The donut spare had just popped, and my son and I were outside the car scratching our heads about next steps when a silver, late model Subaru rolled up and a friendly man jumped out and asked if we needed a compressor.
Why, yes, we did.
That was Nick, and over the whine of the compressor he told us that he worked at a music store in Santa Fe. Sure, he’d like to come by to check out my tenor banjo and have a beer.
We drove up the long dirt road to the remote mountain village where I lived, hung out for a bit, and by the end had plans to get together to play music the next week.
Such was the unlikely beginning of a five-year, weekly musical collaboration. Year in and year out, week by week, we met at my home in the small village. Nick claimed he loved the drive up and out of the giant northern New Mexico central rift valley, a 45 minute quest of epic views, horseshoe roads traversing watershed after watershed through the Ponderosa forests of the Sangre de Cristos.
When I moved to an RV on the property where he lived, we transformed his living room into our practice space. Soon after, I moved into a casita on the same property, and one of the two rooms of that was dedicated to music. We built shelving and stands for amps to make use of the tiny space.
Life Lessongs with Nick
My time in New Mexico was very challenging, and my relationship with Nick and our musical collaboration was a bright spot.
For example, Nick and I also worked on cars together, and for me, after a life of such work with a highly impatient father, his calm and patient steadiness proved a balm for my ability to have vulnerability and relationship with men.
Back when I was in the remote village, Nick started telling me he loved me. I found it shocking at first—that was language reserved for my family—but in a very hard and dry place, during the pandemic and where death seemed just around the next horseshoe bend, he made this kind of vulnerable care make sense.
Eventually, through the years, Nick became family. He moved down the street with his girlfriend, and they hosted me for a few days on my current summer trip to New Mexico. We played music for many hours, and even after the year of separation, we fell directly into improvisation.
This is the first 18 minutes of the music we made that afternoon, and I added the keys later to push my technical abilities and create another layer to the improvisation—further improvisation in a long, improvisatory relationship.
This trip and my work with Nick prompted me to finally go back and comb through the hundreds of hours of recordings I made—the Tascam DR-05X MP3 recorder taped to a mic stand, or propped against a shelf somewhere. That huge collection will see the light of day soon, along with more posts about this trip, memory, and how the past can be redeemed.
This track can be downloaded in full at my bandcamp.
