Hello friends, old and new!

I’ve been quiet for a long time. And you may, along with news correspondents and pundits everywhere be wondering: Why write now? For what critically important reason is Cameron Hood choosing to break his bloggish-silence? Since I’m sure you where losing sleep over it, I will now reveal my answer:

I’m writing to congratulate myself. I’ve done it! I’ve completed the task set out before me. This was not a task assigned to me by anyone other than me. It was a harrowing path that I alone chose to walk. It’s been difficult. It’s involved a lot of traveling, a lot of shows, a lot of training, a lot of skillful finger-performance. And it’s involved a lot of Redken Rough Paste Hair Styler.

The earth-shattering subject I’m addressing is not my involvement in Ryanhood’s massively successful Spring tour, though it was the stage upon which my heroics were performed. Instead, I’m talking about something even bigger and longer: my hair.

At tour’s start, way back in January, I vowed that I would not cut my closely shorn locks until I returned home to Tucson’s beloved shores. And here, on the eve of my return, I am contemplating the utter greatness of my achievement. Just look at where I started:

In this photo you can see  me trying to pretend I’m not taking a picture of myself in the bologna aisle in Texas. And now compare that with my current, Emo-Rockers-Would-Be-Proud-Of-Me-Except-For-My-Enthusiastic-Thumbs-Up stylings.

In this photo, you can see the mists of Spokane Falls rising up to applaud my fantastic achievement. “Hurray for our hero!” the splashes seem to say. Listen, can you hear them?

In all, well at least in some seriousness: today we go home to Tucson for the first time since January 9th. We’ll still be playing some shows in California and Washington throughout May, and there are some cool public and private events going throughout the summer, but today we return to the city of our birth. And there’s something exceptional about that. Even more exceptional than the amazing and stupendous achievement of my hair growth (which is hard to imagine, I know).

During our tour, we’ve been introducing Gardens and the Graves with a story about how people who grow up in Tucson generally can’t wait to graduate high-school and leave. “We gotta get out of this town.” Not that there’s anything wrong with Tucson, per se. But there’s this restlessness that grows in teenagers who grow up in a town famous for retirement communities. “What am I missing by staying here? What could my life be if I left town… if I didn’t play it safe… if I risked a little bit?”

And here at the end of four plus months of seeing the country and playing for thousands of good people and driving 13 hour days and staying in different hotels every night, we’ve begun to feel that pull, begun to say those once-foreign words: “We gotta get back to that town.”

Summer in Tucson has rain. Monsoon rain that makes Tucson’s arroyos (dry rivers, or washes) become real, live rivers. You know, like the kind they have everywhere else in the country? The kind with water in them. And there are thunderstorms, with lightning, and wind that blows the contents of your trash can all over your street. Simply delightful.

I am glad to go home. And in a few months, I will be glad to go to Wisconsin, and Michigan, and the Dakotas, and Minnesota, and Iowa, and many other places with secrets and mysteries and beautiful storms all their own. In a few months, I will be glad again to leave, to go. Where? I don’t know. And, mmhmmm, already I’ve reached my quota for self-quoted poetry. But with hair this cool, how could you help but quote yourself? I mean really. Who’s with me?