Joe's Odyssey

My friend and excellent Classicist Joel Christensen seems to have a bottomless well of good analogies for framing various aspects of Homeric epic. He's written about them at length over at his website Sententiae Antiquae as well as on Twitter/X…

νόστος = a return home.

My trip to perform at the 2023 National Junior Classical League convention was a return of sorts: a return to the site of the 2014 convention, Emory University, in Atlanta, Georgia.

The 2014 NJCL holds…

Before my Monday morning show at BYUI in Rexburg, Idaho, the 47th state in which I’ve performed the Odyssey, the professor and class said a prayer for me.

It was a simple prayer that I might perform well and return…

I had just wrapped a Saturday afternoon performance of the Odyssey in the lunchroom of Easton High School in Easton, Maryland, a small town an hour southeast of Baltimore across the expansive Bay Bridge. The occasion was the Maryland Junior…

Three years since the acute beginning of the pandemic and I'm finally starting to fully understand its impact on  my work and career.

I think the pandemic diverted me off a potentially damaging framing of my Homeric pieces, something that…

Traveling is a muscle:  If you don’t use it, it atrophies and it takes time to reestablish yourself both practically and emotionally around the challenges of going town to town playing music.

It’s been over three months since my last…

I awoke in the dark in my hotel room in Connecticut and immediately checked the weather. When I went to sleep there was snow forecast and I was worried that the backroads on the drive to my morning shows would…

I awoke on Tuesday with my manic Monday travel schedule still echoing in my brain and body… but feeling refreshed after just a few hours of sleep. A hotel breakfast, a shuttle ride back to the airport to pick up…

After three days home following my show in West Virginia, I headed back out on a Monday morning for the second part of my ten show run: four Odyssey shows in three days in two states, Texas and Connecticut. 

For the second straight day I’m on the road in the pre-dawn darkness. 

I’ve got an almost five hours drive from Lexington to Wheeling, West Virginia, where I’ll be performing at The Linsly School, a show that will mark the…

After a great first day of tour on Monday and a beautiful, intense Blues of Achilles show at Earlham College on Tuesday night, I awoke on Wednesday in my quirky mid-century modern Airbnb in Richmond, Indiana. I only had a…

Life has a way of waiting to give you what you want until you’re ready for it. 

2020 was supposed to be the year I took my touring to a new level. 

With a second Homeric piece to offer in…