In the previous couple chapters I discussed the initial discoveries, thrills and challenges in my first 10-15 years or so transforming into a solo guitarist. In this chapter I’m going to skip ahead to where I am now in the summer of 2026, how I think about what I do as a solo guitarist and what I aim to create/channel/conjure/express in my performance. I’ll also talk a bit about where I see myself in the hard material world of the music business.
There are still many stories to tell from my evolution as a solo guitarist over the past dozen years: the recording of my first solo guitar album released on CD in 2014 (at the exact moment no one wanted to buy a CD anymore), a tribute to Alfonso Chacón called The Panamericanist for which I had to go through a revolutionary alteration of consciousness: learning to play to create sounds for my ear rather than creating sounds merely from the feel of the movement of my body (as well as not to not put microphones against a wall). I do also hope to write about my years playing for weddings and being a part of the Chicago events world throughout the 2010s. And then there is also my strange and wonderful and quite surprisingly long lasting relationship with the president’s office of Notre Dame University And then there were the potentially career ending externalities of becoming a father in 2017 holding down the role of full time primary care provider for three years right up into the days of Covid where at one point my “next booking” was a re-scheduled wedding 18 months into the unknown future.
Then there was the unexpected comeback in 2022 when I was recruited by the mysterious agency that books the Palmer House Hotel in downtown Chicago to perform 3 hour shows up to four times per month at the legendary Lockwood Bar. Three fifty minute sets for the elite tourist crowd in one of the most incredible and historic spaces in the city. Thursdays and Sundays, as they’re coming for the weekend or as they’re heading home. To play there is to represent Chicago, you are either someone’s first impression or their last. Every second has to be worthy. First there is just having the material to cover that timespan, let alone for it all to be excellent at all moments, let alone for it to be music these people even want to hear. It is the general nature of the reality of what I do that I perform music my audience has never heard before except maybe in a movie soundtrack. But my repertoire works even at the level I play it, the music makes its own case, I just bring the energy and the nerve. A cinematic ambience. By and large they dig it. I want them to feel cool. Many don’t pay a mind, some just love it.
I played the Palmer House around 70 times over 2022 and 2023, re-kindling my imagination for what was possibly for me in a solo guitar performance while gaining the strength and endurance to pull it off. Protein shakes a must. It was awesome. I now felt part of the long and honored musician tradition of playing in hotels as many of the greatest bandleaders had the world over. I had some rough nights playing through flus or injured hands, but mostly it was an incredible experience every time. The boldness of playing on the small temporary stage they set up right in the mix of things. Meeting people from the world over, hearing their stories (someone in the fam plays guitar) and sometimes letting me offer my tips on places to see in the city.
If I could tell there was a table of folks really watching me I would definitely step up my game. Playing during Lollapalooza time would be extra fun for all the freaks suddenly hanging out. I had a couple from Australia locked in on me for two hours on Lolla’s Sunday evening and they came up to me afterwards to tell me it as one of the best sets they saw the whole weekend. Magnificent.
With the chandelier lighting and high painted ceilings (and when the tvs are turned off) it can be a truly surreal environment and as inspiration I would imagine myself as at the Roadhouse Bar in season 3 of Twin Peaks, playing this exotic music for small town midwesterners coming in to the big city rubbing shoulders with inscrutable fancypantsers. When I think of my absolute ideal concert set lists or the track sequencing of an imagined album I’d like to make it is always within a kind of Lynchian dream logic: archetypal music forms that tap into feelings of sexual adventure, strong melodies with emotional climaxes that fade into stretches of negative space, hypnotic bliss, a darker mood, jump scares and then a burst of daylight, a celebration we survived another and the cycle begins again. Maybe this time with tango.
Once I had an incredibly Lynchian moment where I believe because I had just played a few Venezuelan tunes a strikingly beautiful and perfectly put together middle aged (I’m guessing) Venezuelan woman approached me, palmed a bill into my hand looked me in the eye and asked that I play something from my heart’s greatest desire. I stuffed the bill in my pocket. I was about 3 tunes away from ending the night and I reached down deep and savaged blood on the stage. I broke down my stuff, rolled cables, packed up the tip jar and my little sign, and then checked my pocket, a crisp $100 bill. I know. It’s only rock and roll.
But the best feedback was from the staff. Just to get nods from the waiters was enough but there were a couple servers who were impressed with my knowledge and would tell me what they heard. There’s also a super lovely woman who manages a little jewelry shop outside the bar area and she would pop by and tell me how much everyone appreciates what I do. It was fun to get to know the security dudes by name. It was fun to feel like a regular. And then I got maybe my most favorite piece of positive feedback I’ve ever received as a solo guitarist. Across the way from the stage is the host station for the restaurant behind the bar. Often there would be a very smartly presented Latina who otherwise could be efficiently described as doppleganger for Aubrey Plaza halfway between her Parks ‘n Rec and White Lotus characters. She usually has to deal with me at end of the night as I’d have her help me wrangle a manager for the parking voucher. It was late December, my last date there for 2023. In the previous year they took a 2 month break after the new year before ramping up music again in March. But I didn’t know what the plan was for 2024 and it had been awhile since I had any communication with the agency. I expressed to the Plaza double my hope in coming back next year and she said “I hope you do, you play so poetically.” Swoon.
