better from above

just home from playing french horn for Brooke Waggoner's cd release show at the Belcourt. It was a fun show with a lot of fun production and Brooke was stellar as always. Save a few flubs on my part and fairly dreadful sound engineering, it was a great night. Lots of good friends, new and old.

By no fault of any current circumstances, I'm thinking a lot tonight about being away; away from home, from friends and family. Often a huge part of playing music for a living means being gone a lot. There's something about moving from town to town like that that seems at times lovely, but often quite (albeit poetically) melancholy. If it's a town that's dreadful, boring or just a bust in general...no great failure. lesson learned; avoid Leiben, Arkansas next time. But, if it's a town you immediately fall in love with, your bags still get packed and you're still leaving. For some reason (probably because i've been home for almost a month) I'm ready to have a solid run of shows again; ready to be gone. Not because i don't love being here...i do. and i actually LOVE having a routine at home that i can never quite get into on the road. I don't know. I suppose it's the greener grass...but that's not quite the full picture either.

If you're lucky enough to find a place that feels like home, you've got to leave to keep it. Which especially makes this time in life an interesting one. There's a part of me that's always invested in people, but (to awkwardly quote myself), "kept my suitcase small". I'm suppose if i was married or just more settled in general, i'd feel differently about leaving. More to leave behind i suppose. Though, i can't imagine any 180s on the subject. who knows?

I heard two people talking tonight about returning from the road recently and it just made me wonder...Is it easier to be the one leaving home or to be the one left at home? I tend to get in my own world on the road and. Contrary to what we often feel like, we return home only to find life has continued in our absence and people have ceased keeping up with your comings and goings.

I think there's probably something in us that's attracted to that loneliness...or solidarity. Whatever you call it, I think David put it well in "Astronaut" when he sang, "couldn't tell you for sure the view is better from above i'm not the first of the astronauts to leave the place i love " I've always loved that song. NPR It's a painful roundabout admission that, while the places we leave exert a gravitational pull, they can never miss us the way we miss them."

for now, i'll just stick to being home...and maybe...just maybe..."spend a lot of time finding out just where that is".