Daydream Believer
Now is the time to dream big
About a month ago, I got to play a few shows in the Midwest with an old friend and brilliant songwriter, Richard Shindell.
I wrote a piece recapping the shows and the surrounding tour, which you can read here.
Richard and I worked up a cover of “Daydream Believer” and the audio of us rehearsing it is included below.
Thinking about this song, thinking about the world, thinking about today, (I’m writing this on July 4th), I am hopping on here to talk about dreaming: going big, making room for fantasy, giving the middle finger to fear.
Like a lot of folks, I spent a lot of this week feeling distraught, betrayed, crushed about the horribly mis-named legislation that just passed, and the cruel damage it seems designed to do to so many folks.
But yesterday I got to spend some time talking to local businesses about ways they can support and defend immigrant workers and community members. (The initiative is called Make North Carolina Work, which is connected to Siembra NC and you can see some incredible local businesses getting on board in this video).
When I got home from the trip around town, Mike and I were lamenting the passage of the bill and all of the… ALL of this year.
After a while I said, “Babe, I need some good news.”
Mike said, “You’re the good news.”
Most of you don’t know my husband personally, but a key feature of his personality is that he starts cracking jokes as soon as his eyes open and - unless he gets distracted by politics or sports - the comedy show continues until bed time.
I automatically assumed this compliment was a joke, a sardonic take on a platitude. Exasperated, I said, “Babe, I’m serious.” To be fair, I think he did initially say it as a joke - I could see the childlike smirk on his face. But given the opportunity to retract, his expression became more thoughtful, and he actually doubled down. “You did something important today, something that’s even more important now.”
I still didn’t feel satisfied, so I did what I always do when frustration with the world gets entangled with my marriage: I took a shower. Water connects me to my intuition I think. In the shower, I remembered that the world is not mine to fix alone. In fact, that kind of egotistic, individualistic BS thinking - that we each have to be the hero to everyone in every situation - is, to my mind, a big part of why we’re in this mess to begin with. It makes everything impossible, and suddenly your defeated before you even started. It’s hard to celebrate the small wins when your belief is that you didn’t do enough.
Listening to We Can Do Hard Things podcast today, I heard Glennon Doyle say, “Self-help doesn’t work. Community help does.”
This is all to say: Doing the small work of building community IS the antidote.
I just want to leave you with this on this strange day. We have the power to re-imagine and re-calibrate our world to be about the WE of We the People. The power of connecting in real time with the people in our communities is what actually gets humans through dark times. Laughter, food, music, dancing. Dreaming.
Here’s the audio of Richard and I rehearsing Daydream Believer. Check out the original ending lyric - Richard found it and we were both surprised!
Thank you so much to each one of you here - you have collectively taught me bucketloads about community just by coming to shows, saying hi, sending me notes in response to these newsletters, buying my albums. I love you and look forward to doing more of all of these soon.
4th Sunday Salon Returns July 27th
In light of an upcoming family trip, we’ll take a break from the Salon this month and return July 27th for a livestream concert over zoom! Details to come in July.
Wow! Huge John Stewart and Richard Shindell fan here! You sound great. Very much appreciate the use of “funky”! (Also, in John’s original lyrics, “the shaving razor’s OLD and it stings.”) Very impressed that Richard found the politically incorrect version 😆 Made my day!
"Daydream Believer" has one of those never-ending memories for me. I was at the end of first, 2nd, or 3rd grade when our schoolyear ended with a field trip to Rye Playland, just over the bridge from western Long Island where we lived. And there was a girl from one of the other classes who I had a crush on, and I saw her enjoying a buggy-whip ride while The Monkees hit played on the speakers (it had been a hit in the year before.) The opening tinkling piano perfectly matched my young affection for that girl as her hair whipped back and forth (a bob cut, as I recall).