Howdy, friends!

Hope y'all are having a great day. I played a fun show at Chick-Fil-A with my friend Mr. Cow last night. Every Tuesday I work with him and he never ceases to amaze me at what a good dancer he is. I occasionally work with his daughter, Baby Cow, and one of these days I'll try posting a picture of her too. For now, here's one of me and Mr. Cow taking a well deserved break from all the singing and dancing...

Every week, I play tangos, waltzes, polkas, the twist, the kangaroo hop, marches, the hokey-pokey, the chicken dance, a few fox trots, the robot dance, and of course a ballet song or two...however the best dance he does is the disco. What a guy!

Cheers,
Conductor Jack

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Just my robotic way of saying: "today's been a good day"! I hope it's been that way for you too!!!

Jack

Thanks to Randy Watson for taking this picture and emailing it to us this morning. I always approach Chick-Fil-A from the opposite direction, so I had no idea my name was in lights. Thanks, Randy! Always nice to see your family at Chick-Fil-A!

Jack & Kitty

Hey everyone!

Hope you're having a great day! Today we're recording and in the studio most of the day, however, I ran out when I saw sheep in the field behind the studio. Kitty has fed them before, but this was my first time running into 'em. They love branches...

One more of me feedin' 'em...

After they had a little snack, it was time for me to play them a new song to get some audience feedback and constructive criticism...

As a reward for listening to our new tune, I gave each of the sheep an apple. Yeah, it's been a good day - recording and feeding the neighbor's sheep!

Hope y'all are well, havin' fun and enjoying the summer time...

Cheers,
Jack

PS - Forgot to mention that the sheep in the last picture (above) is the one Kitty named Apple, because of his obvious love of apples.

Hey all!

Spent most of the day in Nashville. Birthday party fun this morning with everyone singing and dancing and playing drums, shakers, jingle bells, tambos and more. Happy Birthday, D.!

Ran down the street to do a quick radio spot and on to Whole Foods in Green Hills to play a short afternoon set of music. More fun. Stopped very briefly at Davis-Kidd books (my favorite in Nashville) but was especially anxious to get back home at our place out in the country. After spending time in such a busy shopping hub (where traffic is always clogged)...I was so happy to see fields, trees, cows and the like. I snapped this photo today as I was arriving back home...

Later Kitty and I were driving around and saw this cow in a neighbor's pasture. Do you know what this cow's favorite band is?

The White Stripes!

Alright, I'm off to play another birthday. Today I'm a dancing, singing, musical party machine!!!

Toot! Toot!
Conductor Jack

PS - Tomorrow we're having a pickin' party out on the porch...should be fun swappin' songs, stories and instruments.

Hi everyone!

Hope all's well. Here's a little picture we took running errands today. Another reason why I love life in Tennessee. This on a main road here in town right off the Interstate. Yup, you don't see sights like this too often in Minneapolis...Phoenix...New York...

When we got home, we couldn't find Doolittle (our little beagle-terrier) anywhere. We went out back to the cabin (where our offices are) and sure enough there he was...sleeping in the sun out on the cabin deck.

One of these days I'll have to post some pictures of the sheep, goats and cows that live next door...

Cheerios,
Conductor Jack

Howdy, Friends!

Hope alls well. Not too much to report on here: just enjoying summer in beautiful Tennessee. We have a big apple tree in our yard and we're now able to pick apples and juice them right from the tree! That's big news to a former city boy living life in the country now...

Speaking of apples...we've written several new songs all about fruits and veggies. We've gotten several emails asking for a sequel to our "Salad Ballad" song with lyrics that include the veggies that didn't find their way into our original song. So now we have two veggie songs: "Salad Ballad, Part 1" and (of course) "Salad Ballad, Part 2".

In other news, we're working hard preparing for Conductor Jack And Friends' debut DVD that we will film in Cookeville this October. We're selecting songs, working on arrangements and having some fun musicians on the project. If you'd like to drop us a line, request a song, or if you have an idea of something you'd like to see on our DVD, we'd love to hear from you!

You can send suggestions to Kitty at: kitty@jacknorton.net or me at: jack@jacknorton.net. We've already had several mums & dads tell us their ideas and of course we love feedback from children too! We hope to really make this project a fun community dance party concert for all ages!

Well, nothin' more to say...now I'm off to have some late-night asparagus!

Toot! Toot!
Conductor Jack

Hello Friends,

Hope y'all are doing well. Today is my birthday - so happy birthday to me! Last year, Coconuts The Kangaroo, Penelope The Possum and Olo The Donkey recorded a great song for me so who knows what's in store for me this year? I'm excited!

