Now get Chrome for your upper torso. The latest, and most swell, EP t-shirt is now available. Umbrella design on cardinal red, 100% cotton shirt. Purchase yours in the Goods Webstore.

If you live in the Chicago area – any of its 227 sq. miles – or in Michigan I’m playing a run of Chrome concerts and radio interviews starting this Thursday Jan. 14. If you’re around, and are interested, most of the shows are free, or an offering will be taken. I’d love to see you there. Spread the word, drag a friend, stay warm.

1/14 – New Hope Church – Alsip IL – 8:30PM
1/15 – SouthBridge Church – Orland Park IL – 7:00PM
1/16 – Elmhurst CRC – Elmhurst IL – 7:00PM
1/17 – Alleluia! Lutheran Church – Naperville IL – 11:30AM
1/21 – Hickory Creek Community Church – Frankfort IL – 7:00PM
1/22 – Grace Reformed Church – Lansing, IL – 7:30pm
1/23 – Parkview Christian Church – Lockport IL – 7:00PM
1/24 – Georgetown CRC – Hudsonville, MI – 6:45PM
1/25 – Calvin College – Cave Cafe – Grand Rapids, MI – 8:00PM

The folks at Under The Radar recently gave Chrome an Honorable Mention (mention) in the 2009 version of its annual Top Gourmet Albums of The Year.

“His previous releases featured solid songwriting and quality musicianship, but Chrome takes both of these to another level.”

Be sure to check out Episode 42, which features my interview with the show’s host, Dave Trout.

Wishing you all a healthy and fearless 2010. Thank you for your support this past year; it was an interesting one.

Here are the highlowlights:
* Monroe, our 2nd child, is now ten months old, crawling, and getting into his three-year-old brother’s beeswax. Get used to it, eldest child. Here, I feel the weight of men.
* Chrome released on August 25, owing WHOLLY to the Patron Saints who made it possible with their financial support. Incredible.
* This fall, I taught Ancient World History and Ethics to high school sophomores and seniors. I wore a tie every single day. Strange year.
* The traditionally woeful New Orleans Saints football team clinched homefield advantage throughout the NFC playoffs. Beware of flying pigs.
* I did not write a single song in 2009. Not a one. Pathetic. Frustrating year.
* I read four, five books tops, the entire year, two of which were British history I reread from my college days. Ask me about the year 1066 or the fatal Charge of the Light Brigade, and I might be able to hold my end of a conversation.
* I am thankful for the beginning of a new year, and the end of this particular one. Let’s move on.

Here’s wishing you all a courageous and bright 2010. Thanks for your words and notes of encouragement along the way. Cheers and hope-
EP

This holiday season, take advantage of some special deals:

Chrome (2009) or Scarce (2006) — $6.99 per copy (regular price $13.00)
Chrome + Revenge of the Birds combo — $13.99 (regular price $17.00)
Holiday Pack: Chrome + Scarce + Revenge of the Birds + Ridgely: The Only Thing – $24.99 (regular price $38.00)

Don’t forget about the nifty Volkswagen “Beep Beep” t-shirts (sizes S, M, L or XL) or the EP Box Set (6 full-length CDs)

Prices good through 12/31/09. Available in limited quantities.

Happy Veterans Day to everyone.

If you are, ever were, or ever plan on being, in our nation’s accomplished military, please accept my humble civilian thanks for your service to this civilization, to this nation, to my family. If you are currently serving overseas, or are putting yourself in harm’s way, may your name return answered with every roll call. Blessings and utmost safety to you.

We are grateful for every single one of you.

On the southwest corner of my front yard stands a double-forked black walnut tree. Its height of some forty-feet is ample enough to cast a belly shadow across the front porch of the house in the peak of summer. For that I am exceedingly grateful. By early October however, if not sooner, it becomes a skeleton of its formerly buoyant self. Its alternate compound leaves will have, by-and-large, fallen to the ground along with the slender brown tendrils to which the leaves clung, brittle and piling up like a Milton Bradley game of Pick-Up-Sticks on the droopy fescue lawn. The tree, I suppose due to summer drought, becomes awkwardly and prematurely barren of most vegetation with the exception of its enormous quantity of fruit dangling overhead like a million blunt swords of Damocles. Living beneath the tree this time of year is an equally precarious, if not epic, affair.

Mowing the lawn, I run the risk of getting pelted in the head by cascading walnuts. Often, they fall in single, lonely thuds to the ground. Other times, they fall in rapid-fire clusters. Occasionally, and thankfully less often, they fall on the roof of the house with a clumsy rap. But if the wind picks up, or scrambling squirrels jostle the branches just right, a series of green golf ball-sized fruits plummets to the ground and pavement below as if in an embarrassingly poor juggling act. And that’s when things get dangerous for perusers like me. With each ominous pass beneath its boughs, I am certain that I will be knocked unconscious by one of the blunt spheres, waking up to find that several Rip Van Winkle hours have passed with only a tender knot on my skull as proof of any botanical villainy.

Aside from any Newtonian peril, walnut trees entertain the natural world with a biochemical process known as allelopathy, a method of Darwinian survival. The tree secretes chemicals into the earth that prohibit other plants and trees, even its own kind, from growing near it. Essentially, it monopolizes the ground it inhabits, and, in that respect, I am no different.

Much like my caution beneath raining walnuts, these days I find I am afraid of most everything involving the unknown, the future, and anything outside my domain of control, which is to say, everything. It is no simple fear, instead, a near-paralyzing comedy of capitulation, that although lonely, cold and brittle, is vital enough to cast its own belly shadow across the sphere of my shrinking world. I discover inside me anger — at the world for being the liar that it is and always has been, and at myself for believing those terrible, fear-mongering lies.

In my own version of allelopathy, I have for years fended off the deepest demons by pretending the space I inhabited was, and always would be mine, a gift I believe I rightfully deserved. I kill off any honorable Christ-inhabited humility by decaying the Root from which it springs. I fend off those who try to care, those who seek to lean in, those who invade my world, by poisoning their atmospheres with my own defense mechanisms.

Christ, where is there hope left to pluck from the living boughs? Pray, reveal yourself before this fool has claimed an entire realm as his own. There is too much poison, too much anger, too much sadness, too much listless memory to pulse through the veins of a single soul. Beneath the burdened branches of this far-fetched, far-reaching, irrepressible hope, be merciful, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and remind the Living inside me that the sweet birds will one day return to nest, to roost, to sing and play in the boughs you created so long ago.

This is a photo sent in by Stacy Schmelzel of Chicago, IL, that great host city, not of the 2016 Olympics, mind you, but of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Seen here, Stacy shows off Chrome for the Bean.

Remember, Patron Saints, if you’ve got a great photo of you and your Chrome, feel free to send that in to info(at)ericpeters(dot)net.

David Van Buskirk (graphic designer of Chrome) offers us Chrome wallpaper with which to beautify our boring computer screen desktops. David, we tip our hats in your general direction.

I mentioned this in passing in an earlier post (Interview Heaven or Hell) but I feel it warrants further close inspection and its own beloved place in the post queue.

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve written a tutorial for all 11 songs on Chrome. In the form of a podcast, it details the specifics of why I wrote each song, my thought process(es) behind them, and sheds some light on my enigmatic, ofttimes abstract way of writing. I hope it will help you decipher some meanings and shed a ray of light from my cloudy brain to yours. Go here: Rabbit Room Chrome podcast