But of course, that was the kiss of death. To play poetically is grand, but it is also to not play spectacularly. And if I’m not playing music people know and like then it better be spectacular. I had achieved charmingness, but that only gets you so far.
And sure enough in 2024 it stopped, they had found better guitarists. I was relegated to the “emergency substitute list”, good for once a year or so. Triple A.
The early months of 2024 was another of my seemingly never ending wake up calls. It wasn’t just the Palmer House dropping me, there were other opportunities in that period that in theory were going to lead to future bookings but didn’t work out, either due to an inability to draw people or just not being amazing enough to overcome that. I had spent much of 2023 cultivating a collaboration with a world class violinist who had reached out to me and then she ghosted me over that winter. For a good six months there I felt a positive and strong momentum in my music career and suddenly I was back to square one again. With the Palmer House experience I had begun pivoting away from the events world and towards public/concert performance as my driving concern. And to get there I had more peaks to climb.
In the spring of 2024 I crawled back into the woodshed. I wiped the table clean and re-started my technique practice fueled by the fear of death. In 2025 I opened the doors to musical re-education, finding a guitarist in Buenos Aires to help me finally challenge and take down my structures of controlled ignorance, and start playing the music.
These are stories for the final chapters.
But here I am now and I feel like a wholly different musician than I was even six months ago. The fire is still there, the fire that was lit as a 16 year old playing Ramones songs in a garage in Syracuse NY, then erupted into a furnace through ecstatic marathon jams in basements in Ann Arbor, MI, and then the flames honed and energy condensed as force to the blowtorches of style and genre alongside brilliant professionals in Chicago, IL.
I want people to see me play guitar, regularly. Or routinely. And I want it to be an experience, an escape. Something that is felt, with emotional arcs and many moods. Something that can be zoned out to, as hypnotism, as trance, the music transforms, or to be transported, to memories, to dreams, or processed as ritual, or processed as rhetoric, by the choices, the creators, the lands and conditions, the stories and the histories being told in set lists and style juxtapositions, or as entertaining sounds with polyrhythms and excellent chords that could be danced to if there were only drums. Spiritualism, intellectualism, revolutionary politics, musicality and sexual swagger. And tolerable enough for the uninterested.
I’m the only practitioner that I know of of my concept of solo guitarism. A single cell radical, a trickster, a straight man.
I am writing this blog today because of the work I have done with my back against the wall. It is still all a work in progress but I am currently in a nearly satisfying peak state reaching for I think reachable higher terrain. Any time I am performing these days it is likely my greatest public performance or at the very least substantial sections will be. There are climactic moments of spectacularness, the showstoppers, that are still not quite consistent, especially in public (especially if I’m playing outside). But I am on top of them consistently enough in practice that they are doable with more real opportunities. These are the small details. I do a good show.
My goal at the moment is a monthly residency at a mid-sized neighborhood bar with good lighting and a small stage. A place I could come in once a month, like a first Thursday, and play for 2-3 hours. People could converse over it or watch it like a concert, but it would be a ritual where I could perform with 100% output, explore improvisational spaces, stretch the strechable, lock in the pockets in the spaces in between, otherwise celebrate the solo guitar form and the musics of the Americas.
A home base. It’s such a modest thing, but it would be huge for me. If I had a steady opportunity for people to come see me they will come and bring friends and there is an audience for what I do in Chicago that just needs a chance to find me. More importantly it would be a monthly lab to explore solo guitar and the extrapolations of my repertoire with 100% energy. But being a bit of unicorn makes it tough – I have to fight against impressions of weenie classical guitarism or not understanding if it’s ok that a white person is playing this music.
Thankfully I do just enough events these days to keep the operation going (and I still desire to get back into that world more in non-wedding ways). But my first thought for a home base is my own neighborhood, Rogers Park and then outward. This summer I’ve been working on laying a foundation in Rogers Park where mostly folks know me as a dad with a kid at school. So I’ve been playing at the Monday Twilight Market in Jarvis Square and this week is my third appearance outside at the Blue Jay Cafe at Loyola Beach, and next month I’m even doing a Friday happy hour at Picnic Wine & Provision. Trying to raise my local profile, push the performance bar and get feedback where I can head inside when the weather gets chilly.
And I need to up my promotional game – my current videos are poorly made homemade efforts way behind my current progress. To take advantage of my peak state while I still have it I have a video shoot brewing for September 2026 to hopefully capture a good couple hours of my repertoire, hiring some actual filmmakers to help. By the holidays I hope to have a much updated much stronger representation of what I do in my online presence.
So what exactly is this thing I want do still to the point of obsession in my, gasp, late(r) 50s?
I’ve touched on it all briefly and in very abstract ways, but as these will be common threads that will run throughout the all different phases of my entire musical life I want to go a bit deeper. It’s time to break it down.
My set lists are where my real creative work happens. First and foremost through them I am creating a satisfying experience for the audience, with novel twists and turns and variety and fun stuff. And underneath the engineering of those simple pleasures there is a narrative, and a polemic. It is for myself, it is how I commune in the waves of space and time, and it is breadcrumbs for the curious. Follow along and we will enter my code…
UP NEXT: The Present Tense, Part 2
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