Will the Balalaikas play for me?

 Until I was forty years old, I traveled very little.   I'm an East Coast native, and still live in the Philadelphia area.     I have relative in Boston and we visited every year.    I went to college in Connecticut.    I spent two Summers in Maine and one in New Hampshire doing Summer Stock.   I had been to DC and to Pittsburgh once, and there was that trip to Disney World in Florida.

All East Coast, all within tight parameters (and mostly in the original thirteen colonies!).

So many years and so few destinations.   So for my 40th birthday I decided to take a solo trip through the American Southwest.  I was going to fly (and had done very little flying) to Dallas and visit a longtime friend, and then pick up a "driveaway" -- a service that moved cars for people and gave them the option of hiring non-professional drivers cheap.    Drivers like me would volunteer to move the car for free -- I picked up a trip driving a Jeep Grand Cherokee from Dallas to San Diego, first tank of gas was free and the rest was on me.   As long as I got it there in ten days, I could do what I wanted.

My younger son (who sings on the new CD) was only four at the time, and he loved the Microsoft Encarta CD-ROMs.    He loved the music section, where there was a page showing instrument icons on their home countries -- you could click on them and listen to their sound.    He asked me once if we could go to Russia so he could hear the balalaikas.

That conversation was in my head as I sat in the Dallas airport, waiting for my first real journey.   Anticipation, nervousness, fantasy.    The song "Balalaikas" is about that moment, poised on the edge of an adventure, eager for discovery, dreading the unknown.

My journey took me to through the empty Northwest of Texas; to Amarillo, where you could order the 64-ounce steak; to the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest; to Albuquerque; to the Grand Canyon; through Arizona, passing Phoenix, cacti and penitentiaries; to Yuma where I got locked in my room for an hour when the electricity went out; over Route 8 where I could see the mountains of Mexico; and finally to San Diego to deliver the car, see the Zoo and see the Pacific for the first time.

When I hit the coast I immediately parked at an overlook, got out of the car to see the ocean, looked down and found a used condom at my feet.    Welcome to California.

"Balalaikas" is a song about going into the unknown, the essence of any journey, internal or external, ready to encounter "less hospitable terrain."   And there is the title of the album and the real heart of it. 

Less Hospitable Terrain

It has been a long time – far too long –since I last posted anything at all. Part of that was that there was nothing truly happening, and also as we moved through Covid, everything (even creative endeavors) shut down. 

But I’m happy, even thrilled, to post now about the new CD that Michael G. Ronstadt are finalizing. Several years ago we put together a five-song EP called “Quiet Revels,” a collection of “art songs” in various styles. 

Our latest effort is a full-length CD of ten songs, “Less Hospitable Terrain.” Six songs are new collaborations by me and Michael, two are from Michael’s personal repertoire, one is a song I wrote years ago and have been singing since, and finally a bonus track featuring an “olde Englishe ballade” pastiche I wrote with contemporary “traditional” folk artist Zoe Mulford of Manchester England. 

Unlike “Quiet Revels” where I sang all five songs, this time we engaged several guest vocalists. It’s hard to look at the diverse collection of songs, which range from folk ballad to rockabilly to cabaret to Indian raga, and come up with any common theme (or style). But the graphic designer, Scott Wolfson of Original Brain Media, thought the collection had a “haunted intimacy” 

I guess that is true, and there are only two fully uptempo songs – there are a lot of thoughtful songs (in differing levels of tempo and drive). But the theme of “less hospitable terrain” (which comes from the lyric to “Balalaikas”) is about journeys both physical and emotional, and the challenging experiences they bring us to. 

Four of the songs are about literal journeys, people traveling to places unknown. There is one song about the emotional journey from the end of one relationship to the beginning of another (“A Thing or Two”), a song that is a journey through a dream of a memory (“Even Now”) and a song that is a journey through the experience of a lie (“Rumplestiltzkin: Dead at 95”). 

Two songs are about entering unhappy emotional terrains – “Seems So Sweet” and “Naked Reprimand.” Only one song – the oft-requested “Me and My Purple Monkey” is a celebration of living in the joy of right now. 

Life takes us on many journeys long and short, large and small – and we are always challenged with the unknown of new territory, moving from the safety of what we know into “less hospitable terrain” and learning from experiencing the unexpected.