Author: ClemTheGreat

This Thanksgiving holiday was a quiet one, delightfully quiet. Snuggles with the pug, delicious food, and mild flu-like symptoms that gave me a good excuse to do what I wanted to do anyway, which was to lay on the couch and watch movies and read and doze. The rain was a gift.

I needed to do something “productive” so I decided to go through old music I’ve recorded and update my YouTube channel. Talk about going down a rabbit hole. 11 years ago I started writing songs. I had a day job in a law firm and when I had a weekend off from the band, I would head to my studio on Friday night and just camp out there for the weekend. The door would close and I was in Playland, with instruments and the computer and drums and my voice and all my little black books of scribbled lyrics. Continue reading “Our Default is Joy”

Home from a 10-show tour to Denver and the Pacific Northwest. My bandmate and I flew in and out of Colorado in 24 hours and then starting driving North from San Francisco. This is a relatively new project, just the two of us, so we took it on the road to break it in.

I was not playing drums, but triggering electronic tracks and singing. I’ve written before here that singing has been a long process for me. The technique of singing is like that of any instrument: it can take a lifetime to develop. Then, letting go of technique and of self-consciousness, doing the internal work to really own the performance, this has been the biggest hurdle to being a decent front-person. Playing drums, I have had stage fright exactly once, at my first show. Singing, I have overcome a ridiculous amount of terror, shaking violently on stage and sort of blacking out during performances. Continue reading “Stepping Out of a Box, Singing”

I’m back in San Francisco for a little while, sitting in the window seat and reveling in the morning. A big cruise ship rests at Pier 27 and I put myself in a state room for a moment, gazing through a porthole at the pastel hills of San Francisco and I can feel how I would long to live in such a lovely landscape. Outside this window, hummingbirds are doing that funny thing, hovering, lifting out of view, then dropping like little green daredevils into the fig tree below.

I have been spending so much time in the Midwest, helping family members, that people have started asking why I don’t move there. My ring of friends there is wider than in San Francisco, and the city of Omaha is finally booming, with art galleries and concerts and restaurants flourishing. The standard of living is gentler there, and even the location is more conducive to touring bands. Continue reading “An Ode to Cali”

Dear Humans,

First off I will say, so there’s no misunderstanding, I love you.

This is not love that needs something from you, or is some sort of burden or expectation you need to carry around with you. I love you with our common heart. Common molecules, common history, common planet, common energy. We are One. I know this is not a popular belief these days with so much side-choosing, but it’s a fact. My love for you is the same energy that lies underneath the love I have for my self and for my family and my pets and my place of manifestation. Love, at the core of myself, this energy shared with you. Continue reading “Dear Humans”

Out the window, morning. There were thunderstorms last night and now the sky is gray and dense, monochrome against the rolling ridges of tree. I imagine it will be another thick day. Someone must have turned the air conditioner down because the pug is stretched out in the center of the bed instead of pressed up against me as usual. I can actually stretch out a little instead of being pinned at the edge of the bed by 25 pounds of dog. Pinned by pug.

I’ll miss this house. I’m here to help a family member move out. I’ve been coming here for 18 years, to this big house on a hill overlooking the little old town of Elkhorn. The town is adjacent to the original trans-American highway, a bumpy brick deal of which about a mile is still intact. It runs along the train tracks and the sound of the train is a frequent gorgeous and wistful reminder of long-lost days. There are wooden buildings along the tracks that I love, whitewashed, leaning, and oddly shaped from when there were horses, not cars. Continue reading “Notes from Elkhorn, Nebraska”

Life has been interesting lately. I find myself very aware of the rollercoaster of the mind: the freak-outs when things don’t go exactly as I planned, the sometimes feeling that things are stagnant and the worry that gets created with that, and the absolutely peaceful moments in which I truly feel as if I am just putting one foot in front of the other. I feel I am forever taking a breath and falling into that true self place, that heart energy, that vibratory field of consciousness. Then, watching as the small self scrambles to get out of there like she’ll die without the tension she’s always known.

Small self, true self. I write frequently about these concepts. The small self I mean to be the self that interacts with form. The ego, the history, the personality, emotions, thoughts. The true self, I mean to be the unchanging field of consciousness or awareness that seems to be watching the small self interact. Continue reading “Awakening: The Cosmic Joke”

There is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation in which you remember a time you were wrongly accused. You bring up this feeling, and in doing so, you identify what is called the False Self, the egoic sense of self.

“How dare they.” With just that thought, it’s easy to feel this false self very strongly. How dare they think the worst of me; how dare they misunderstand, mistrust. How dare they hurt me? Me??

Once you dial in that feeling, then it becomes easy to question this false self. Who is this Me? What does it feel like to feel injured? What am I attached to that has built this solid sense of self so solidly? Who is it who is injured? What if I let that part that can be injured go? And most interesting: what is there that can never be injured? Continue reading “Viva La Revolucion”

Last Saturday, I drove 12 hours. The day started at 9AM. I drove for seven hours from Oregon to California, then five hours after an early show at a festival for marijuana growers in the center of the Emerald Triangle in Northern California.

On the drive, it occurred to me to do something I never do, which was to listen to some of my previous blog posts to see how they were hanging together, see what I could improve going forward. I committed to writing the posts weekly over a year ago, and I do my best to make it happen, even though I have missed a few weeks. The weeks when I have shows on either end are often the most challenging, but I try to find time in a restaurant or backstage, and then I wake on a weekday morning and force it to all come together. Continue reading “The Rock-Addled Brain Goes On Repeat”

We’ve been shut in all week, the pug and I, due to the terrible Northern California fires and the subsequent sinus infection from the air quality. It’s been harrowing, watching the notices come in about the beautiful areas overtaken by firestorm, and the neighborhoods burning daily. It is paralyzing, watching and not being able to help beyond donation. It feels callous to participate in life going on while so much suffering is so close at hand.

That is a heavy feeling, this guilt of being momentarily spared. Each of us are assured of suffering in life. Suffering is happening right now, all around us, possibly within us, or within the people we are sitting near as we read this. Maybe the suffering is not as tangible as that of a home burning down, or of losing loved ones in tragedy, but in the minds of many, the anguish is just as real. It is the human condition to suffer, as long as we identify with the ego and its preferences and emotions and attachments. As long as we are in duality, we suffer. Light has its opposite. Just by shining bright it deepens the darkness of shadow on the other side. It is the human condition to live in both light and darkness. We will live in both, that is unavoidable. Continue reading “Deeper Feeling”

One of my songwriting partners asked me to come into the recording studio for a couple of days and play drums on some songs that he’d been itching to get going. It’s been a while since I got to record anything but Zeppelin on the kit, so I was excited he asked.

The studio where we recorded is one of my favorite places in the world. I have been working there for 16 years, the whole time that I have lived in San Francisco. Nearly every project, every record I’ve made, it’s all come out of this place. The reason: Robert Preston, owner and engineer. He is my dear friend. I could never describe the depth of my delight in this human. Because of him, the studio is my happy place. Continue reading “Ten Ways to be an Awesome Studio Musician”