Thanks, Allen

What is the exact opposite of a Hatchet Job?

The San Diego Troubadour is a local monthly free newspaper about San Diego's roots music scene. They cover Americana to Jazz, Bluegrass to Blues, and everything rootsy in between.

My friend Allen Singer occasionally writes reviews of local artists and CDs and such for them. (I should confess at this point that Allen & I have been performing together for a couple of years.)

About Allen: his deep, first-hand, encyclopedic understanding of Folk Music is based in the life-experience of "being at ground zero during the great Folk-scare of the '60s". Allen came up hanging around Greenwich Village, rubbing up against heros like Seeger, Guthrie, and Zimmerman (er, Dylan). The life-experience he's amassed is conveyed in a very direct way in the honest, immediately accessible & unaffected manner that he plays and sings the music he loves. Allen's a great contributor to our local Folk scene - as a performer, booking agent, writer for our local journals and mentor (of musicians like me).

He's also seen so much musically historical stuff personally that he's a pretty hard guy to impress at this stage of life. ("But enough about that", Allen would say.)

For the September edition of the San Diego Troubadour (Vol. 6, No. 12), for some unfathomable reason, my pal Allen wrote an extremely flattering article about me. Said a bunch of stuff that it's going to be very difficult for me to live up to. Really nice stuff. It's the first time I've been the subject of any kind of publicly circulated piece, so it's a really big deal to me. I'll be sending copies to family members just as I'm telling y'all about it here in my blog.

It's a little unsettling to see one's own name in a publication read by thousands (TENS of thousands?). And it's very humbling, especially coming from someone whom I like and respect so much. Hard to come up with something that accurately conveys how this boon makes me feel.

Thank you sincerely, Allen, for the 'good press'.