Dear Simeonie,

It was really good to hear from you, especially after such a long silence.  I was starting to wonder if I'd ever find you again, or if you’d become permanently icebound among the polar bears and auroras of Churchill.  So many things have happened since we last talked, so many days and nights spread over so many thousands of miles, that it's hard to know where to begin.  Since I last saw you on that April day with the bees buzzing and the dogwoods flowering, my life has looped me twice around the world, and swept me into and out of eddies I could never have expected, or even imagined.  But I’ve just put some lentils on the stove to simmer, and I’m listening to the Harry Smith anthology with Nico’s Desert Shore on deck, and the cat is sleeping comfortably in my lap, and there’s nothing at all pressing this evening.  No rock clubs, no rehearsal, no thesis writing (not tonight – too tired, just as I’ve managed to be somehow for the last two years), no one to share a meal or a bed with.  Just a little time and a little space to try to bring you up to speed.

I think when I sent my last letter I’d just come back from Madagascar and started thinking about putting together a new band, with some new friends that I met when my old band was playing a benefit for the local college radio station. The old band – you remember them, they were good, you saw us play once in my back yard in Dallas.  It was a bunch of high school friends, we played awful shows at awful bars in town, and generally tried too hard in all the ways that first bands do, especially the kind that has about two “influences” and not much sense of context.  I found a CD of a rehearsal we recorded a month or so before drifting apart the other day, and listening back I was charmed by it, especially by the care we took in arranging all the guitars and keyboards – but also embarrassed by my flailing vocals.  Everything was stretched too tight, and I remember feeling that then.    

That was about the time I met Will.  I wanted to do something different, musically, and he did, too, so we made that first Shearwater record, “The Dissolving Room” in three days in a dark, rainy room in a building downtown that now seems well on its way to becoming derelict.  There were loan sharks on the ground floor, and the upper floors were a bewildering series of storage spaces and empty rooms that didn’t seem associated in any particular way.  I remember Jeff Hoskins’ directions: “Go up the stairs, walk straight back, and when you can’t see anything anymore, you’re there.”  That’s exactly what that record sounds like to me, now.  Jeff’s a wonderful drummer and engineer.   He lives here in town again, having moved (since the record) to New York and back (a common Austin phenomenon) with his Doberman, Annie.  She looks the part of a fierce guard dog, but is in fact meek and sweet-natured, and I’ve seen her wearing a wig and a sweater.  Jeff was struck by lightning while we were making the record, but it didn’t seem to affect him.

The next year is sort of blurry and I don’t remember the chronology of it that well.  I do remember spending months on end on icy islands in the Falklands and Argentina trying to follow penguins and caracaras around for my thesis research, and, sometimes, working on new songs in my field notebook.  Somewhere after or before that we played our first show - me, Will, and Kim, opening for Rebecca Cannon and Thor. Thor, as he now tells it, demanded to be in the band that night, which might be true.  But I think we just gradually started inviting him to play with us, and slipping him a few bucks when we played shows, and then asked him if he’d like to be in the band.  He said yes, so we stopped paying him and started practicing at his house.  Somewhere around this time we made the second record, “Everybody Makes Mistakes,” which title seemed funny and brave at the time, in Brian Beattie’s backyard shed.  I remember the smell of oil paints in Brian’s wife’s painting studio, the grackles squawking and chattering outside, and the startling THWACK of ripe pecans falling on the tin roof. Listening to that record now is a weird experience. Brian gave it a late-afternoon feeling that’s comforting and familiar, but the songs are all so short and static that they’re almost disorienting.  We found it difficult to play any of them live in a way that was interesting to us or anyone else.

But play live we did, and after some trial and error a new crop of songs turned up.  These were longer, clearer, and made more racket, and mostly ended up on the third record, “Winged Life”.  We drove up to Argyle, Texas for this one, hauling the big  Hammond up in the back of the van and unloading it into the cavernous tracking room of the mighty Echo Lab in the dead of night.  The Echo Lab, though shiny and new, and, the kind of place I might have daydreamed about recording in when I was in high school, was also unnervingly occupied by a host of little scorpions and large spiders.  Some of them made their way into the record and the new “Thieves” EP (in songs like “Sealed” and “I Can’t Wait”), but most of them were squashed on sight.  We also added two new members to the band to fill out the sound:  Travis, who plays bowed instruments through loud amplifiers, and Howard, who plays just about everything, as far as I can tell.  It’s made for its own set of difficulties live (how to rein in so many horses?)  but over a couple of tours we’ve learned how to make it work out more predictably.   When I hear recordings of us playing live recently, it sounds to me like we’re heading for something, aiming at someplace, somewhere otherworldly and lovely and a little bit evil, and that we’re closer now than before.

So, now, as you say, what’s next?  I guess, to answer your other question, I’ve become a musician with a passion for science, rather than the other way around. But the birds are never far away in my mind (I’ve filled our web site with pictures of them).  I hope they’ll be there if I decide to come back.  I figure they waited long enough for me to find them the first time, so maybe they can wait a little longer.  This past summer I spent a couple of months in the Galapagos working as an assistant on a hawk study, partly to see if that was really how I felt, and it turned out that it was.  I brought back a sea lion’s jaw, and a few crystals of  sap from a palo santo tree, and a notebook full of song ideas.  I loved life in the field, and the prospect of doing serious research.  But right now it’s the piano, and the banjo, and the tape recorder, and the touring van that have the most claim on me.   And I’m very curious and excited about the record we’re starting soon.   Now that we’ve passed the Sargasso of the first albums, I think we’re ready to handle stormier weather, rougher seas.   

Love to you and to your surrogate family. I hope all of you keep warm and get enough light this winter. If you get the chance, when spring rolls around, will you keep & press an arctic poppy  for me this year, like the ones in the picture you sent?  I can hardly believe that such delicate and graceful flowers can grow in such a forbidding place.  I’ll gladly send you some feathers in trade, from the collection in my freezer.

- JM '05