Once again, I bring you cheeriest wishes amid falling leaves and the coming season of all seasons. Hope you’re enjoying warm tea and steaming soup. Since last year’s response to the Scarce sale was so tremendous, I’ve decided to do it again this year, only with my 2003 album, Miracle of Forgetting. Unfortunately, I can’t afford to sell them for $2 apiece like last year. Admittedly, that was painful to absorb, so I, in a fit of mad marketing genius and financial wizardry, raised the price by a whopping buck. I hope this won’t deter you, since where else can you buy 5 CDs for $15? That’s still cheap, even for misers like me. I hope you understand.

MOF was released in 2003. It was an album that I feel sort of fell through the cracks for a lot of folks; it received little to no press or publicity, it had to follow Land of the Living, but it contains a few of what I feel are my better songs. Many of you may not even know the album exists. I really want this record to be easily available and I want those of you who have heard it (and hopefully like it) to be able to give copies away as gifts to music-loving friends and family, a la last year. So, for two weeks beginning Friday 11/2/07, MOF will be on sale for $3 each + S&H. We’ll sell them in boxes of 5, 10 or more.

CliffsNotes summary:
5 CDs = $15
10 CDs = $30
20 CDs = $60

Click here to order. As always, thank you for your great support over the years.

I am finally taking a few moments to post something besides a series of boring pleas and explanation apologies of internet dissolutions, new material and what not. I am in the kitchen standing over a gas stove brewing up a pot of shrimp and corn soup, one of my few culinary specialties. Adding green onions to a warm, rolling broth is something everyone should have to do at least once in this life, if only to realize the breadth and beauty of slow-cooking in order to warm and fill hungry stomachs. The smell is invitational, the rain is falling and, though it is a tad too warm for the time of year, it is nonetheless soup season. A great time of year, yes?

Upon flying home from Chicago this afternoon amid one of the bumpiest plane rides I have experienced, my beautiful wife and son picked me up at the rainy Nashville airport. It was good to be on solid ground again. I mean that in more than one sense of the word. I played two shows in Illinois this weekend. Saturday morning my friend picked me up at Midway and drove us to Bloomington/Normal, IL. I found out at the venue that Bob Dylan and Toby Mac were also in town that night. There were 15 people at my show. I wonder how Bob and Toby fared. I knew half of my crowd personally. I’m not entirely sure if that’s meant to be pathetic or heart-warming. Numbers aside (God knows if I had allowed crowd sizes to dictate my career outlook I would have quit a long, long time ago,) the sound system wound up being decent (meaning Eric could hear himself), folks were pleasant and I enjoyed once again playing these songs I have been given. I had not played a show in a month, not even picked up the guitar in that time. It was good to sing again, but my fingertips ached since the callouses had regressed from lack of exercise. A medium-well steak and catching the final minutes of the LSU-Auburn football game on television made for a very pleasing end to a long day. They tried to get me to play Guitar Hero II afterward, but since I am terrible at video games, I left it to the college-age pros. Goodnight, I shall sleep like a rock.

I woke up Sunday morning to strong winds howling at the side of the residence I stayed in. It sounded like wind playing Yahtze on sheet metal, minus the sheet metal. We enjoyed an unhurried morning of coffee, cereal, reading and conversation. Much needed. Then it was back to Chicago for Sunday night’s show at my friend’s church. A beautiful, small sanctuary full of windows that, when the day finally faded and the sun sank low enough, it lent the westward facing stained-glass window true purpose. The room was warm with the end of day daylight. A friendly crowd of 50 or so (alas, still no Dylan or Mac numbers) were kind enough to listen to me for nearly an hour and a half as I forgot several words (I have slowly been weaning myself off the cheat sheets). I was undoubtedly an unremarkable figure on stage, but they gave me an encore regardless. I thank them. I enjoyed every second of playing on this particular night - folks actively listening, smiling, responding - and, at some point during the show, the career crisis I have been embroiled in for quite some time crossed my mind. I pondered how hard it would be to give even this paltry career up once and for all, yea even the long hours of traveling to and fro. I imagine it is a rare gift in this life to find work that is altogether fulfilling to a man’s soul and that which edifies one or two other people en route. I build, and I tear, and I rip up, and I reach for what I long for, and I find ways to succeed at it and I find ways to absolutely mangle it. Through it all God sees fit to provide and nourish even in those arid times when there are far more questions than answers and far more dust in the air than water in pools. In those times, the slow seeds of faith once again peek through the calloused surface and continue their upward ascent. Folks, I rarely know what I am talking about in these brief pages - no doubt, you have already ascertained as much - but whenever I am down (and seemingly out), the opportunity to play a concert or two is usually a fair dose of encouragement for me, however few attendees, however good or bad I may sing or strum, however far from home or the Truth I may be at the time.

