I’m coming to one of my favorite clubs anywhere, Rancho Nicasio on November 8. Tickets are available through www.petercase.com/gigs.

Last night I had a realization, and a big moment of gratitude for the path I’ve able to take in music. I’m going to try and express it. This is a long number, sort of like a late night conversation, so take what you want from it or set it down…there will be some who find it interesting from a musician how thew sounds and styles come together. I’m going to post it in pieces over the next few says

When I started out my dream was to play piano harp guitar and sing–just to be doing it–and to write songs–I couldn’t do any of these things worth a damn when I was thirteen or so–just had the desire–my heroes on the piano were Little Richard, and a local Buffalo rock’n roll piano player named Jimmy Calire who was completely fantastic and exciting, and I especially loved whoever played piano on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album…I later found out his name was Paul Griffin, and that he’d come up with the keyboard work on many incredible hits and was known as one of the greatest session players in New York City in the sixties and seventies. I especially liked his tack piano on Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues by Dylan, it drove me wild, it said so much to me, and I tried to get my head and hands around that style for years–hours and hours trying and failing. I figured out a lot of his licks and flourishes on my own, and meanwhile banged the piano for some rock’n roll bands in Buffalo, including a short stint with Skull Street Train, and another run with Pig Nation. But I didn’t really ‘get it’ until one night in 1982, when a friend of mine took me over to her friend Benmont Tench’s house– and once there we gravitated to the piano room, and spent the whole night talking and taking turns at the keys–I picked up a million kilowatts of information in one night– keys to some musical mysteries I’d been trying to understand for years. Thank you, Benmont

it was such a beautiful surprise to even get to be there doing that—life can be amazing that way,