old friends to work on songs as they got built. It was a good recording process- good strong, well rehearsed basic tracks and then additional things if there were players who could or there was something somebody heard in their head. Good work was happening. My buddy Matt Skinner came in first and had a banjo part and a solo, I think in one take. The single note over the top was one of those late night ideas. Andrew Brockman added a couple more keyboard notes. Ryan Bernemann who played bass late in the Shame Train days came in and played upright bass. We brought Justin LaDuc in to play drums on another newer track (Smith, What? Music? 32) maybe more than a year after I sent out the tenor guitar thing in a here’s-what-I’m-up-to kind of way and it came up conversationally in the session. I was like, you wanna take a pass at it? And he was like, sure. Fuggin’ one take. Nails it. The mix was uneventfully easy. It's just performances. For a long time it was my favorite peice I'd been a part of making.Some of the lyrics were improvised over the tenor guitar part. Some were figured out before hand.AbandonWhen you're taken with abandon, and you're far away from home, and you ain't got no companion. Wherever you lay down is home. When the sky is your direction but your feet won't leave the ground. There ain't no lie in self deception, and what you're standing on is sound. There’s always drifting sand between you and what you wanna be. They tell you you ain't goin’ no where, and all your time is free. You can stay right here and fight your petty ears forever. Me, I’m walkin’ out the door. And with me it’s always better late than never, better left than never more. Repeat first verse.finAnd as always if you like that song and think it would be cool to pay for it, you can buy it on Bandcamp as part of the album Donkey Island, OR as a single.Here's the link.https://samknutson.bandcamp.com/album/donkey-islandIt's track five. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I took a little vacation.I went to war-torn Portland, the place presidentially purported to be burning. It's funny because sometimes social media is spreading inflammatory b******t, and sometimes it's the source for true, on-the-scene reporting. More often than not in my 55 years I have seen a preponderance of attempted truth coming down the conduits that connect the world to me: internet, TV news, the radio. I pick well. I check. I listened to the Columbine situation unfolding from a car radio on a cross country drive.Today it's no guarantee that what is coming at you has a substantial relationship to the truth. Case in point- war-torn Portland:Part of my trip was gloriously free from news of the world in a cabin on the beach, and for the record, Portland is calm. It seemed the same as always. I didn't go to the building ICE is temporarily occupying. It's where the protest is a vital constant. It's where the terrorist furries handing out flowers and dancing in exchange for free tear gas and socialized redistribution of plastic bullets is the current daily norm. In my understanding, it's happening on one side of a city block.In the city where I live, I have seen less than a dozen picketing pro- lifers portrayed as a major protest on the six o’clock news and been well displeased to know a show was capable of such a thing. During the part of my career when the first Caucus in the country was in Iowa, I worked dozens of Caucus events, called “shows” by the production staff that worked them- the same as Broadway shows and rock shows and boat shows and stunt shows and car shows.You can't get the whole thing into the conduits that take the news from where it's happening to the TVs and the radios and the phones that deliver it to the humans, so you present the part that builds the brand, that defines the candidate, that forwards the good or even the best foot. You compromise the reality of the event to do so, in part because you can't get the whole thing into the conduit.If the brand or the messaging is impossible to portray with the media collected on sight, in order to profer the message one might have to run counter to reality itself, leading to, in the long run, a complete mistrust of the conduit, perhaps resulting in…I like the radio, when the news ain't on in the car parked out front of the house before dawn. I like the radio when the news ain't on.But no baby, I aint high like you. And it's who you are not the things that you do. I could take what you take, see who you see, do what you do but babe it ain't me. No,baby, I ain't high like you. And you ain't rich like me. What I got you can't even see. No, baby, you ain't rich like me. I’d like to wander off and never come back home, be the kind of man no one knows is gone. I could sleep under the stars at night, spend my time just gettin’ right, never come back home. Never come back home. I like the radio when the news ain't on in the car parked out front of the house before dawn. I like the radio, when the news ain't on. I like the radio.A version of this recording appears on the album, Lucky 13 which you can buy right here: it's track 10Ryan Bernemann plays upright bass.This is my first time uploading to an RSS feed, so if this gets to you via that let me know how that went.Also let me know if you get this randomly and would like to always get it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

