Since my Odyssey shows at the 2024 NJCL Convention, I've played the piece only three times. But for a last minute unexpected (and welcome) booking at Lake Forest Academy this spring, the Odyssey shows at Miami of Ohio for the 2025 NJCL Convention (my 14th straight) could have been my first of the year.
But the lack of Odyssey performances doesn't mean Odysseus has been far from my mind and heart. If anything, the opposite.
I wrote in my piece about the LFA show that I was wrestling with the idea that 2026 could be a big year for a Homeric bard owing to the excitement around Christopher Nolan's summer blockbuster Odyssey movie. I've since planned out the next 18 months around the opportunities I think the movie might afford me. I've made investments both creatively and financially in things and people I think will help me find a wider audience for my heretofore niche work on Odysseus' exploits.
And I've continued to lean into Homer and being a bard through The Blues of Achilles, which has developed into a piece with an easier crossover to general audiences.
Which brings me to the four shows (two Odyssey, two BOA) I played at Miami of Ohio.
Show number two of the four (a Blues of Achilles show) was the 500th performance of my Homeric pieces.
500.
Performance 1: The Odyssey (in my parents' living room) on March 17, 2002.
Performance 500: The Blues of Achilles on July 23, 2025.
I'm still not sure what to do with that.
I do know that over 23 years into performing, the interest in and relevance of my work around Homer is expanding. Yes as connected to the Nolan movie, but also as part of the culture of classical retellings in music other media in general that has happened over the last decade.
It seems I was ahead of the curve in how I chose to present these stories. A student asked me how the (massive) successes of Epic the Musical and Hadestown made me feel. I think the implication was that I might be jealous but beyond the obvious wish to have as many people as possible hear my work, I see the success of those two properties as validation of my own creative instinct and academic analysis. My feelings around and agenda in creating my Odyssey have proven extremely prescient and accurate.
Back to the 500th show.
It was amazing. All four of these shows were. I'm performing and talking about these pieces at a higher level than I ever have. They are resonating with audiences profoundly. I am particularly proud that they seem to connect so deeply with high school students. To be a musician approaching 50 years old and have young people (to whom music means so so much) relate and react to your work with such intensity and love is so remarkable it makes me feel like crying out of gratitude.
Which I basically did at these shows.
I still sometimes don't full appreciate what being a bard means. What it gives you and what it takes from you. How important it is: One of the most important jobs in human history. I think we bards will be the last ones left to turn out the lights when this human experiment comes to an end. The gift it has given me and keeps giving me is extraordinary and I owe my career to the bards that came before me, back to Homer's time and even earlier.
After singing show 500 in the morning, being immersed in the world of grief and love that is the Iliad and by extension The Blues of Achilles, I come back to the same lecture hall in the late afternoon for show 501, my first Odyssey show since March and only my fourth in 12 months.
I inhabit Odysseus easily now. A complicated collection of contradictions. That is, a human being. I relate to the character differently than I did on performance 1 but somehow the way I wrote these songs allows me to in performance 501 with only interpretive changes to the material. That's good songwriting.
Performance 502 the next morning (another Odyssey show) is electric. The students buy every vinyl record I brought with me and almost every T-shirt and CD too. Posters. Stickers. All of it.
I'm back on the road for another homecoming. Feeling lucky. Feeling nervous for what I have planned in 2026. Feeling excited. Feeling almost at peace with what has become my legacy as a musician.
Feeling thankful for my winedark life.