I am what peo­ple call a ​“pro­fes­sion­al musi­cian,” which is to say I make my liv­ing by play­ing music, drums most­ly, for oth­er peo­ple who pay me mon­ey in exchange. For years I’ve joked that my job isn’t real (it’s not, real­ly) or is a self­ish way to make a liv­ing (it is, most­ly). This isn’t to say it doesn’t require ridicu­lous amounts of ded­i­ca­tion and sac­ri­fice — it does — it’s just that in the greater schemes of the uni­verse it’s easy for me to see how I’m not exact­ly first in line for the group they’re gonna line up to pop­u­late the new Earth.

It is insane times at the moment. Out of many of the issues we’re fac­ing, this new wave of insu­lar­i­ty and nation­al­ism is crush­ing me, and I wish there were more I could do. I can’t lie and say I don’t strug­gle with the fact that this job I pour so much time into does lit­tle-to-noth­ing for the greater good.

In relat­ed news, the Twi­light Hours, the pas­sion project of Matt Wil­son, John Mun­son, and oth­er fine men of much musi­cal cal­iber, are play­ing a show at the Cedar Cul­tur­al Cen­ter in Min­neapo­lis on March 25. We’ve been rehears­ing, many times even, focus­ing on minu­ti­ae and try­ing our best to arrange a show we’ll be proud to per­form and you will enjoy lis­ten­ing to. It is a lot of hard work and my cal­en­dar has a remark­able amount of things that start with ​“TTH” scrib­bled in it, but if the show is a suc­cess it’ll all be worth it.

All of this being said, I’m real­ly hap­py to say we’re donat­ing a por­tion of the show’s pro­ceeds to the Min­neso­ta chap­ter of CAIR, the Coun­cil on Amer­i­can-Islam­ic Rela­tions. It is a tiny way to sup­port just one orga­ni­za­tion work­ing to pro­mote social jus­tice and mutu­al under­stand­ing. It is a small way to say ​“thank you” to a com­mu­ni­ty we wel­come and feel wel­comed by.

And doing some­thing, any­thing, helps me sleep just a tiny lit­tle bit bet­ter at night. If you’re around the Min­neapo­lis area, I hope to see you there.