I got an email today from the Montreal publisher-editor of "The Light in the Darkness," a new book of essays about Bruce Springsteen's dark 1978 landmark of an album, "Darkness on the Edge of Town."
He asked me to contribute an essay to the book after reading my review in this blog of the Boss' April show in Phoenix. I gladly obliged; it was a chance to think back to that time, that album and the circumstances that helped shape it.
I also wrote about my first Springsteen tour, which I caught late that year in Dallas.
Which brings me to Lawrence's email. The book's out (my copy's on the way) and my Canadian associate forwarded to me a link to a blog written by Pete Freedman of the Dallas Observer's Web site, which talks about the book and quotes from the piece I wrote.
It was a much-needed ego stroke on a grey, dreary, rainy day that was way too much like so many of those grey, dreary, rainy days I enduring during my 25-year residency in Michigan.
Here's the link if you want to check it out:
http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/dc9/2009/10/remembering_bruce_springsteens.php.
I guess I've been on a bit of roll lately. I just had my first story published in the October-December issue of Texas Music, a quarterly published in Austin and edited by Richard Skanse, a fellow Eastwood HS grad.
The story is a profile of Morakestra, fronted by El Paso natives and twins Will and David Mora (whose folks own Chico's Tacos). It's in the Spotlight section, which profiles up-and-coming bands. You won't find it on the Web site, but you can go to txmusic.com for more info about the magazine.
Last but not least, I also wrote the official biography for The Swellers, a pop-punk group from Michigan that I used to write about when I worked for the Flint Journal.
The group's been around about six years or so, and since we were big on local music coverage there (and covering the big stuff), we pretty much wrote about the Fenton, Mich., band that brothers Nick Diener (vox, guitar) and Jonathan Diener (drums) not long after they started it in their mid-teens.
The bio accompanies their new Fueled by Ramen debut, "Ups and Downsizing," a fiery collection of poppy punk that's very much inspired by the downward slide that's been going on in Michigan for years and was only made worse by what's been happening with the economy the last year or so.
You can read the biography on their MySpace. The guys were nice enough to include me in the acknowledgements of the new album, which is on the same label that numbers the Academy Is ..., Panic at the Disco and Paramore among its prizes.
The Swellers currently are touring with Paramore and doing some one-off club dates here and there. There's no El Paso date at this point, but the hard-working quartet will be touring their new album for quite a while.
Oh, and one last thing to tell you about. Page views for this blog should top the 100,000 mark lifetime sometime in the next few days. Not bad for a special-interest blog that's been on this site about 18 months.
Thanks for reading!
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