How do you see yourself?When you get well into a complicated task or a long term project do you see yourself or start to see yourself as a character in the project, reflecting the characteristics of the people who came before you chasing the same goals? I think I do. For the same reason that- kids who were into the movie Rattatouille or older kids who really dug Anthony Bourdain's whole deal, take on the lifestyle they associate with being a feral food artist, I took on the artists lifestyle. Dudes that play guitar and sing in bands and grew up in the 70s and 80s have this deep littany of human tales, popularized through the music press and tabloids. I was on the road to find out, playing that role. I was doing the stuff that I was supposed to do, according to the “legend”- a word that conveniently means both lore and the key by which you read a map.I even felt pretty good about it still when this song came rolling out with riffology owing to Neil Young and references to Ginsberg and The Band, unironically sprinkled there in. Half RightI just might get it half-right in the hours from three to five a.m. while the girls are busy losing friends to me. I see myself a damned site leadin’ with the other kids are sleepin’. The fate of the known world is up to me. And I'm a star ing rock and roll phenomenon. Reality don't hit til after dawn. I live my nights high like a rocket. A stranger tells me I should stop it- a bigger man with half as much to burn. If I get a job my ass is draggin’. Spend a week home on the wagon. Yeah, you can take my turn. And I'm a starving rock and roll phenomenon. Reality don't hit til after dawn. If you can read me I'm all right. And I can hold out here all night listening to the hippest Howl, best version of Stagefright. I just might get it half right in the hours from three to five a.m. while the girls are busy losing friends to me.If you think this song is awesome, it's a part of an album called Splendor that you can buy right here: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I used to introduce this song by telling the audience that it took as long to write as it takes to play it. It's true. It refers to a night spent in a bar called the Cloud Room which was on the top of the Camlin Hotel in downtown Seattle and from when it was built in 1926 until the year 2000 had a clear view of the Sound. It was glass on three sides. The beers were expensive and the clientele was fancy and a combination of hotel guests and upwardly mobile young people. I was 30.Bathtub meth hit the party scene in the town where I grew up after I was gone. It's a shitty drug. My exposure to it was to observe the wreckage when I came home to visit- disaster porn. I hadn't seen reasonable adults in nice cloths doing speedy drugs. It didn't register. It made sense in an I’ve-heard-about-this-kind-of-thing way, but it was really my first exposure to hard drug use that wasn't shameful, criminal and hidey. It was urbane in a so-what way.You guys are on coke?Yeah, so what. It’s awesome.It would be half a decade before I got myself into any such thing.I was babe in the woods. I was kind of enthralled and not really brave enough to get in the water.Trouble Hangin' OutTrouble you’ve been hangin’ out so long, I’m amazed that it’s the first I wrote this song. Trouble you’ve been hanging out so well, life has been so good it’s near impossible to tell you’re there at all, but I see you there tonight. I’m gonna toss this back and move one stool over. Rows of tiny lights across the bridge, city tricks are just for kids, I wont be staying here too long, but then I could be wrong. I’m gonna miss the view from this high off the ground, the way the rain comes off the sound, pretty city girls with five beak loads of twenty dollar bills, the way they smile when I tell ‘em money kills and they say baby you should die so well, but I can tell their hustlers smiles, true all the while to how they feel, they are for real. They say they will but I know they’ll never call. I take no fall. I lose no face. ‘Cause I know I’ve no place in this town. I can see you here tonight. I’m gonna toss this back and move one stool over.I had finished Mudfence Turnaround when I was travelling back and forth to the Pacific Northwest for the first time. A friend of mine had moved there and had a job that made it possible for him to get me booked in places where I could make some money. I had already almost ended up there. When I was home, in Iowa I got a band together and we made a record to follow Mudfence Turnaround. Pretty good record. You can get it here:Trouble Hangin' Out, is the last track on the album. