The Road Diaries

MONTAUBAN-SUR-L’OUVÈZE, France – Today we went to the source of the Ouvèze river. Eventually, the Ouvèze feeds the Rhône near Avignon, but up here in Haut Provence, just before the Alps take over, it is a trickle dressed only in moss-covered rocks. When you slip into...

[Note: This piece was originally published in July 2010. As I am on tour now and visiting many of the same venues that I discovered for the first time with Mavi, it seemed like a good time to revisit this piece. And anyway, it's always a good time to...

ZARAGOZA, Spain – If you listen carefully enough, other people will tell you everything you need to know. I’m an artist with a need to express and I have my Sunday soapbox… but I’d much rather listen to someone else telling a good story or saying something...

BUDAPEST, Hungary – Last night, after our concert at the Budapest Music Center, a man came up to María and said, “You are a master of your craft and a servant of your art.” Truer words were never spoken: the master, despite all appearances, is indeed the...

PARIS, France – Hemingway called Paris “the moveable feast” and I can see from where he got the idea. It seems there is nothing the French like more than cooking up some gourmet meal and then lugging it down to the Seine, out to the Atlantic...

It was a long time in coming, but finally I met the man I was to become. Along the way – and first – some other people pointed me in the right direction. As you move through life, you cross paths with countless others. A few resonate with you in deep ways. It is, I...

After all the harangues, the children hawking baubles, the young men with hard-luck stories and health dramas, it is a relief when the poets come down the aisle of the Buenos Aires subway trains. They are soft-spoken if they even speak at all. They are well but simply...

It’s how I always thought it should be: a string of diffuse and magical happenings super-imposed on each other but offered without much fanfare. Gatherings where all the people who needed to be there just were. Nights full of the unexpected that you somehow knew would one day come your way.

As the sun was starting its below-horizon test firing, I stumbled sleepily across Av. Libertador and into my morning routine. Ahead of me, the parks of Palermo were covered in a wispy, teasing fog that removed the bases of trees while leaving their tops;...

This piece hails from the vault. It is a true story peopled with some colorful characters from the Argentine cultural scene: an artist who used to hang out with Andy Warhol and built a Parthenon of books and an impresario who lived in a glam church. It also hails from a time when three pesos still meant something.