Uncertain Beginnings
Another new beginning that sparks an archival return
Among the legendary chance encounters that shaped musical history—Mick Jagger and Keith Richards meeting by accident on a train platform, Lennon being introduced to McCartney at a church fair—there’s my own, much smaller story. It didn’t change the world, but it significantly changed my life. Nick pulling up on a remote mountain road, offering help after my donut spare had just popped, set the course for one of the most meaningful relationships I’ve ever had.
My son and I were outside the car, scratching our heads about next steps, when a silver, late-model Subaru with oversized tires rolled up and a friendly man jumped out and asked if we needed a compressor. We did. Over the whine of the pump, he told us he worked at a music store in Santa Fe. Yes, he’d like to come by to check out my tenor banjo and have a beer.
We had actually broken down just a few turns below my house—the donut had blown, leaving us stranded—so once the tire held enough air to limp forward, we led him up the winding dirt road to the tiny mountain village where I lived. After hanging out for a bit, we already had plans to get together the next week to play music.
That was the unlikely beginning of a five-year, weekly musical collaboration. Year in and year out, week by week, we met at my home in the remote east mountains. Nick claimed he loved the drive up and out of the giant northern New Mexico central rift valley—a forty-five-minute quest of epic views, horseshoe roads, and watershed after watershed through the Ponderosa forests of the Sangre de Cristos.
We played in the living room of that house in winter and the back room in summer. When I moved, we kept it going in whatever room served as the music space in the various houses I lived in across Northern New Mexico. After a couple of years, I moved to an RV on the property where he lived, and for a brief time we transformed his living room into our practice space. Later, when I moved into a small casita on the same land, one of the two rooms became a dedicated music room. We built shelving and stands for amps to make use of the tiny space. The collaboration kept taking new forms, but the weekly rhythm held.
My time in New Mexico was very challenging, and my relationship with Nick was a bright spot. We worked on cars together, and after a lifetime of associating that kind of work with impatient, unkind masculine space—because of who I had learned from—his calm, steady approach was a balm. It opened something in me that had long been guarded in friendships with men.
Back in the remote village, he’d started casually telling me he loved me. At first I found it shocking in its vulnerability. But in a very hard and dry place during the pandemic, when death seemed just around the next horseshoe bend, he made this kind of simple care make sense. Over time, Nick became family.
During my summer 2025 trip to New Mexico, Nick and his then-girlfriend, now wife, hosted me. Nick immediately agreed to play a stream together, and even after a year of separation, we fell directly into improvisation again. After that visit something in me felt revived—like a long thread had been picked up again.
Here’s the first example of Nick and me jamming in this new room—the next space after more than a year apart. This recording captures the first 25 minutes of that afternoon, and you can hear the chemistry immediately. I originally published a version with added organ parts, but in the spirit of what I’ve learned while editing the Regular Humans archive—that less is more, and that the raw, uncompressed version often carries the power of the moment—I’m releasing the longer, mostly untouched version. These are the first 25 minutes of us jamming on the Fourth of July, 2025.
Returning to Nick, and to the music we make together, nudged me back toward the hundreds of hours of recordings from our five years of work—the Tascam DR-05X taped to a mic stand or propped against a shelf somewhere. That archive has already begun to surface. I’ve released REGULAR and HUMANS, and I’m now deep into mixing and mastering the third album, Regular Humans, the full multitrack project scheduled for release in the spring of 2026. This reunion also marked the midpoint of a solo period—two years of building inward from the lessons of New Mexico, a practice of patience, attention, and a deepened relationship with myself through solo streaming. It’s a bridge toward a new start in Spain, where I look forward to creating collaborations with others again.
The full track is available to download on Bandcamp.