I rarely talk about “calling” with a capital “C”. I once thought that to say one is “called” to something or other was an ignorant, blind statement; after all, we do what we want to do in life. But now I am not so sure. By no means do I hear ethereal voices telling me to go hither and thither other than the voices of my wife and respected friends. When they speak, I lean in a little closer, afraid of missing a word, THE word which I might have overlooked in my panicked plea and excavation for guidance. I have no idea what I am doing right now, no idea if I will continue to write and play songs for a living, no idea where I will be or what I will be doing in 5, 10 years, but I can only hope that faith will be the vessel of the journey taking me there. There may be no promised land for me, no fame, no notoriety, acclaim of men, or even a clear, audible voice from heaven directing me, but for now at least, there are friends and family whose voices and lives are very real and are callings in and of themselves. I listen to them. I lean in a little closer for a word, the word, and I hope callousness - the same hardness that protects my fingers - will not act in the same manner unto my heart. Lean in a little closer.

This is Ron (Eric’s web guy) typing. I have a quick public service announcement.

Eric, in a fit of passionate rage, fired his ISP last night. When he awoke this morning, he realized that canceling the service would cause his email address to stop working. (We were forwarding all of his ericpeters.net email to his ISP account. That’s been changed, so now Eric can fire ISPs at will, without impacting the receipt of his email.)

This means that if you sent email to Eric in the last 12+ hours, it may have bounced back as “undeliverable”. If that’s the case, please resend. The correct address is eric [at] ericpeters [dot] net.

We’re sorry for any confusion this may have caused, but we’re thrilled that Eric is finally free from the tyranny of that certain ISP.

This constitutes Part II in the “Bus 152″ post from about a year ago….

For the past year I (a.k.a., the publishing company I hired) tried to pitch (i.e., sell) my song “Bus 152″ (Land of the Living) to be a part of the film score for the new movie based on Jon Krakauer’s 1996 book, Into The Wild. The movie, directed by Sean Penn, premieres in theaters 9/21/07. My song did not make it on the score/soundtrack (yes, I am bummed) but I am glad this true story was made into a movie, regardless. It deserves it. Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam) did the score and I think it includes songs from a couple of other artists whose names currently escape me. I suppose I’ll need to channel Mr. Vedder next time…

A petite history:
For those of you who may be late to the game, a few years back I wrote this little harmonica-accompanied song called “Bus 152″ that was based on this good book retelling the story and retracing the steps of Christopher McCandless, at the time a brand new college graduate who became weary of society and thus sought to live some portion of the rest of his life in solitude. That is exactly what he did. Christopher changed his name to Alex and forged his way to the middle-of-nowhere Alaska where he set up house in an old, abandoned bus used by hikers and hunters as a refuge. Christopher was not well prepared for the weather - he had brought very few possessions along - and was found frozen and starved-to-death a few months later by folks passing through the area. Krakauer, in his typically thorough and exhaustively researching way, recounts Christopher’s journey across America into the wild. It is both beautiful and devastating to read. Ideals clash with reality. Fathers alienate sons. Wisdom seems to forgo knowledge. Life, death, gain, loss.

In the least self-aggrandizing way I know how, I wish to point those of you who may not have my 2001 album, Land of the Living, to my myspace page where you can listen to the song in its entirety, and, if you’re willing and able, to purchase a copy of LOTL. You can also purchase the song or whole album on iTunes, if that’s your druthers. Either way, thank you for staying tuned in and interested in the highs and lows of it all as I try to get back in the swing of the information age.

