new year, new shows, new newsletter
hello and ciao my friends and pals-
Wow, can you believe I haven't sent you a newsletter since last year???
(an evergreen joke I love genuinely)
I hope 2024 is treating you with a gentleness so far!! I unfortunately caught covid for a second time on January 2nd, and then got hit with a bad wave of winter blues after recovering, so I very much hope that this is not a portent of the year to come. Maybe I'm just speed-running maladies to get them over with.
On to things new!
New Show
I am so excited for the first official show of my residency with Keepsake House! Not only will there be an amazing lineup of songwriter and storyteller residents sharing original work on the themes of transformation in a roundtable setting, but also there is dim sum included in your ticket!!! A combo that can't be beat.
This week is your last chance to get discounted advance tickets before the price goes up on Monday, so don't wait to get your ticket for either in person or the live stream!
Tickets here: https://www.keepsakehouse.com/shows/metamorphosis
PS: Also! Save the date for February 20th at 7pm where I'll be back at Rockwood Music hall playing a solo set !
New Newsletter
One goal I have for the beginning of this year is to level up this newsletter that I love writing! Buttondown has served me well this so far, but it's very simplistic in its design and I would love to be able to include more things like embedded demos and videos, fancier formatting, and even discussion threads for sharing shorter bits of info between newsletters!
So! Either the next newsletter or the one after that will likely come from substack, so keep that in mind when you're looking for these missives in your inbox!
New Year
I feel like it's an unpopular opinion, but I genuinely love New Years time. There is a palpable sense of possibility and renewal that makes me so excited. You know those cartoons where a character smells something enticing and drifts up off the ground and floats towards it? That's me every January.
Still, I understand and agree with lots of people's hangups with this season. There's an unreasonable amount of pressure and unrealistic expectation setting, especially in nature's season of slowness and hibernation. I just like it as a time to check in with myself and my dreams, write a letter to myself a year from now, and reorganize my bedroom. Subtle bits of ordinary witchcraft.
Here are my resolutions/meditations for this year:
(I also have a list of some more concrete goals, and one of them is to finally finish and release the yet-untitled celebrity-crush-ep I've had in the drafts for forever. It's about .... 50% done. But I finally feel motivated to work on my own personal recording project after work for the first time in months, so fingers crossed I make a lot of progress on it these next few weeks.)
Getting me through:
This essay by Hanif Abdurraqib on video games, morality, and getting too attached to fictional character. (Video games have been on the brain for me a lot as of late. I spent a good chunk of my covid time watching Hbomberguy's multi-hour long youtube essays on video games I've never played and never will. This weekend one of my best friends skyped me and shared his screen so I could virtually try out playing Baldurs Gate 3, which is incredible! I'm fascinated by them from a storytelling perspective, but the completionist and perfectionist in me makes me wary of actually picking them up.)
Making soup. Self explanatory. Healing. Find me in the kitchen chopping vegetables and simmering them in a big pot while softly chanting soup, soup, soup, soup, soup.
Listening to Faye Webster. Especially while making aforementioned soup. I had to lie down when I found out she was younger than me though. She has a musical and lyrical wisdom beyond her years.
I'm glad you're here.
for auld lang syne,
Em