Los Angeles! I’m coming your way on January 20th with “8980: Book of Travelers”. Come see it. Tell you friends. It’ll be fun. 📷: @joshgoleman

Back on the train today, and looking forward to LA and Ann Arbor premieres of “8980: Book of Travelers” early next year!! cc: @cap_ucla @umsnews

I walked along the Willamette River this afternoon and saw half a dozen young people camped out in sleeping bags amidst freezing rain. Last year, 549,928 Americans experienced homelessness. Almost a quarter of those were children. Among the ways that the federal government combats homelessness is through issuing housing vouchers. 5.3 million people make use of these annually to afford decent housing, at a cost of $19 billion to the government in 2016. Until Reagan drastically cut federal funding for affordable housing, there was no homelessness crisis in America. There was widespread poverty, but for the most part, people hadn’t been living on the streets en masse since the Great Depression. Since Reagan, we have failed in many ways to provide basic shelter for our fellow citizens. The current President and Congress propose to cut housing vouchers further by about 1 billion dollars at the same time that they have rammed through a 1.5 trillion dollar tax cut, most of which benefits corporations and the very wealthy. The entire federal housing subsidy budget amounts to a little more than 1 percent of that tax cut. Folks, if we can give a 1.5 trillion dollar tax cut to corporations, we can end homelessness. What do you say we get on that by voting in droves in 2018, and again in 2020?

Photo by Josh Goleman. 8980 tour continues in Los Angeles on January 20th, Ann Arbor on February 2nd. Then Paris June 8 and 9… 

Wut. It seems I’ve been illustrated again in @newyorkermag. Thank you, @cornelia_illo for this beautiful image!

Sunrise yesterday in LA. And now back in Brooklyn…

11.21.16 One year ago today I returned to New York after my 8,980 mile trip. It would take several months for me to realize that I needed to start from scratch, creatively speaking. I abandoned much of the music I’d written in the six months leading up to the election, and began in the spring to write songs that existed in conversation with the experiences I’d had riding around the country, at such a great distance from my normal life. It will be a great thrill to sing these songs next week at BAM. I hope to see some of you there. #8980bookoftravelers

11.20.16 My final dinner of the trip is with Sarah, Mary, and Marlon. All three have been traveling for their respective nieces’ weddings. Mary and Marlon are each other’s second spouses. I ask how they met, and Mary launches into a baroque tale of personal ads in the age of newspapers. She refined her ad over time to narrow her search, and eventually found Marlon. She would call the service only on Mondays and Thursdays, and she would call the men whom she was interested in at noon.

All three are college football fanatics. There is a lengthy episode which I can’t follow, as they delve into the arcana of this division and that division, this conference and that conference.

As it would happen, this is one of the only meals in which politics doesn’t come up.

The election was twelve days ago.

I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon.

#8980bookoftravelers

And… that’s a wrap on tracking for my new album. Can’t wait to share it with y’all. In the meantime, catch a sneak preview of the whole thing (live!) at BAM in about ten days time.