This post was originally published here.

Forty years. Hundreds of shows, a dozen bands, a van with more miles on it than sense. I wrote songs the way most people breathe, because I didn’t know how to stop.

Then a few years ago I went back through all of them and found something I never planned. Eleven songs, written decades apart, about completely different moments in my life, fit together. In order. Like they’d been waiting for me to notice. Those eleven songs became the album Songs in the Key of Return.

I wasn’t the one who figured out why. That took stepping back from my own life with more patience than I usually give myself, and doing it under a different name. Writing as J.W. Kindbloom, I pieced together the timeline in the novel The Echo and the Voice, the story that finally explained what the songs had been quietly building toward the whole time. The character at the center of it, Jonas Wilder, is close enough to me that I decided to become him, at least for seventy minutes at a time.

That’s the show. Being Jonas Wilder: one guy, one guitar, no band, no set. Just the songs, in the order they were always meant to be heard, and the stories behind why I never saw it coming.

People have described it as part concert, part confession, and part detective story where I’m the one solving the case. I still don’t fully know what to call it. I just know it surprises people.

See where it’s playing next, hosted by the Creative Humanity Alliance →