I need your help. The booking agency who has been working to book some shows for the fall tour with myself, Andrew Peterson, Andrew Osenga and Jeremy Casella has found little to no fertile soil thus far in the inglorious process. October, the month we’re aiming to book the shows, is not that far off and we hate the thought of abandoning the idea altogether if nothing comes through, so I’m enlisting your help… as fans, friends, church staff, college students, hooligans, whatever…

If your church or your school (or other venue) might be interested in booking a show, please email The Breen Agency soon to find out details needed to pull it off. Heck, if nothing else, email me to discuss it. We four Square Pegs were enthralled with the idea when it was first presented to us and we would love the opportunity to play in your town.

Thanks for letting this be a forum where I can plead for help and mercy. Thank you and carry on.

If you’re interested, I just posted a new unreleased song/demo on my myspace page. The song is called “Bedlam and the Fuse”.

An old Louisiana buddy who’s currently @ MTSU studying music production asked me about a year ago if I’d be willing to be the subject of his semester-long school project: produce and record an original, non-cover song. I had just finished writing this song and, since my wife was pregnant at the time w/ our firstborn, I didn’t see myself recording any new albums anytime in the near future. It sounded like a fun idea. So my friend, Jon Bufkin, came over to my house one afternoon about this time last year, set up his computer, mics and cables and I played him the song so he could have a rough recorded sketch to pass along to the musicians who would later play on it. Jon rounded up all the players, helped me arrange the song to fit a specific time-length he had to adhere to, and before I knew it, I was standing in the great studio workshops @ MTSU very impressed by the gear the students had available to them on a daily basis. We tracked the instruments mostly in one very long night session amid coffee and pizza. I made a return trip a couple of months later to record vocals. My voice was shot that night, I remember, so I wound up going over to Jon’s house a week or two after that - sometime just before Thanksgiving - to re-sing the song. I’m glad we did; the result sounds much better. I don’t remember all the players’ names (forgive me), but they all did a good job and worked very hard to aid Jon in his project. I hope he got an “A”. The song is unmastered, but is more than presentable in this setting. I hope you enjoy it.

A note about the song itself:
It arose from my distress over the world’s seemingly willing plunge into further chaos and disorder over the course of the past few years (war, 9/11, suicide bombings, deep hatred, religious fanaticism, political divide, etc.). I had just finished reading Life of Pi (Yann Martel) and was struck not only by such an invigorating tale of survival, but also at the power of story-telling itself, whether it’s true or not, and how it somehow mysteriously manages to invoke peace in the one who tells it. Some things in this world are too horrible to remember; people cope as best they can in an effort to either forget the thing ever happened, or they grant narrative - their own narrative - the power to weave the story as a means of surviving and coping with such traumatic events. We’re human and we’re not as strong as we think we are. We’re human but we’re stronger than we think we are.

… is like sleeping in a fully-functioning coffee bar, blenders, bean grinders, steamers and all. Just when you think the blending is done, there comes a brief pause, then the steamer goes off. Pause. Some relief… nope, more bean grinding. So forth and so on.

Still in Minnesota. I’m wearing long-sleeves in mid-July and loving the fact. As many of you may know, I enjoy wearing my Mr. Rogers zip-up sweater jackets whenever I can, especially so during the summer months in a climate other than the southern one I’m familiar with where it is typically impractical to don such garments in the unbearable heat and humidity of the southeastern USA. I know the return to Nashville in a couple of weeks will be a face-slapping reintroduction to a grotesque sweltering sauna. But the thought of returning home to normalcy looms somewhat bright and appealing in my mind. It’s the littlest things like eating what I want, when I want, and mowing the lawn.

We had to move Ellis out of his room into ours for 10 days in order to accommodate a visitor needing that space, the one adjacent to ours. Last night was Ellis’ third night with us and I can imagine few worse nighttime sleeping scenarios. We typically crawl into bed here near about midnight, long after Ellis is asleep.

Sidebar: for the life of me, I still don’t understand how or why parents refer to the bedtime process as “putting him/her down”. The word “down” in such phrasing sounds too much like a ghoulish euphemism for euthanasia. Eupeptic Europe eats its own euros while eulogizing the Eustachian tube.

