I wanted to share a review of Danny Flanigan's new album Evergreen. 

Full disclosure: I have played with Danny many times over the years. He’s played with me in The Fellow Travelers and The Navigators, and I’ve shared a stage with a songwriter in the round for many years. He’s a great guy, and if you’re in Louisville and you’ve seen live music, you’ve probably seen him and not even know it. However, I realize that there are people who don’t live here, who should know about Danny’s music.

Within seconds, I…

You probably already know that I’m a musician, but you may not know about my background in theater. I did theater in high school and college, and a little bit in my twenties, but music demanded so much of my time that I just focused on that. For years, I’ve thought about writing a musical. My last attempt was cut short. I was developing a musical about Orpheus, and then I discovered that Hadestown was doing it. Sigh.

All songs have a degree of theater in them. Everyone knows there’s music and words, but…

There’s a theme that runs through a lot of the songs on this album: the power of the few over the many. Here’s just a sample:

Free-market lotto, it might happen to you

One person wins while millions have to lose.

And while the masters sit on high

The people fight to stay alive

But kings and queens cannot be blamed

It’s only numbers that decide

The great man he walks upon the stage

The little men are all dancing in his cage

That last one is from “Read My Mind.” This song has many threads, but it opens with a…

Many years ago —so long ago that Frozen had not yet been released— I wrote this song. I have always been a huge Simon and Garfunkel fan, and I was very fortunate to meet Paul Simon in person. My friend Graham Hawthorne, who has played drums with everybody (Cyndi Lauper, Roberta Flack, etc.), was filling in for Steve Gadd on a tour, and I got to go backstage. I didn’t say anything, which I kind of regret. What can I say? I’m very shy.

I honestly don’t recall anything specific that inspired this song. Just the…

Unless you slept through English class in high school, you probably know Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. As a songwriter who is probably best known for his original lyrics, you might wonder why I would write a song using someone else’s words. The answer is simple: this was a homework assignment. To explain that, I may need to give you a little backstory.

When I moved back to Louisville, I thought I might do an early childhood class that I did in New York City. It was very popular there. They had a six-month…

There was a time when I measured my songs in the number of pages. I was so proud when I wrote my first three-page song. As a big Dylan fan, I felt that it was perfectly okay to have long songs. That just meant that you had something to say. I started writing shorter songs around the time of Love and War: Volume 1. Part of the reason was that I had so many song ideas at that time. Sometimes I would write two or more a day, but during this period of my life, songs got shorter, because I had less time. I often…

Why is it that even when we need sleep the most, it doesn’t come? It’s like our bodies are fighting with our minds. Sometimes you just lie there and think of all the things you should have said or done in your life. There’s no lack of fuel for that fire. We have all kinds of cures. Melatonin, bourbon, distract yourself with some tv- the list goes on and on. But one trick that seems to work for me is to write, and this song is the result of one of those sessions. When you write something down, you get a…

So far, I haven’t really dug into the promised darkness. In order to understand that darkness, we have to go back a ways. As far back as I can remember, I liked to sing. When I was little, I would listen to records, so I could sing along. When I was seven or eight, my best friend moved to California, and I was very sad. There was no song that expressed how sad I was, so I just made stuff up and sang while I cried. It never occurred to me that I was doing something unusual. And maybe I wasn’t. Maybe that’s a…

It’s crazy that we call this time that we live in the information age. Sure, we have a lot of information, but a lot of it is garbage. And staying on top of what’s going on certainly doesn’t make you better off. I’d love to say that this was written from a knowing place of appropriate information-distance, but the truth is, I was once like Phil in the song- “an information-junkie and a cable-news whore.” I was plugged in to what was happening, and I was getting the talking points. I knew what was what. Or…

This song has a lot of layers- both lyrically and musically. I was playing the music on the guitar and thought, “This should be a song.” No plan, just some music. Sometimes I write place-holder lyrics when I want to remember the rhythm of the melody, so I began in that vein. Something about that first line captivated me, and when I got to the second line, I knew I wasn’t writing placeholder lyrics. I wasn’t writing so much as channelling from a very deep source. Something knew what to write, if I didn’t…