Before long, it was springtime – which is when the touring season started to really pick up again.

I think Kléo did a pretty good job of recapping the Romantic Punk Tour I did with France de Griessen at the beginning of spring, aside from the fact that he made me sound like I’m on psychedelic drugs, when I’m actually just drinking one or two cups of coffee and in real life, I’m a completely normal, actually pretty boring person.

Kléo’s recap of our Romantic Punk Tour is in the 3rd chapter of his “Who Transports The Ferryman?” piece, which is a longer post that’s kind of a deep dive into why he and I have mixed feelings about the business of “publicizing” music altogether, and how our work is changing and evolving in different ways. We love it that people are getting to know about our work and that people keep telling us it has a positive effect on their lives – that’s not the issue at all – it’s more the “industry” of PR and Kléo’s own experiences in navigating that, and the moral implications in a time of multiple genocides, horrible atrocities and injustices on Earth that the entertainment industry is sometimes complicit in, and how some of us speak up against these atrocities even so.

And Kléo’s solution here was actually that he decided to stop working as a publicist altogether, and to only do very minimal work on my website once we released the new album this year. After all, being a publicist was never his main gig to begin with – it was more of an experiment he took on because he wanted to see what it’d be like to run publicity campaigns for underground musicians he liked, and to see what kinds of effects this would have on our work and our audiences – and overall, the effect seems to have been positive! But now his sense is that it’s run its course and it’s time to move on.

I also had to do some soul-searching for similar reasons, which was a big theme of this year in general.

And the conclusion I came to for our concern about profiting from other people’s struggles was pretty straightforward: to donate any proceeds from songs about struggles that aren’t mine (both from performances and from recordings) to the relevant causes – so when I make money from performing a song about Palestine, I donate the amount I made from that song to a Palestinian organization – like The Freedom Theatre, which one of our songs is also on this really cool benefit compilation for.

Kléo did a great blog post about the benefit compilation, where he also talks about some more of what I did later on in the spring and how that’s all interconnected with the release of the benefit compilation, which was mostly a compilation of NYC artists – I really like how Kléo works here, how he’s trying to weave together NYC, Philly, England, mainland Europe, and Palestine into one big tapestry of how we’re all interconnected.

Of course I’m taking notes and trying to figure out how best to incorporate that sense of interconnectedness into my own work – as he says in that post, I alluded to something similar at the Nottingham gig in May – a man with one hand in a train station in Brooklyn is connected to a family in Palestine is connected to a family in Tigray is connected to all indigenous people, everywhere, all immigrants, everywhere, the entire working class, everywhere, to the human heart, and to you – in 2019, I apparently made this short film that I suppose is about how the man with one hand in the train station is connected with a retirement home in Arizona and with my grandma and how I learned to sing – meanwhile, Kléo claims I’m the one who inspired him to do this kind of thing, and now I’m saying I get a lot of inspiration from him, maybe more than he’s getting from me – this has all been cause for some heated debates in the Cannonball Statmansphere recently, and I don’t know if it’ll let up anytime soon.

Anyway, I think Kléo did a good job covering my UK dates with Adam Rivera, and my return to Somerset, where France de Griessen and I swapped places from what we’d done for my album in January, and recorded a new album of hers, once again working with Ben Turner at Axe & Trap, featuring myself on guest vocals, electric guitars, and percussion. The recaps Kléo wrote in “Who Transports the Ferryman?” and “A Benefit Compilation for the Freedom Theatre” sum up anything I could say about what I was doing this spring far better than I could say it.

All in all, it was a good spring – some really good gigs with some really good people, some really good times, and – wow, Renaud Monfourny did an incredible photoshoot of me and France in “romantic punk attire” during our European tour.

And there was our gig in Cap-d’Ail, photographed by Murielle Iris and with this video of the post-gig jam session which was a ton of fun. After a rewarding and fulfilling but still kind of depressing winter, this spring was a seriously fun time. I was even inspired to take some photos of a few of our adventures!

Big thanks to France de Griessen, Arthuro, Adam Rivera, Renaud Monfourny, Murielle Iris, Music Waves, Don Nino, Rémy Trouches, Celtic Pub, Jean-Louis, Longueur d’Ondes, Librairie la 25e Heuere, Ben Turner, Stephen Doyle, Bob Osborne, Ian Keith Moss, JT Soar, Alex Hale, Shelley Jane Newman, Unknown Primate, Biddle Bros, Alan Caruso, The Flashmen, Lou Terry, Claire Wilson, Olga, Kléo, and everyone else who helped make it happen.

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

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

Page 3: Cannonball Statman at the party

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

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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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