Wow what a year!!! Having recently completed a great west coast tour which involved 5,000 miles of driving thru Texas, New Mexico, California, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and back to Texas and playing great shows along the way, I’m back at the grindstone of booking another west coast tour for late October thru November and 6-ish weeks in England and Scotland plus negotiating a swing thru Ireland with my great Irish artist pal SJ McCardle AND beginning the blow torch summer season of gigs in and around Austin.

My wonderful duo pal Stephen Doster and I began our spring/summer/fall weekly “Smokin’ Tuesdays” at Austin’s Four Seasons Hotel this past week out under the sprawling oak trees by Lady Bird Lake. Stephen landmark CD “Arizona” continues to garner critical acclaim while my recent “On Earth As Its In Austin” is still on the move. I can do nothing but give thanks to the Universe for all the gigs and the wonderful people along the road who make my journey so comfortable.

I’m in the early stages of assembling what I think is going to be a landmark record for me. Its called “Fifty Years”, and its an anthology looking back at my fifty years of writing and recording. Its gonna be a double disc CD with 15 songs on each disc plus another 20 downloadable songs.

The GoFundMe fund raising effort I started a week ago with the goal being 20 grand has come along quite nicely approaching the 1/4 mark. It takes a minimum that kind of money to compete in today’s market place by creating the product, hiring the right people to promote it and then touring to bring it to world wide audiences. That said…I’ll be doing the west coast and UK tours to promote “Fifty Years” and to visit with the many great, lifelong friends I’ve made out west and in what will be my 11th out of the past 13 years of touring across the pond.

I turn 73 in Sacramento November 11th and will play that night to a sold out audience of my wonderful friends there many of whom are musicians I’ve written and played with during my 15 years of living there and who whose musicianship will appear in some of the songs on “Fifty Years”.

Life here in Apache Shores with my rock and roll woman Sharon Kay Berger is the greatest. We are surrounded by woods and the sounds of a magical forest. She does so much to help me with the behind-the-scenes stuff of my one-man-band career. I’m so proud of her for her dedication to the families she helps in her Child Protective Services career of over 17 years. She is a honcho in an area where superstars are really needed and harder to find.

I wanna thank my close, personal friends at DBM Entertainment for the last two years of work with me on my “On Earth As It Is In Austin” record which, at this moment, is at #19 on the Alternative Roots chart and climbing. Its a bit like watching your kid grow up and find his or her place out there in the world. These records we artists make are our hearts and souls and mean so much to us as their “parents”.