Long Time Gone
It's been exactly 20 years since Link Wray died, but he's not going anywhere.
Hi. Cutting (switchblading?) right to the chase: The last newsletter I sent out was in February 2022. There’s a long preamble below about why that is, but if you’d rather skip the realtalk and get right to the music stuff (and I would not blame you one bit for doing so), you can do so by clicking here.
The last time you heard from me, more than three years ago, I told you how badly I was burnt out — from work, distance learning, seemingly endless book edits, parenting, having to take on side hustles, Covid fatigue, repeatedly having to clear my house’s sewer line — all of it.
Shortly after that last Switchblade, my life started to fall apart, for lack of a better term. My amazing maternal grandmother was diagnosed with cancer and died within a few months. My mother-in-law died a few months later. Within another year my dad, who had been fighting his own battle with late-stage lung cancer for two years, died.
Anyway, the past few years are a blur. A series of different — but all equally emotionally numbing — hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, and hospices, punctuated by another layoff (my second in four years), job seeking in a terrible economy, health challenges (including getting mono at age 42?!), trying to manage incredible grief while still somehow being a functioning human, and splitting up with my partner of over 10 years (who is also my kid’s father).
For a long time, this gif was the first thing that popped into my head almost every day:
Things are more manageable now. My top priority is maintaining a stable home environment and putting food on the table for my kiddo. Co-parenting is going about as well as it can and I am fortunate and grateful to have a wonderful new partner, a great new job, a home, supportive friends and family, and access to good healthcare providers who listen to me. I’ve also been rediscovering the pure joy of listening to music for fun without reviews or social media chatter informing or clouding my perception. What a treat!
So if I haven’t answered your email or returned your text, thanks for your patience. I’m also not really using social media much at the moment but will be back eventually.
On the Link Front
While all of that (⬆️) has been going on, I never stopped working on the book, and I’m genuinely excited about how it’s turning out. Also, hello? Link FINALLY being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2023, by JIMMY PAGE, who then PERFORMED “RUMBLE” at the ceremony??? I also loved seeing my girl Sheryl Crow get inducted, and Big Boi inducting Kate Bush actually brought a tear to my eye.
As the author of a Link Wray biography, I need to acknowledge the 20th anniversary of Link’s death, but I don’t really know what to say about it. After being surrounded by sickness and death the past couple years, it seems like such an arbitrary thing to commemorate, although I know it is very meaningful to those who were close to him. But here’s something I wrote in 2021, on the 16th anniversary, about Link’s last/lost years in Denmark leading up to his death there in 2005. I think it still holds up today.
The book is coming along, by the way. There’s so much behind-the-scenes “admin” work that goes into making a creative project of this magnitude as good, thorough, and accurate as humanly possible. Those are three basic things I feel that I owe Link, his family, and his fans, and that work takes a lot of time. Not to mention the work that goes into marketing it, selling it, and keeping it out of the hands of A.I. pirates.
On November 28, UK label Ace Records is reissuing their classic Link comp Early Recordings on sunflower yellow vinyl 🌻🤩🌻. It’s a limited run of 500, so pre-order yours here. This LP is the way so many people, especially Brits and Europeans, discovered Link’s early stuff in the late 1970s. A must for the Link lover on your holiday list!
Side note: If anyone who reads this knows Peter K. Siegel, a former A&R rep at Polydor Records in the 1970s, please send him my way! I’d really like to interview him.
Bazillion Points, my publisher, has a dedicated email list for the book that you can sign up for. That and this newsletter will ensure that you are the first to learn about pre-orders, pub date announcements, events and everything else book-related when the time comes.
Bye for now. More to come when there’s more to come!
Dana