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I have always been a quitter.I have successfully quit smoking cigarettes nearly a dozen times. I give up. A thing that I value in songwriting is the kind of connection you get to an artist who has decided to be fully honest in spirit if not wholely. You can tell when something comes from the middle of a person, from inside them. People have a subconscious understanding of the intimacy of an unspoken truth, of someone who has quit trying to conceal their heart.This recording is old. At the time I was gathering the things that ended up on this collection my friend Andy and I were exploring stairwells and halls for the reverb there was in ‘em by rolling in with a four track cassette recorder and a mic or maybe two mics and setting up to perform. We didn’t ask for permission we just went in and did it. Somewhere there are hours of tape with people walking through. Its not like a camera. People will wait out your shot and walk through after. This was taken more like, ‘what the f**k are you guys doing in here?’ I had long hair and I smelled and I was high. It kinda figures.There was a songwriting thing happening here then in the late nineties and early 2000s. It was self referential and tight and there were a gang of us who liked each others work and played on each others shows. This guy Dave Olsen had this record called #80. I’m not sure if I remember correctly that he was in a long distance relationship with someone a days drive down interstate 80. I hadn’t yet ever owned a car when I wrote this song so the idea of trying to do something like that, like maintaining a long distance thing that involved a drive had a completely foreign quality to me, but I could imagine it. And I was learning about heartbreak by throwing myself into things with the kind of ideals that someone raised on eighties movies and TV brought to relationship experimentation. I didn't make any bones about writing songs that were more serious and maybe darker than what everybody else was doing.And I was the kind of kid who was really effected by the emotional pal of real life. I did things with a romantic’s abandon but suffered like a boxer after. I’d get down and then just drink about it. There aren't really places where it’s proper to emote with the furvor I was inclined toward.I went in dumb and thrashy and then came out sad and dumb and thrashy or catatonic with grief. I knew myself to be like this but when you are young and down on the scene everybody is a stranger so no one expected it of me. I could still get in.So this song is me leaving the place of an imaginary relationship and just sadly going until the metaphorical wheels fall off.It's blues I guess.DakotaAs the road passes out the back way round to the part of my heart where you’re no longer found I nearly turn to water every time Dakota passes by my side.I’d never been alone til she left me. I’d never been high, til she let me in. I never got the picture now I wish that I had never been.Palaminos in the tall grass, elevator every five mile passed. Seen half this state in my rearview mirror since dawn this mornin’ better part of a year.Two days and I ran out of gas 200 miles into Iowa’s ass. It came to my attention I was someplace I had never been.When I lay down by the side of the road. Realized that I'm done something I had been told not to do. To run with no intention livin’ through is marked down as a win.Repeat first verse.I think we recorded it in a stairwell with all the mics far and I just yelled. People complained to me about the fidelity of this record, but I felt good about the feel and the audibility and there was a little movement of four track guys making tape only records and then releasing them on CD, Sam Eggnog, David Dondero, Guided by Voices… it felt completely legit to me to do it this way.I have not put the record that this song is on onto Bandcamp, but if you are super curious you can buy it from I-tunes and Apple Music and all of the other things. It’s on Spotify. If this kind of thing appeals to you do a little digging. There are 15 good songs on Mudfefnce Turnaround.. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

