As usu­al, it’s been ages since my last ​“news‑y” type of update, so here’s the scoop from the land of Prince and Honey(dogs).

Ses­sions: lots of them sprin­kled around, includ­ing a fun cou­ple of days at the Pearl with Jason Shan­non; two days in Duluth with Caitlin Robert­son at the beau­ti­ful Sacred Heart Music Cen­ter, which is a church with a record­ing stu­dio inside; and a fun, fast day at Brent Sigmeth’s stu­dio in Can­non Falls with Brent’s two awe­some dogs and the Minor Plan­ets.

Gigs: after being gone for most of last sum­mer with the Alter­nate Routes it’s been a nice change of pace to stick close to home. One of the high­lights of the last month or so has been being intro­duced to Wits, which I guess is sort of the younger, hip­ster ver­sion of Prairie Home Com­pan­ion. I’ve got­ten to play a few shows there as a guest drum­mer, back­ing Aimee Mann (!) and Ted Leo. The show is a lot of fun to watch and the house band — John Mun­son, Steve Roehm, Janey Win­ter­bauer, and Joe Sav­age — is crazy awe­some, so hope­ful­ly there’ll be a lit­tle more of that.

This is prob­a­bly also a good time to men­tion my friend Dave Olson…his new album No Octo­ber was released last month and has been get­ting great reviews. I can’t say enough good things about the cast and crew on this record, and there were some pret­ty incred­i­ble moments work­ing on it. I had fair­ly good inten­tions of writ­ing a lot more about it, but I think it’s just best if you check out his web­site and lis­ten for your­self.