This September marks the second autumn that I’ve spent down here in Tennessee. If you can call it autumn in good conscience, seeing as how it was 101 degrees over the weekend. Mercifully, it has cooled down the last couple days and now sits comfortably somewhere in the sixties.

Autumn in Tennessee is nice. Nice. I think that’s the right word for it. It’s fairly warm, the humidity goes into hibernation for a while, it’s nice.

But it’s got nothing on fall in my homeland of the midwest.

Autumn in the midwest is beautiful. It is crisp. And it is bitter.

The trees don’t just die off, they explode in a vivid display of color, as if to say that if they’re going to go, at least they’re not going to go without a fight.

The wind whips up off Lake Michigan with anger in each gust and steals every degree of warmth from your bones until you know that the only cure is a hot mug of apple cider.

This is the autumn that I was raised to love, an autumn filled with apple orchards and pumpkins to be carved, an autumn of backyard football games on frozen soil, an autumn that will rip you up if you’re not careful, an autumn where I first started to fall in love with my wife five years ago.

It’s on the rare days like this here in Nashville, when the sun disappears and the temperature drops a bit, and I have to dig through my closet to find where I left my cardigan six months ago, that I catch a small glimpse of that autumn.

I’m grateful for the glimpses.

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I got a little carried away thinking about autumn, but before I go I want to make sure to tell you about a show I have coming up.

A few months ago I quietly released an album called “The Streets Will Turn to Streams.” We hand-made 100 cases out of felt and sold them all in the weeks that followed.

But I never did a big official release show for this album. And so I decided to do something about that.

That something will happen on Thursday October 20th, at The 5 Spot here in East Nashville. The line-up is still being assembled, but I’m working hard to make sure it will be an evening well worth your time.

The felt cases are gone (except for one I discovered hidden in my house the other day), but have now been replaced by hundreds of black cardboard cases that I painstakingly hand-stamped, front and back, one by one.

I’ll be sure to pass on more details as they come into focus.

As always, thanks for reading.

Let’s be adventurers.

Zach