Joe's Odyssey

What could be more appropriate than an Odyssey show on April Fool's Day? The Greek hero most known for playing loose with the truth featured on a day dedicated to recreational lying.

So I set up in my office for what would be my third appearance in conjunction with the kind folks at Valencia College in Florida. I played The Blues of Achilles twice for them (once last year and once this) and I was thrilled for the chance to play my Odyssey as part of their speaker series.

After a generous introduction I…

No that's not a typo: my last Odyssey performance of 2020 was in November for Waterloo School in Texas and my first performance of 2021 is in March for... the very same Waterloo School in Texas (though a different set of students).

The four month gap between Odyssey shows is the longest such stretch for me in almost ten years. Which is crazy. There were several years that even a month break between shows was long so four months is really something. 

In the interim, I've been able to focus on a couple of…

A short postscript to my "annual wrap up" blog from last week. 

I thought that show for Pomfret would be my last of the year, but I booked a last minute performance for a high school in Texas. It was an unexpected surprise (a teacher there saw me perform at UT-Austin some years back and thought of me for a class reading the Odyssey) and a nice addition to an already successful fall schedule. 

This Thursday morning performance had a number of features that have now become standard for Zoom Odyssey shows…

It almost, ALMOST, worked out that my last Odyssey performance of 2020 was for the same school as my last performance of 2019.

But I booked a last minute show for a high school in Texas that happened a few days after my November 17 virtual engagement with Pomfret School so... not quite the perfect framing moment about which I thought I might get to write. 

But... it's 2020 and there are no rules... so... I'm going to write the "end of the year" blog I was planning on writing for this show and do something…

I've written a lot here about how my relationship with my Odyssey has changed the farther I get from the time in which I created it.  

Lately I've taken to framing it as "when I wrote these songs I was Telemachus' age and now I'm Odysseus' age," which is cute but doesn't really capture the full complexity of the interaction between creation and creator.

In my performances I often get questions about why I made a certain creative decision in my telling.  Some aspects are easy to answer: I put instrumentals…