Dan Bern writes the books

At the risk of posting too much Dan Bern, I thought I'd let the faithful readership know he's got two new books available via his website: sequel The Glorious Return of Ted the Cow and short story collection Tales of Toscana. I haven't made it through the latter, but Ted charms as a simple graphic novel of a cow seeking his place in life "There were baseball tryouts! Ted is going to go! Ted proved to be a decent glovecow, and had a fair arm. But he couldn't hit his way out of a paperbag." Mostly it reminds me, in a good way, of The Onion's Scott Dikkers' sadly out of print and therefore very pricey Jim comics.

There's a new recording online of Dan's March show in Berlin, and it includes the non-album song "Big Old Blue Highway". On the surface it's your basic travalougue/vagabond road song, and most other singer-songwriters couldn't pull this off in an interesting way. But Dan totally sells it, makes it sad and funny and not too sentimental. "And when the train station station was warm enough I played the harmonica low and rough/sometimes made a dollar a day/slept on the edge of that big old blue highway". Go see him on tour.

MP3: Dan Bern - Big Old Blue Highway