Since it was the release party for my new album, I also played some songs, with David Brown joining me on clarinet – this was the first time I’d performed with David, after we were introduced by the accordionist Negrita Yani during a Son Jarocho concert they were both performing at earlier this year – he sounded great in a Son Jarocho band and equally so in a Cannonball Statman duo, which shows some pretty impressive versatility on his part!

And, Gabriel Martinez, who made audio recordings of everyone’s performances at the party, also played a song of his at the party, which I joined him on lead guitar for.

We were all really happy with how the whole thing turned out – great performances from all the writers and musicians, great visual art, about 50-60 people turned up and everyone seemed to have a really good time – great food and drinks, which were enjoyed equally by the human and canine attendees.

And, as has become a tradition with our events at the Centro Cultural, I woke up the next morning around dawn to find the stray Belgian Shepherd dog who lives in our area had broken into the space and was digging through the trash to ensure not a single food particle left over from any plates our attendees had thrown out would go to waste – of course, by the time I woke up, my dog Xóchi was already curiously observing what was happening, and trying to figure out whether to try and scare the guy away or join in on the composting fun. After noticing I’d woken up, though, the Belgian Shepherd quickly fled the scene, leaving a trail of torn up plastic trash bags and paper plates for us to clean up.

It was a lot of fun, and a lot of work, which had been a common theme of this year in general – right before the party, Kléo and I had just finished a several months-long, surprisingly intense project of digging through decades of material from my archives – DVDs, CDs, cassettes, VHS tapes, photography books, lyric sheets, scores, setlists, gig posters, fan art, visual art of my own, physical memorabilia, digital files, memories, and basically everything in this universe that I or my labrador retriever has ever breathed on – to add any hidden gems we could find in there to the Cannonball Statman site, to coincide with the release of the new album, running with the theme of how the album brings together songs from a number of different points throughout my career and puts a new spin on them that reflects a lot of what I do with those songs on stage now.

This was all also coinciding with the reissues series we’ve been working on for the past year or so, putting out “classic Cannonball” albums from the 2010s that had been out of print and unavailable online for some years – so now, you can hear all these albums on the complete discography page of this site, and most of them have also been reissued on the major streaming services – if you want to support my work, you can also buy them on BandCamp.

Arriving Flesh-Scent (2016), one of over a dozen “classic Cannonball” albums we reissued this year.

So: it’s been a time of reflection, digging deep, looking at things in a broader perspective, thinking in the big picture and in the long term. 

And, at the same time, focusing on very local pursuits, like the aforementioned release party, and the series of gigs I’d been doing in the South of Mexico throughout the autumn and summer months of this year, where I collaborated with the accordionist Negrita Yani and a number of other musicians, poets, and visual artists.

That’s been a lot of fun, and it’s kept my feet in the here and now while I’ve also been spending 8+ hours a day combing through anything from videos from my 2018 Taiwanese tour and subsequent and prior European and North American tours, to lyric sheets and scores by my first ever band in 2002, to photography work I did in NYC and across the USA in the late 2000s, to albums I recorded in the early 2010s, to short films I made in 2006, to comic books I made in 2001, to fan art made of me escaping my own gig in 2013 while wearing a panda on my head for some unknown reason, to countless other seemingly endless layers of stuff.

The best of it is (mostly) on the various sections of this site now for you to enjoy at your leisure – and, finally, Kléo and I can sleep.

All of this brings me to a whole parallel train of thought, which is: 2024 is coming to a close, and while we’re thinking “big picture”, it seems like it’d be a good time to write the yearly recap and thank yous list we like to do at the end of a year.

Next → Page 4: Winter in Wales, recording the new album in Somerset

or jump to:

Page 1: Dancing dogs and insects in the days before the party, visual art and guests start to arrive

Page 2: Poetry and Music at the party

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Page 5: Spring Romantic Punk touring season in Europe and the UK

Page 6: Summer performances in Mexico, digging through the archives in Oaxaca and Puebla

Page 7: Autumn reflections on the NYC underground scene and the power of music

Page 8: What am I doing in 2025?

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