The NPR show Tiny Desk is having a contest that goes like this: You send them a link to a YouTube video of you playing an original song behind a desk, and if they like your song you get to be on the show.
Having grown up in a household where NPR was on in the garage and pert near every time we got into our parents’ vee-hickles (not to mention my own when I started driving) I’ve always wanted to be on NPR like my acoustic guitar heroes Adrian Legg and Leo Kottke. I was listening to the Fresh Air podcast a week ago and heard Terry Gross’s creamy eggnog-esque voice advertising the contest. I figured hey, why not take a stab at it? Even if they pass on it, at least it’s a good excuse to bust out the acoustic and play it for an afternoon.
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Winter Storm Jonas is currently in full effect in Brooklyn right now and I love it. Nearly everything is closed and the streets are so desolate that people are just walking in them. Check out the lovely views from our bedroom winderr earlier in the day:
And here’s a couple of pix I just took when I ran out to get a can of crushed tomatoes (thank goodness for stubborn overpriced bodegas staying open! They must be making a killing…)
Mmm. Cozy.
Being that we’re in the middle of a blizzard, what more fitting song to do than “December 31, 1989”? I wrote it about 15 years ago and it was inspired by one of my favorite walks home EVER. You can probably guess what the day was using context clues … It was probably around 10PM and I was walking home from a friend’s house. It had just snowed about a foot and there wasn’t a car in sight all the way home. The snow was blanketing everything and sparkling; it had an awesome dark blue/moonlight reflection color, with bursts of orangish purple every so often from the street lights.
I had the streets all to myself so just walked right down the middle of them nearly all of the 2-3 miles home. I was the first one to make tracks in the snow and it was cool to look back at the trail of my Chuck Taylor footprints as far as I could see. It was completely silent other than an occasional train in the distance. That was some good stuff.
So here it is, “December 31, 1989” from my solo acoustic Finnegan album. I kept it to the old school short version because that’s 2 less minutes of risking screwing it up and having to start over (you can see my left hand is a little wobbly at times because this was probably take #2 dozen).
Thanks for the inspiration, Jonas!
(For more solo acoustic vids like this peep the archive at https://mikekrenner.com/category/finnegan/)
