Author Archives: tris

You said that you were born here/but you haven’t found it yet: Graham Parker sang it in 2007 on a song called “I Discovered America.” He was describing the confusion of millions of people whose encounters with national identity have always been vexed and incomplete. Everybody must discover America, Parker (an Englishman who now lives […]

Probably you know I wrote a book called The Trespassers.  I like it a lot, but it’s nobody’s idea of a crowd-pleaser. What you don’t know, though, is that I’ve got another finished novel on this computer, and, alas, it makes The Trespassers seem like Michael Crichton by comparison. It’s pretty brutal. All writers have […]

  Don’t look now, but today is Election Day. Yes it is. I’m assuming you live in New Jersey, now. And if you don’t, why don’t you? You could make your stand in the shifting sands of New York City, giving ground, receding farther out into Long Island as the rest of the city is turned […]

A special Memorial Day message from your friends at Tris McCall (namely, Tris McCall). To our great dismay, we have learned that you have been paying attention to the President. We don’t understand this. The President is a tremendously uninteresting person. His psychology is shallow enough to be fully legible to a fifth grader. The President is deeply […]

From north to south, sea to measured sea, Bangor to mighty Maine, I really do love all of these American cities. I hope my affection has come through in the stories and songs. As an East Coast loyalist (and a Giants fan) I’m supposed to be suspicious of Southern California, but in my opinion, Los Angeles […]

  Last week I was way too specific. So this week, I’m overcompensating. Not intentionally, though — the calendar just happened to fall that way. “You’re No Good To Anyone” is the most open-ended song in the Almanac, and I hope it will mollify those who’ve said in the past that a listener needs a search engine to appreciate […]

I’ve tried my best never to be too too hokey about any of this stuff.  Just as I’d hate to have an out-of-stater come here and write a bunch of junk about the Jersey Devil and Taylor ham, I don’t want anybody to think that the only thing I’ve taken away from the cities I’ve […]

  I was first introduced to Sara Hallie Richardson‘s music in 2009.  She was based in Portland, Maine, which is a pretty cute city; you oughta visit. Michael Flannery had opened a studio in downtown Bangor. He produced an album called A Curious Paradox for Sarah and sent me a copy when they were done […]

  Like everything else in this Almanac, “Unbeliever, Respect The Veil” is a character song. The narrator is a professor of religious studies — and freelance monotheist, to use Karen Armstrong’s neat term — at a university in metropolitan Detroit. He has come to see fundamentalists as profoundly irreligious people, and he’s also lost his patience […]

  Because you’re a J. D. Salinger fanatic like me, a completist and obsessor who photocopies stories out of eighty-year-old issues of the New Yorker, you recognize the title: “You Needn’t Be So Mean, Baby” is the song that Les and Bessie Glass made semi-famous in their vaudeville act. Neither Franny nor Zooey nor anybody […]