We received some great news this week and it's finalized so we're finally free to talk about it! As many of you long-time journal/blog readers of mine know, we've been working on a CD since the winter of 2006. The conception of this collection of songs began in the spring of 2005, however, when Kitty and I got married. As many of you know, we are high school sweethearts. We met the summer before 11th grade and attended the Arts High School in Minneapolis. We dated for 8 years (it took me that long to convince her to marry me) and married on the railroad tracks behind our school.

Why the railroad tracks behind our high school? Well, because I'm Conductor Jack. Just kidding. We married there because that is where we used to skip out of class (an activity I no longer endorse or recommend I may add) and get together to take long walks, pick wild flowers and watch the trains go by. (I am a pretty classy guy, I know).

For our honeymoon we flew to New Mexico, rented a car and bummed around the Southwest in Arizona, New Mexico, southern California and Texas. We also crossed into Mexico several times and spent about 3 or 4 weeks with no schedule, no cell phones and no computers. We did bring an old Sears & Roebuck guitar that Kitty had when she was a girl growing up in Jamaica and a few notebooks.

Over the course of our time in Mexico and the southwest United States we camped, fished and went to many concerts, picking parties, puppet shows, dances and hootenannies. It was during this time that we listened to a lot of norteno and banda music. At a campfire on the banks of the Rio Grande just outside of Taos, we met an old hobo named Danville Dan that had been riding the rails and working odd jobs since the 1930s. We traded songs and stayed up late into the night listening to his adventures.

The next morning Kitty had written an epic folk poem about him that I set to music. This would be the pattern of our trip. Adventure and writing. Writing and adventure.

We returned back to our home in Minnesota with a collection of songs. Love songs. Adventure songs. Road songs.

They sat on a shelf until a cold winter day in January while in New York City. I was in the offices of Esquire Magazine working as a freelancer on a project completely unrelated to this story (but I'll have to tell you that one some day). I did however have a demo of tracks we recorded earlier that month in a warehouse in Minneapolis. The editor at Esquire had a "friend in the business" (a line I've heard a few times before) and suggested I send her a copy.

I sent a copy of our secret love songs that Kitty and I wrote on our honeymoon along with a note explaining that they were recorded just for fun in a warehouse on a reel-to-reel tape deck from the 1950s with microphones from the 1930s and (needless to say) the audio quality was rough.

Fast forward a few weeks later and Kitty and I are in downtown Nashville signing a music development deal with a subsidiary of Sony Australia. Not sure why Australia but there they were! They wanted us to add a few more instruments and re-cut the tunes from our humble "Minneapolis Sessions" and so we naturally chose the finest studio in Nashville: i.e. an abandoned nightclub in Printer's Alley where my hero Emmett Miller performed back in 1949 and 1950. The building had been sitting empty and we could bring in some recording equipment and set up a makeshift studio if we gave the landlord $100.

The price sounded good to me. I had $130 in my checkbook so we were more than happy to keep expenses low.

That's the door to the nightclub we recorded in. Please note the pot of gold...

We combed Nashville and put together a small band of string bass, drums, accordion, guitar and pedal steel. We recorded these "Nashville Sessions" in three amazing days of music, fun and the ghost of Emmett Miller playing pranks on our tape, on the pedal steel player's picks and on the building's electricity.

Well, some of us attributed the tape randomly stopping, the lights flickering, and picks getting lost at alarming rates to working in an abandoned nightclub with no heat or power and running generators for three days straight along with us all drinking way too much coffee.

Either way, we submitted the tapes and waited. And waited. And waited.

Finally, a response: "Great lead singer, bad harmony singer." (Kitty sang lead, I sang backup). "Great tunes but too rough of recordings." (We did record in an old nightclub on Printers Alley). "Maybe another artist would be interested if we added some additional production elements."

And on and on and on...

A few months later I received a CD in the mail at a hotel in Chicago. A producer in Sydney was hired to do a "clean and fix" job.

Ever wonder what me singing and playing an out-of-tune 1920s tenor banjo sounds like set to the tune of about 150 overdubs of orchestras, horns, strings and backup vocalists? Interesting. That's all I'm going to say.

No one was happy with this new version of the album either. This collection was dubbed the "Sydney Sessions".

Needless to say the album sat and sat and sat. One label got bought out by another. My initial contact in Nashville moved to Los Angeles. The "development deal" was not a record deal with no guarantee of a proper album release and the hope all along was to have a major artist cut one of these tunes anyways.

(If Taylor Swift or Kenny Chesney is reading this, please email me).

So we kept calling asking to buy back the tapes. The songs were our property, the recordings were Sony's. I've had several other friends that had their projects fall into this murky zone. Finally we received news that they would release their version ("The Sydney Sessions") and title the album, "Magic Bullets And Secret Songs". I wasn't thrilled with the title (as a family and children's folk singer I wasn't crazy about "bullets" being in one of my album titles) but just as soon as I had begun to announce this release...guess what? Shelved again.

