Coming to you live from a still Tuesday in New York City. The weather is nicer than usual this time in April. I feel upbeat. More alive than I normally do from the energy of the show last Friday night. It was crazy. It was the album release show for Holes In Our Stories. I had unrealistically high hopes for it like I always tend to. And I think it may have exceeded them…

What a fun night officially kicking off the album and book. Now launched. First of all, the show was sold out, in a jam-packed, shoulder to shoulder small room in the lower east side of New York City, which made it extra exciting. The venue Arlene’s Grocery (which I had never played before) bought us a cake and wrote us a sweet card in the green room to congratulate us on the sellout. That’s a first for me, for sure! I’m happy enough to get on stage and have a working microphone. Let alone a backstage cake.

I didn’t feel nervous beforehand, but I really wanted to give this show everything I could. Something about the idea of it being the album release show added a strange amount of pressure, like commemorating the album for years to come was resting entirely on the shoulders of this one performance. So I went as hard as I could possibly go. Didn’t breathe for a second. Pushed myself to live in the moment. Here & now. Alive & well.

We played through our setlist which we had rehearsed every night that week, out in a small loft apartment in New Jersey getting ready for the show. Something is always different with the live wire energy of the room, though. It’s something you can’t totally quantify. More than the sum of the parts of music and live vocals and a crowded room of sweaty, buzzing people on a Friday night. Something else entirely.

Maybe it’s the idea of what us brings us together there in the first place: music, our very separate but connected stories, and to some extent, a shared understanding of the other strangers in the room.

Our set was as follows: a few lines of Break Some Ice, then cutting it off and jumping into Creases (equipped with live trumpets by Nate Sander), followed by Ghosts (where I held up the microphone and let the audience rap some of my lyrics which they knew by heart, insanely cool), followed by The Only Torn-Up Boy, followed by Neighborhood Saints (where we taught everyone the chorus vocals because Louka got food poisoning the day before and was in the E.R. as the show was happening), followed by Garden of the Ashes (where Gabe Valle let his violin sing underneath those string chords), followed by Mourn (featuring Regina Zaremba), followed by Sail Up The Sun (where the whole room sang along), followed by Fingerprints (I whipped out my acoustic guitar and Andres Vahos featured on drums, a new one-time addition to the set for this show), followed by Holes In Our Stories, followed by The Glory Years, plus a special request encore of Keep Your Friends Close for some fans who drove a long way to the show…and lastly, of course, The Window Seat with a “grand larceny you stole my damn heart from me” chant.

I haven’t ever been gone, but there’s no other way to put it besides that it feels really, really good to be back.

This show reminded me of so many mini realizations that I have again and again when I perform live: it’s powerful to get people together in a room with a giant common thread (especially when we all sing along, very loudly), I want to get out there and play A MILLION more shows everywhere and anywhere possible, I want to continue bringing the tour book to every show that I do so that it can be signed and kept up for the sake of posterity, and that I really appreciate my friends, my fans, and everybody who made this release show and this album possible.

I know I wasn’t as present as I should have been with releasing new music and playing new shows over the last few years. Now that we’re here, I’ll leave you with this:

I haven’t ever been gone, but there’s no other way to put it besides that it feels really, really good to be back.