Portland is radical. During the pandemic shutdowns a part of the city got cordoned off by some radicals. It got some national attention. There was a big vocal effort to get the police defunded. People were being pulled off the street by paramilitary dudes in uniforms with no insignia into unmarked black vans. There has been some pretty radical progressive drug policy reform and unreform. There is a huge population of people who live outside. Some of them are mentally ill or on drugs or both. Some are hearty people who just can't afford to pay rent and are semi-permanently camping or living in their cars. The weather stays pretty nice. My girlfriend lives out there, in the part of Portland that’s affordable. It’s the part where that marginalized segment of the populace can live mostly unmolested by police.It's not dangerous. You don't get mugged or shot. The city is, if you were to put it on a country wide scale, very left of center. It's very queer. Its very forward thinking. The strippers are unionized. Sometimes there are drag races on the city streets in the middle of the night.There's some very white nationalist history to the state of Oregon and Portland's police in particular, but that's an entire other thing When I'm there, my girlfriend and I will play a show or two and we hit the open mics. We try to get our music heard and be on stage.All of this is to establish a kind of ouvre for this little story to live in.We were at this open mike and the last act on the list was a dude with a mic and a dude with a guitar doing a kind of free verse hip hop oriented thing.The one with the mic said they'd met outside earlier, smoking a blunt. They were both black and it was an almost exclusively white audience.The rap kept coming back around to the line, “I killed one man. I saved many men.”Spitting that to a room full of middle aged white folks with guitar cases got me almost choked up. It was radical.It stuck with me.In light of recent events, it came up as a song part. The song is a little story. It might be an allegory about judgement, the kind of radical judgement that leads one person to decide that it's necessary to kill another person.Even if it seems situationally to be the right thing to do, even in the best case scenario it leads to more of the same.And even though this could be interpreted as inflammatory, the intention here is for us all to have a look at what happens if it goes good. Cuz it goes bad. You can say there's no objective right and wrong and that's all well and good, but consider the consequences at scale.Try to think of all the effects and for God's sake disregard the idea of glory or riteousness. Those ideas are to blind you to consequence.Here's this, but also listen to the song Arthur McBride.JudgesI killed one man to save many men. Now I know I'm gonna go to my grave in sin. I played my hand. It was one of many just trying to change the world I found myself in. When I ran the crowd closed in behind me so the law man couldn't catch me. Now I know I'll never put this thing behind me and Lord knows I'll never be free. I ain't never been free.Wake up, baby. I don't wanna go. But I've been on every show. They're gonna come for me by morning. I'm gonna take my things and run. Maybe I shouldn't have come. Some hobos took me in. We knew we couldn't win. We stood under a bridge just drinkin’. An old man handed me his flask. He said, “Brother, I just had to ask, what were you thinkin’?”I said, I killed one man to save many men. Now I know I'm gonna go to my grave in sin. I played my hand. It was one of many just trying to change the world I found myself in. And when I ran the crowd closed in behind me so the law man couldn’t catch me. Now I know I’ll never put this thing behind me and Lord knows I’ll never be free. But I ain’t never been free.When I woke up I was in front of a hangin judge and they had already built one of those number seven shaped rope swing porches. Outside the parking lot was full with the cast and crew from raging bull with pitch forks and torches. When I stepped out over the crowd I though I was about to be lowered down on to their shoulders. But I didn’t fall that far. I didn’t fall that far.The judge poked his head out of the window and he said,I killed one man to save many men. Now I know I’m gonna go to my grave in sin. I played my hand. It was one of many designed to change the world I found myself in.Remember now, when I ran the crowd closed in behind me so the law man couldn't catch me. Now, I know I’ll never leave this thing behind me and I know I’ll never be free. But I ain’t never been free.This song is not for sale.Here's a link to Arthur Mcbride:Included photo byKevin Gunzenhauser This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

People get forgiven. People you love get to get away with things. There are limits of course. You can't let people walk all over you. There's a point at which the allowance you give someone you can't fault out of respect or love becomes them abusing you. You can't let it go that far. It's an esoteric set of parameters, Wax Lips, Wax Wings.Wax Wings by their very nature keep you from flying close enough to the sun to burn up. When your wings disintegrate and you fall the fact that you weren't burned up by the heat of the sun is cold comfort. By the time you are cooked or splatted you are just meat, unopinionated flesh. Wax Lips are horrible candy that tastes good and is satisfying to chew but cannot be eaten.Esoteric parameters. A man can be bad at drinking, and forgiven. Judged to be the man under the influence and not defined by the influence he is under. It can go far.And