Finally, Kitty and I were sent an angel in the form of Teresa Harris: an entertainment attorney, an old hippie, and a banjo player no less! She listened to the whole story and took a lot of notes during our first meeting. She kept nodding and grinning and occasionally asked us questions with legal terminology that makes a Minnesota folk singer's head spin.

She said she'd get to work on it.

Work on it she did! We received great news over the weekend. We are free to release final mixes of the Minneapolis and Nashville versions of the album and all masters are now back in our possession. It feels a lot like seeing a long lost friend or how a parent must feel welcoming a child back home from summer camp.

Of course there's a lot of clauses, conditions and terminology within this deal that I still don't understand. Teresa says it's an "exceptional achievement". Kitty says she gets it and that it's a "good deal". If they are happy, I am happy. I always try to surround myself with smart women. If Kitty says it's good: it's good.

So what next? Well, we are starting to work on putting out the final, final, final, final version of this collection of yet-untitled love songs. We hope to release it next spring and are just so glad that this chapter of our lives will be done and that we can share these songs with you. None of them are life changing or earth shattering but I love each one like a child and am proud of them so I'm excited to finally have an opportunity to share them with you.

So we'll keep you posted and let you know how this project goes. Kitty will be producing and we have an engineer lined up who will help her sort through the boxes of tape. Although we are not even close to being done, I feel that we finally have something that we control and in that sense I already feel like this is a mission accomplished.

Will keep y'all in the loop on developments and hopefully post rough MP3 mixes as we go to get your feedback. Thanks for reading! You guys are the best!

Be well, and again, happy birthday to me!!!

;)

Jack

July 20, 2008

Hello, Friends!

Well Kitty's done it again! We just received our order of her infamous "BFF" T-shirts in today's mail, and we just added them to our store.

Late last year, she came up with these and hand made silk screen t-shirts with this design. We quickly sold out. It seems everyone wants a BFF. Of course, here in our world, BFF doesn't mean "best friends forever" it means, "banjo friends forever".

I'm excited because we'll now have some of the hand made silk screen ones for live shows in funky colors, but online we're offering them as t-shirts for toddlers, kids and adults, also women's spaghetti tanks for you mums, as well as onesies and bibs for the bubs. That pretty much means everyone can now be "banjo friends forever"!

I've always gotten a lot of questions about the fish - he was our logo for years with the Mullet River Boys (my band that is now known as "Conductor Jack And Friends"). His official name is Curley Mullet, and he is a banjo playing mullet fish. The mullet fish is also known as "Alabama bacon" (if you live anywhere south of the Mason-Dixon line).

Toot! Toot!
Conductor Jack

Howdy, Friends!

There's always lots to talk about, but for now the most important thing in my life is...

...pugs dressed up in funny outfits!

Like this spider pug:

Or these hot dogs...

I may be the only person in the world that's never seen any of the Star Wars movies, but I do know that the characters never looked as good as these little guys:

And now, for my favorite. A wrestling pug!

Ok, I promise to write a more serious entry one of these days. Good night, y'all!

Toot! Toot!
Conductor Jack

Hey everyone!

First of all, a very happy (belated) 4th of July to y'all! Here in Tennessee they really know how to celebrate...we've seen big fireworks displays from our back porch for the past three evenings. I'm not talking small displays either, full blown (pardon the pun) fireworks displays. It's pretty amazing.

Kitty shot this picture of me hard at work coding my website. We've been spending a lot of time in the office working 'round the clock on re-launching the site with a fresh(er) new look, some easier navigations and hopefully more fun content. We're putting more emphasis on the "Conductor Jack And Friends" band - formerly known as The Mullet River Boys. We're essentially doing the same genre of music (vaudeville/bluegrass) but with a focus on family folk and kids music. A lot of the same musicians that have been with me over the years (as well as some new pickers from here in Tennessee) are working with me in the Friends Band. We're starting to book a lot of shows for this fall and in 2009 and the Zinghoppers Live Show is confirmed for a tour in Australia over Christmas time again this year - yippie!

Oh...and we finally have gotten new t-shirt designs as well as bibs and onesies for the little ones...stay tuned, we'll post ordering info soon!

Later,
Jack

Hello, Friends!

Today I was excited to get some pictures from my friends Alison & Kaia. Here's some pictures from last month's show at the Arts Center in Winona, Minnesota...

Here's me talking to my friend, Frankie The Spider. He is Tennessee's best guitar playing spider (although he might just been Tennessee's only guitar playing spider!)

Oh no! I have a penguin on my head!!! No need to worry - he's a very friendly penguin!

Now it's time to dance and get some exercise! Here we all are doing some dancin'...

Thanks for sending the great pictures!

Toot! Toot!
Conductor Jack