And every night thus far, as we have ever so delicately tried crawling into bed, he has awoken and subsequently cried for an hour, or the better part of one. I watched the red digits of the clock rust away last night with two pillows muffling my ears as Ellis, on the other side of the headboard not three feet from our very scalps, groaned and yawped his way back to stillness. I found myself amazed at some of the unfriendly thoughts and words that raced through my frustrated mind as I lay there fuming. People in other countries live like this each and every day and in much tighter spaces than our current digs, and it makes me wish I weren’t so Americanized, so fiercely independent. I have much to learn in the way of patience, tolerance and a slew of other fruits of the spirit. Reminds me just how ugly I can be and how graceful God is despite me, his own little surly malcontent.

Sleep well, ye well-rested souls. This too shall pass.

I am staring out the window of our temporary 2-month housing here along the bluffs of Pelican Lake. It is drizzling rain this morning, the distant piers and boat docks are here-and-there obscured by remnant clouds, and the lake is finally still and calm after days and days of unrelenting nor’westerly winds. “Nor’westerly”… a word I enjoy hearing and saying almost as much as the word “sycamore”. There are what sounds like a horde of rampaging children behind me in the community room playing and chattering away in their occupied nonchalance. A bowl of fish sits to the left of my laptop; two mottled goldfish, Sam and Isabelle, occupy it hovering near the surface, I suppose looking for food. Or perhaps they are just trying to avoid the neon-colored bed of rocks. I would too if I were them.

We left Nashville nearly two weeks ago (seems like an eternity) and we won’t be home until early August (seems like another eternity). In the meantime, we’ve managed to sign a contract for a new house and have our current home for sale. If all goes according to plan, we will move across the street. Literally. Our street address would increase by one digit. Since this would be our seventh move since our marriage in 1997, I kind of like the idea of not having to involve bulky rental trucks, trailers, crammed storage units or lengthy drives. If anyone is interested in obtaining a small (750 sq. ft.) 2 bed/1 bath house in historic east Nashville, please, by all means drop me a line. I know of a quaint little corner property with a great backyard filled with Bradford Pears and an elegantly shaped Dogwood. A la Fred Rogers and his wonderful zip-up sweater jackets, we could be neighbors. But I’m taking the Japanese Maple in the front yard with me. I’m just weird that way.

In our long four-day drive up to Detroit Lakes, we drove into the gut of a nasty storm that was spewing out a handful of tornadoes along I-29 near the South/North Dakota state line on into west-central Minnesota. At the point where I thought for sure our van windshield was going to shatter from the barrage of dime-sized hail, we pulled under an interstate overpass (along with several other folks jockeying for a safe spot) and waited things out until the sky’s disposition improved. While listening to the repeated radio warnings, I at one point, fully expected to see a funnel cloud barrelling down. I scoured the immediate surroundings for a hiding place since the radio’s advice was to “get out of the car and hide in a low spot away from your vehicle”. Super. I imagined myself running through the missile rain and across puddles of water with Ellis in my arms, sheltering him as best I could - all the while hearing the screams of sheer terror in his tiny voice - with Danielle close by my side, and the three of us hunkered down beneath a bridge or, worse, in an open field away from the car with nothing sheltering us but my flimsy 5′7″, 135 lb. frame and the grace of God and his silent hosts. I thought on the harrowing prospects and it made me uneasy, to say the least. Me being a glass-half-empty sort of fellow, immediately thought worst case scenario: separation, loss, death, aloneness. I could see my frail self in the middle of the storm, debris and reckoning all around, clinging to Ellis and Danielle as if my very life - not theirs - depended on the grasp of a human hand for protection. To bear such loss would ruin me more than any storm. To bear such loss would turn anyone inside out. Plainly (and thankfully), some sort of an emerging father is coming to life in me, and I am glad things did not come to such extreme, but necessary, actions. We waited out the storm and eventually made it to our ultimate destination along the lake, all the while driving the very route of those vortexes from just minutes before like stragglers to a battle already fought. Our story in a strange non-fiction.

In other news, I’m hearing rumors of a fall tour with fellow Square Pegs, Andrew Osenga, Andrew Peterson, Jeremy Casella and myself. I will certainly attempt to keep you updated as these plans develop. If you or someone you know is interested in booking a show in your town, please drop myself or The Breen Agency an email. We’re looking to fill dates in late September to late October.