people don't see all of you. Your intimates know you as a collection that includes your foibles. The dudes at the office know you in your suit. Church ladies see you on your best behavior. We are aware of the eschelons we traverse and where the boundaries lie.People who are not just whole and themselves know where they can go off the rails and where they must stay on, where appearances have consequences and where they don't. Rock and rollers are gonna get drunk and high. Artists might be undependable and late or flighty. Their glasses might be dirty. It might be lost on them that their emotional fortitude is rocked by the late nights and the intake. The people who have to absorb the blows from the wild emotional swings are those most likely to love them as a collection that includes those swings as the foibles.It's excusable, so the responsibility to become whole and cease to swing falls on you. And maybe a song can get you by til you come together. But don't ride on it. You can't write the really good ones until you are whole and real. So, write your way toward that. Wax Lips Wax WingsYou've seen him go liquid so many times, When his coat drags on the ground it shines over. You know he’s been sleepin’ in his clothes, and that nobody else knows.You know you hold on to his heart in your hand, and that he can barely understand when you go around wearin’ his clothes and you don't let nobody know.O! When you go, your heart goes silently with you alone.O? When you go, your heart goes silent.He says he wishes he could tell the whole world when he's got you alone. He says you bring a raise to his pride, but he still feels obliged to hide away your love. He says you bring a raise to his pride, but he still feels the need to hide.O! When you go, your heart goes silently with you alone.O? When you go, your heart goes silent.Repeat first verse. And if you love this, you can buy it as part of the album SPLENDOR and keep it until all the digital s**t goes out of fasion…buy it right…Here: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

This one has a tragic history. I wrote it from an honest place. It took about as long to write as it takes to play it. Sometimes they just fall out. The band was still a thing but my life was a mess. It's like a love song for the type of swinging heathan I was and the sort of partnering that seemed to happen amicably at the time.Being the kind of “public figure” that I was, dating harlots briefly drew devicive attention.The first time I played this song live, a table of single girls hissed at it from right up front. At me, really.When it was a new song, I only ever played it that once. That hissing was enough for me to decide to skip it as part of the live show. It's merely a trifle.I didn't play in front of people for a long long time. When I started to play again I had the support of some of the old gang. The sound guy from a place I used to play with the band was working at a little restaurant owned by a guy who had all the band records and they asked nice and I played. At the restaurant it was the same sound guy, now a little older and married: Trevor.Trevor confided in me that this song was his wife's favorite song of mine. I shouldn't judge, but I did. I was like, really? He assured me it was true. So I learned it. It's simple. I'd save it for later in the show when she came for him and then play it. It became a thing. I'd play it when she showed up and then she would discretely say thank you to me after. It was nice. Trevor was apeice of work, but he gifted well.He died in his sleep, probably from alcohol related things. He and his wife were my neighbors when he died.Around a year later she was hit by a car on a bike ride and died. Now I don't know if I should play it or not. I bet I will on Friday, but what it means to me now is so much more complicated than what it meant when it came out of me the first time.At the end of the day they're not for me and perhaps just feelings button pushers and I might as well have been playing it the whole time to anyone within ear shot. I feel self conscious enhabiting these old songs, because they are from a me that once was but is no longer. Like a snap shot from a drunken make-out on top of a parking ramp no one was meant to see. The shot composition makes it worth looking at. The people are not.A Broken Hearted Girl with a Dirty MindI want a broken hearted girlWho wants my timeI need the letter of her lawLike she needs mineInspired and tattooedAnd about to go blind from waintin’A broken hearted girl with a dirty mindShe knows my way from all over townA broken hearted girl who gets aroundShe begs me to stay. Then she changes her mindCuz to a broken hearted girl, I'm a waste of time.It's the first song on an inappropriately named record by the band Shame Train called SPLENDOR Which you can buy righthere: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

