I packed Return with me as I headed to the desert and I dug it out in the depths of something I was having a hard time shaking off in February. The sandstorm winds shook my apartment windows and filled the roach-shit littered floors with a fine pink dust. I fought that immersion with Old Man Brown’s music. Good, soul music from a great band. Aside from freedom I don’t need much more.

You can hear all the influences in Return but you can also hear a band making good on them. They take what’s been given to them, what they’ve absorbed and make it their own. They nod to the past, turn their head and move on. And coming at a time when so much of rock music is bloated and so much of “soul” music is anything but, Old Man Brown seemed to spearhead a desire to raise Southern soul music up from the ashes of Wilson Pickett’s grave and drive it to someplace new. Even if they were the only ones doing it.

And they could. With tightly written songs and a twin guitar and organ-driven front that could kick out the jams with the best of them, Old Man Brown had the goods to drive that spear wherever they chose.

Trapped in the desert my brother would write me updates of what he was seeing Old Man Brown do amongst the night of Baltimore, the same night that once devoured Edgar Allan Poe. His letters burned with the changes nightly playing had brought upon the band; now with a horn section and a new drummer.

“Tighter than ever,” he wrote to me. “They covered Sam Cooke’s ‘I’m a Pilgrim’ and it took me out. The whole place was grooving away. Hard. They have also been burning up a cover of Doyle Bramhall II’s ‘Problem Child’ with their guitarists sending the solos right through you. Damn man, they just can’t get better right now. And that horn section….”

But Kuwait is a long way away from Fells Point and there were no tapes to be traded from across the ocean. No new videos were popping up on the internet, so I was left to imagine the new developing sound every time I put “Return” on.

Then the letters shifted. Adam, Old Man Brown’s lead singer, organ and keys man as well as main songwriter, and I began exchanging emails. We were trying to set up a way to do an interview from that distance. It looked like there was going to be a new album out come that May and they were willing to send me a rough mix of it so I could listen to it, generate some questions and do a correspondence interview. They were recording the album themselves over a greater span of time than the first and using the technology that allows bands to separate themselves from costly studios.

May passed into the heat of June and there was no album. It was put off to save money for a small tour of England. By that point we had worked out a time to interview after their set during the Hot August Blues Festival, an interview that looked like it would dovetail nicely with the album’s pushed back release date of early September.

I’ve gone through another pitcher of beer and feel that August far off. The snow is beginning to fall and the electricity to the jukebox is shot. The wings weren’t enough but I don’t have money to both eat and drink. I’ll just drink. The river will still be there when I’m done.

It’s nearly noon and the sky is gunmetal. I can hear the river. Phil is in the kitchen laughing with the cook. James left an hour ago, his shot glass is still on the counter. It’s sitting in a small puddle of whiskey. The notebook is still next to me, as indecipherable as ever. It is as if the nights between August and now have sent the ideas to corners I can’t find with a compass. Or, it is that the words have found a mortuary only the clean can enter. The tape recorder lies cold and silent next to my pen. I haven’t written anything in months. A short story of mine came completed and final in the contributor’s copies from San Francisco the other day. But seeing my name on the index felt foreign and vague. The story itself felt used, just as a snake’s skin must after the shedding. People keep asking about the novel and I keep saying spring. When the snow melts.

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