Jason Peterson, Writer

I think I read more this past year than I have in any year since grad school, and nothing kept me reading quite like the Lonesome Dove saga. I picked up Lonesome Dove because one of my favorite podcasts, The Watch, was doing a special on it - I'm so glad I did. Not since I was a kid have I been so fully immersed in a novel as I was with this series.  The sequels are each great too (Dead Man's Walk especially), but nothing quite like the first. If you haven't read them yet, I highly recommend diving in, and The Watch pod is a great companion. I've been picking up other McMurtry books since finishing.  I first posted this yesterday (3/25) and just read that Mr. McMurtry passed away today. Thankful for the books he wrote, especially in this pandemic year.   

Like a lot of folks locked-down during the pandemic, I found myself with a desire to do something positive with the stressful energy building up inside me. That led me back to the creative comfort food of songwriting, which has always been a way for me to get lost in the moment in a different way than other forms of writing. I also had a tremendous amount of fun messing around in GarageBand, recording new instruments and playing with the tools in the program. It was a lovely distraction from everything happening this year. The five songs on this EP  are part of a larger batch I wrote and that may find themselves on other projects, but they felt of a piece and of a time - written and recorded in my home office/guestroom (dubbed the Nana and Papa suite). It's been a refuge for me, and I hope you enjoy what came out of it. Check out Home Office Suite on Bandcamp here: https://themeltedcoins.bandcamp.com/ And the Melted Coins website here:  https://www.themeltedcoins.com/

Really enjoyed speaking with Ian Stich of StichMethod guitar lessons for this Performer Magazine piece. I've learned a ton from Stich over the past few years, and he was a humble and kind as he comes across via his YouTube lessons.  Be sure to check out his stuff (especially his breakdowns of Trey's solos) here:  https://stichmethod.com/

Wrote about the new memoir from Black Crowes drummer Steve Gorman for Performer Magazine.  Check out the review here  and then dust off your Black Crowes albums to remember what a killer band they were.

I interviewed guitarist extraordinaire Yvette Young for Performer Magazine,  which you can check out here . As a guitar-strummer and rudimentary soloist, watching what Yvette is able to do with a guitar is pretty mind-blowing to me. That she's as humble and good humored about her incredible skills is all the better. Check out Yvette in action!

I wrote about Jeff Tweedy's new memoir for Peformer Magazine - check it out here! Super excited to see Jeff in Dallas in early March. I've been to a few Wilco shows, saw The Autumn Defense (John Sirratt and Pat Sansone's side gig) at the Basement in Nashville a few years back, and now Jeff Tweedy solo. All I need is to check out The Nels Cline 4 and one of Glenn Kotche's projects to round out my complete Wilco fanverse. Also have to post this video, which Jeff mentions in the book with the following quote:     Indeed. 

There aren't many restaurant jobs I haven't worked - well, except for the most important one: cook (if only you didn't have to be a good cook to be a cook). But name almost anything else, and I've done it. Dishwasher, busboy, host, waiter, bartender. Some were terrible, some were a blast, and all were made cool in hindsight after reading Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential.  I first read Kitchen Confidential while in New Zealand on a working holiday visa. I'd gotten a job washing dishes at a spot were I was hoping to bartend, and his book made that decision feel romantic and exciting (rather than depressing). While I'd worked in restaurants before, I'd never worked in the kitchen. It was a different planet from the front of the room.. Bourdain captured it better than I ever could, and I highly recommend reading his account. I only stayed back there a few weeks, but it's a few weeks I'll never forget. Night after night, I hustled like

Raising a glass of Kool-Aid (non-electric, but thanks) to Tom Wolfe, who wrote the book that set me on a course of exploring too many books and bands to mention. I was fifteen or sixteen when I first picked up The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (from my high school library no less), and its wild tale wildly told opened up possibilities of writing that I hadn't considered until then. I started listening to The Dead, wearing terrible tie-dyes, and using ellipses and exclamation marks like crazy. (I stopped with the punctuation because only he could really pull it off). The tie-dyes took longer to shed. I'm going to put his other great reads on my list to check out soon. Here's to Tom Wolfe and his electric writing.  

I love photo caption contests. My favorite site for them is the Nashville Cream blog over at the Nashville Scene , which offers one up every few weeks or so. I've entered maybe ten of them in the past few years and somehow won three times, and I'm more proud of that than I should be. But there's just something about having a caption match up with a picture in a funny way that feels so... right . And, you know, prizes. I've posted my three winning entries below for posterity's sake: Sometimes life imitates art, and sometimes it imitates Art. This remains one of my favorite pictures I've ever seen. I don't know if it's the seriousness of the guy, the weirdness of the moment, or how much I wish I were there to see this in person, but it's all amazing. I really hope his name is actually Art. The Old Man and the Sea (of sadness) When I was in college and practice-teaching 8th grad

Had a chance to interview UK's Shame, a great young band that lives up to the hype they've been generating. Check it out in Performer Magazine