I suppose I have mentioned The Country Blues as a thing. It’s a thing.The Blues form came to America from West Africa in the unfortunate way that most of the cultural things that came to America from Africa came. Country music came on a long strange path from India. Carnatic music left india as little groups of string players that exchanged melodic “solos” and went from place to place to place, making it’s mark in the Romanie culture in eastern Europe and roaming into the Gypsie Jazz scene in Spain and France and across into the tinker and traveler cultures in Ireland and Scotland, as it was not fixed to a place into England and eventually appalacia flavoring the string band traditions of all of those places and the melodic choices and the words and the themes and it didn't stay there either. It roamed to the Mississippi delta where it met up with the blues proper and gave the owners of guitars something to keep themselves with when the banjoists and fiddlers left them for jazz.Country blues tries to get a guitar to do the work of a whole band. It bucks the traditions of the string bands and embraces stride piano and the stuff that would become rock and roll and what it touts and flaunts barely more specifically than womanizing is booze.The country blues, it says, “Time signature? Naw, man- feel!”It leans on phrases and shapes and runs and it thumps along all bleedin’ and drinkin’ peach brandy from its sock and showing you where you're wrong and swaggering.When you leave it it calls you. It calls you baby and reminds you that you like it- confident from being a little high.It could be any dance, but for the sake of this song, It's a Drunken Waltz, The Country Blues.It's a drunken waltz the country bluesStep out the frying pan get the fire on your shoesDon't have to live like you mean it if you're preachin’ born to lose.It's a drunken waltz, the country blues.She says. “You don't have to reinvent the wheel.”I say. “Whatima do, baby? That's the way that I feel.”She says “fine, but when you're sober you ain't got no sex appeal.And you don't have to reinvent the wheel.”So I sit alone and I pick guitar.And if I had you I would wonder where you are,But I don't, and I don't care how gone or how far.I never wonder where you are.So there is waltzing to be done and there are drinks to be had and if someone showed up with some cocaine, well, it wouldn't be that bad…except for waking up in the afternoon wondering, where's all that money that I had?Oh well. It wouldn't be that bad.Ting ting solo which is the core melody from a circus waltz called, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeez, because when I drank I was even more sure I was funny than I am now.*repeat first verse*The first collection of pieces I made available without a band on board was an album called Reinventing the Wheel, the title to which was inspired by the lyrics of this very song.Which you can buy right…Here: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

This song is on a relatively long list of songs I mean to learn how to play.I played a week ago friday and I started and stopped a song I wrote and breifly explained that I had just learned it.The audience laughed. I bet half of those people had seen me play that song before.“Its a 25 year old song!”I excused. It was a 30 year old song I hadn't played in probably 20 years before the week preceding the show.What I am trying to say is that it is not unusual for me not to know a song I wrote. I let it all go for a while. I didn’t play any songs for most of ten years.Now, during the period of time I wrote the one that this piece is about I was spending my evenings writing stuff that was beyond my ability to play and then taking Adderall and practicing/learning the songs as I wrote them, til I could pull them off well enough to record them and then recording them right away, as soon as I could play em. Then forgetting them and starting something new- 2010ish for a few years.There are piles of these. But this one is honest. It feels comparatively classy in it's recorded company.I meant to tell you I don't get lonelyWhile you were here, but it’s too lateFor me to tell you I think of you onlyAnd you'll never have to waitUntil we both recall I said I'll never miss you at all, and you know you never hesitateAnd if you r-u-n-o-f-t with my heartI'll recover right here where I lay I meant to tell you, I don't get lonelyBut now I've got nuthin’ to say.Every year or so, I'll sit down with this recording and get a couple moves in to figuring it out and then be distracted by dinner plans or a small shiny object.At the time I wrote it I was trying… I was a successfully, actively single person. I got laid. But I think really, I wanted to be in a committed thing.This got said to me by someone in a moment when I could receive it four or five years ago, “I fall in love with everyone I have sex with.” It was cautionary. I had heard things like that my whole life and poo pooed ‘em.It's true for me too.And in a way this song is me saying that I felt that way while still seeming cool with all the casual f*****g, that was in fact love making, that was going on in my life at the time.If the way this tune got made seems like it could develop into a cool album you can buy the one of them there is right…Here:….-you click on it….the box below… not the photo above…. although that is the cover photo…you're doing great. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

