At Steady, you might have noticed that we have a thing for trees. And music.  Last week, in our “A Reason to Smile,” we brought the two together with performances of a favored hymn, “I Shall Not Be Moved,” and its central imagery of “a tree planted by the water.”  Today, we ask you indulge us once more. We have another tree song we found particularly inspiring, relevant, and yes, smile inducing.

I know many of you are already happily using pressure cookers, but I also know that a lot of you are thinking about either upgrading or – hooray! – buying a second or third. So while this post is mainly aimed at those who are yet to buy, you might want to have a scan through as some of the information might be useful. Generally speaking, these posts about pressure cooking basics which I am going to intersperse with recipes might be worth reading by experienced pressure cooker users – new and useful things occur to me all the time, which seem really obvious as soon as I think them, and I will want to share them all.

Hello, everybody. Wilco is back on our bullshit. We played Milwaukee on Wednesday and Chicago this weekend. It was such a beautiful night outside at Salt Shed on Friday, I couldn’t believe it. I’m conditioned to expect weather extremes. Thunderstorms, 100% humidity, scalding heat, etc. But it was what I’d call a perfect Chicago crisp (new apple?). The solo/family/Tweedy band rehearsed in Chicago earlier in the week. I thought you might like to see a short clip of our rehearsal.

To quote Barack Obama — let me be clear. I don’t care about Brandon Sanderson. I don’t care about Jason Kehe. I don’t care about Wired. I don’t care about fantasy fiction. I definitely don’t care about fantasy fiction fans (at least in the sense of their interest in fantasy fiction — I’m sure I often care about them otherwise). But I do care about writing. I care about people doing interesting writing — even if it ruffles feathers.

I’ve decided that I will periodically shout out other music publications that I’m enjoying. This week I’m turning my attention to Sunlighter, a weekly digest that will keep you up-to-date on music news, artist discovery, and companies disrupting the industry. Here’s a little blurb from their latest issue: As digital audio workstations and streaming technology continue to lower the barrier of entry in becoming an artist or producer, oversaturation occurs. When you combine these problems with other music industry trends such as shorter listener attention span and Rob Abelow’s adroit observation of streaming becoming a zero-sum game for artists, you have to wonder … is this the beginning of the end for massively popular hip-hop headliners (just as classic rock, disco, jazz, and other popular genres eventually went out of style)?