I just celebrated Mother’s Day for the very first time. Not that I haven’t wished my own sweet mother joy in years past, but those were tail-between-my-legs sheepish and, admittedly, of the lazy-mouthed, long voweled, dutiful son “Happy Mother’s Day, mom…” variety. They always included a card, though. But this Sunday was more of an “Oh, my gracious, I am now responsible for keeping and wholeheartedly observing an entirely new holiday.” It scared me and made me quite nervous to ponder such weighty burden. I also realized yesterday that, upon a first child’s birth, husband and wife transform into father and mother in the swipe of an epee, and one’s realm of responsibility instantaneously adds three new dates to the yearly calendar:

1. The child’s birthday. Easy and appropriate enough.
2. Father’s Day. Ennnh….do people make that big of a fuss over dads these days?
3. Mother’s Day. You’re dead meat if you forget.
Fatherhood, ain’t she grand?

p.s. Happy Mother’s Day, mum. Hope you love the framed baby pics of your first grandchild.

I can hear my son’s voice echoing through the house even as he is away on a weekend trip to Alabama with his mother. I swear I hear Ellis’ voice - every now and then an imagined coo, giggle or cry - cutting through the dry air as if he were physically here, and those sounds were actually emanating from his curled, partially agape mouth. I, of course, am hearing things out of nothing, but absence, as they say, makes the heart grow fonder. I do miss the attachment of his presence. And I certainly don’t mind the echoes.

In a not-too surprising admission (at least to those who have newborns), my brain has been reduced to mush for the better part of the four months since Ellis’ birth. If you happen to frequent this website-blog, you no doubt might have noticed my woefully shy attempts at writing at anything resembling a regular pace. Not that I was ever consistent at it before, but rest assured, I am still here and accounted for. Barely. The details of the daytime have grown to be duly predictable. Thankfully, our little dude is establishing a nice little sleep pattern at night, but the daytime is a whole ‘nother deal: he is still comforted only by, and will rest only in, our arms in those hours while the sun is out for its walk across the sky. It is hard to get much of anything done, especially something so cerebral as writing words or songs or chords, with a sleeping or crying baby in your arms. It’s enough to melt one’s brain. Maybe that is a good thing. Goodbye freedom. I hear echoes then as well; those of my former self and all the self-indulgent independence I once possessed, and took for granted, here at the base of my own little wailing wall. Oobla di, oobla da life goes on.

I’ve been in the midst of some sort of career crisis for quite awhile now. Ellis’ arrival has surely exacerbated this little Heart & Brain War of mine, but hopefully for good cause, not bad. I am a stubborn man (just ask my wife), so in a very real way that same “quality” has kept me in the music biz game over the years duking it out to find work, get myself to and from itinerant jobs, do the work, and hopefully get paid for it. Repeat cycle ad nauseum. But in another way perhaps it is to my detriment that I have failed to give up the ghost on the dream (of the pipe variety?) in the nearly-blind, relentless pursuit of a gleefully successful, self-sustaining career that has yet to sustain itself. I’m a sucker for the white picket fence, you see. We singer-songwriters sometimes joke that though we smile at shows, we later cry ourselves to sleep at night. Sometimes that is mentioned in jest, others not at all. Though it sucks to have to scrape by every month, it is far, far worse to be unloved and/or homeless. Unloved and homeless, I am surely not, and for that I am grateful beyond language. I’m not telling you all this to enlist your sympathy nor am I begging for compliments or encouragement here. I write this to get these things off my chest because what I ultimately want is to hear those same reverberating echoes… of life, of God and his brilliant voice in my soul, of a hint as to what the pursuit of truth and happiness looks like from day to day, of faith in creation, of faith in humanity, and hope to sustain me from now till darkness. I am no psychologist, but I suspect that we all, in some measure, wish for these same things at some point or another. After all, life is full of faith and darkness.

Like a child’s voice echoing throughout a still house, perhaps the truth that absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder is revelatory of our ultimate desire to be sought, found and known in this post-Jacobian world where God seems just as much a mystery to us as mystery itself can be a god. We wrestle with, and yell out, words across, and at, the Great Expanse in hopes of hearing them bound back effortlessly across the stringent madness of our lives, bearing on the echoing wind something far greater than our original puny words: belief in spite of all the unbelief, hope for a better tomorrow, grace to fill, lead and change us, perseverance to put up a good fight, and wisdom to recognize reality when she is standing on the street corner wailing aloud. Welcome the echoes.