There is this song that gets called Country Blues that was first recorded by Doc Boggs in 1928.You have heard parts of it in other songs or as other songs. It’s a lament detailing what happens to gentle people when they move somewhere where the people are on a scale of gentle - urbane, more down the way toward urbane.If you come from where people wear the clothes their momma made, you take what you eat and eat what you take, places where God or the holler provide and the response to progress of any sort is, “We don't need none of that around here” you might not be sure what to do in town. If women with whiles and men bent on separating you from your coinage are more than you’ve seen you might have a fall of sorts.Traditions exist because they fulfill and function in places and times of great need. They look odd in the presence of plenty.I moved to the city where I live in my early twenties- a geeky skinny kid from a farm town with a working train line. There was a machine parts factory across the alley from the house I grew up in. A block away the train line passed through the lot of a small trucking company. Up the line another block there was a grain elevator. I talk smart, but I am simple really.I moved to a big ten college town when I was still young enough to always get carded for cigarettes.But I thrived. A socially awkward kid succeeding in the bars, I was.Years later, of course, I was old.Stuff like having your name written in a list of the hottest guys in the women's bathroom of a bar where famous authors and alcoholic grad students hung out lost its appeal.Movin to town used to seem so much like what you did just before losing touch with living a good way. Why don’t you stay? It used to seem so much. Bathroom walls used to seem so big. Some people got no sense of glory. When someone tells your story, but you don't know, it used to seem so big.The city reaches out, but it wont let go and being good at hiding doubt’s the same as, ‘Baby I know it’s gonna be ok. Why don't you stay? You used to seem so much…’ This part requires a little annotation. ‘Trouble Hangin’ out’ and ‘Nerves of Steel’ are two songs I wrote*. Both are on albums that got tiny releases. This self reference has been noticed by exactly one person. ‘Sweet Carolina’ and ‘My Winding Wheel’ are songs on Ryan Adam’s record ‘Heartbreaker’ - his only good one, a memorandum of a loss of innocence like Country Blues. I got trouble hanging out, but I’ve got nerves of steel, sweet Carolina and my winding wheel if you wont stay. I’ll be ok.Me, I envy the man on the street drunk on wednesday afternoon, no place to go and a smile that I don't know anymore.Well, the city reaches out, but it wont let go. Being good at hiding doubt’s the same as I don’t know. It's gonna be ok. Why don't you stay? It used to seem so much.I got a window facing the street, bars to keep it safe and food to eat I bought at the store but I don’t know.See, moving to town used to seem so much like what you did just before losing touch with living a good way. why don't you stay? It used to seem so much…likeLiving a good way . Why don't you stay? It used to seem so much.I'm living a good way. Why don’t you stay? It used to seem so much.It's a Country blues.These guys that knew me when I wrote this had a nice studio. They asked me to come over and record. It turned into a whole project during the period of time when I was transitioning from playing theater shows back to being a working person. When we quit working on it it didn't seem like there was any reason to make an album. It languished unfinished until the pandemic shut downs. It has famous musicians on it, but this track is mostly me and Andrew Brockman. He played the pedal steel. I played tenor guitar. It’s the first thing we ever worked on together and it wasn’t done until a decade later when we were adding souzaphone at Dave Helmer’s place.This song is available on a record called Donkey Island, which you can purchase rightHere:* Trouble Hangin’ Out is on a record called ‘sam knutson Shame Train and the Devil’s Square Quilt’. it is covered in What? Music? 9.* Nerves of Steel is on a CD produced to raise funds for the Mud River Music Festival probabaly in the year 2000. It is covered in What? Music? 24. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com

This song is called:The BelmonteIt was a special time. I was in a cool band. I was pretty high most of the time and really high some of the time. Like fifties professional drinkers- you drink a little bit all day and then you have a nice dinner and get hammered with your friends. I drank, but it was only part of the blend I was applying.I have always been and still am fascinated with the kind of every day crime that goes on all around us all the time. I am a small town kid and until I moved to a “city” I thought that people truly were good. My parents were good. Their friends were good. The president was bad, but he was just sort of dim and probably fun at parties. He’d been in some movies. He wasn’t evil. He was laughable. Clearly just stoked to finally be playing president.All of that is beside the point. When you get somewhere were there is this everyday crime and its right there where you can see it, you look right at it. You might even sit closer to get a good look. Criminals and smart druggies that are getting away with it are like movie stars to a small town kid.I’m fine. The point is I’m fine now, but I got in there and looked and some songs came out.This is one.There was this Hip Hop group that put out records and toured and stuff and some of them lived in this building. There would be a cop car parked across the street from this building, and the guys were selling the cocaine out of the place. Eventually they got busted, but even this is a little off the path. The building was called the Belmont. There was no e. I added that. I think I thought it was the right way to spell it. I’m good like that. You'll see me do it again.At some point during this special time I got pulled over at a couple minutes after two driving a friend home from the bar. I was cojent. I was fully aware, the cops liked me, but I blew over and they took me to jail. I paid a lawyer to get me a deferred judgement and I did a drug evaluation which I know I failed, an out patient treatment program and AA that I had to get someone to sign off on. I’d go directly to the bar after. I failed UAs for the outpatient. I sat in the back row at driving school and drew in the workbook. It was expensive. I hated it.I liked group because there were charactars in it. There was a light light Latina with “Princess” tatooed across the back of her neck in swirley cursive script who bragged about slaying in her four inch heels in the sobriety test, saying how some people can just do it, yo. She didn’t think she needed to be there. Then there was a coke dealer in his early 20s. He was a very regular looking white guy who was probably going to go away for a long time, but he was confident and honest. He told how he sold coke to brain surgeons and lawyers and anybody else. He talked about this place he delivered to. He said he knew they were smoking it because the blinds were all broken from them coming up to the window and looking out. And that is where this song came from.The first line is, I know you’re smokin’. The blinds are all broken and you’re too high to come to the door.And no one’s looking out for you, but my baby.There was a short lived spin off sit com from Happy Days called Joni Loves Chachi and there was an episode wherein the dilema was that they had to sleep in the same bed, but they were two good catholic kids and they needed to find away to assure that they wouldn't get up to any hanky panky because its idealised TV from the imaginary fifties in like 1980 or something. So they decided to try to sleep with each one foot on the floor.Her shoes don't stay on the floor.And she don't come around here no more .And I’m fine.I told you I was fine. I’m fine.Once the sarcasm was turned on I was off to the races.Come back baby.You know I mean maybe.I cant take any more.I don't drive so the highway sides aren’t mine.I had just lost my license.I move too slow to wait for a sign.Is a throw away line for the rhyme.I’ll be where you left me a line.Baby, I’m fine.At the time, in this bar I went to there was a place in the back that you could just walk into. It was austensibly a staff only part of the place for the restaurant, but the restaurant was closed late at night. If you had coke you would cut out some lines on the back of a cd or something and leave it on top of the water heater and send your buddies back there to get a line one at a time.If I had time I’d take a step back. I could be led back down.But my whole life seems like a rain check. Roll up every paycheck.Hand up every hand me down.Cokeheads are always busy.Repeat first verse.The names and locations of the bars have all changed since the last time I did cocaine. When someone I know gets into it I get all concerned.It's hard to watch someone do something you know is a s**t idea.Criminals and smart druggies look like movie stars to a small town kid.When Ramón got out after 11 years, I saw him at the grocery store. He had just got out. F****r asked me if I knew anybody who was looking. He probly owed somebody a lot of money.The Belmonte is on an album called Splendor and you can buy it by clicking right… here: This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit samknu.substack.com