With special guests Tom Hansen and Jonathan Evison

(Run time 49:36)

This is the time of year when there’s a lot of talk about home. Going home. Coming home. Staying home. Inviting guests into our home. Arguing over whose home we are going to choose  –or not choose—to spend the holidays.

Home is a funny notion, if you think about it. We can feel ‘at home’ when we are not, in fact, in our homes. And yet, we can long for home when we are actually in our own homes. Often, when we are feeling sad, lonely or scared we say, to ourselves or others, that we want to get back home as though that will somehow fix things. Sometimes it can for a while, but sometimes it never does. We can be just as alone in our misery at home as we can elsewhere. Sometimes being home by ourselves is the scariest thing of all.  And yet, sometimes it’s sublime. Solitude and a sense of being surrounded by our familiars can bring a true happiness. Sometimes we need to leave home to find ourselves and sometimes we need to return back home to do so. There’s no place like home…unless there’s no place like far away from home. Home can be a place we stumble upon or a place we create.  It can lift us up or tear us down. ‘Home can be where the heart is,’ as the old sampler reads, or it can be a place we can’t locate no matter how hard we try. It’s a funny notion, full of contradictions. It can be a place we remember or a place we imagine. We can be homesick for a place we’ve never been while we long to forget that home where we grew up. Home is a place. Home is a state of mind. Home is a feeling. Home is a location. Whatever it means – or doesn’t mean to you  -- these songs will take you there.

 

Tom writes:  “Home Sweet Home. It sounds good, right? But what if you don’t have one? I was born in Seattle and that’s where I live now. But it’s just a place. It’s not really a home. I lost the last of my family earlier this year when my adoptive mom died and it underlined this truth to me. A home has to be more than merely the particular city or home you reside in. Home is where the heart is. And my heart lies not in Seattle, as I discovered when I took a trip to Joshua Tree in the Mojave Desert last summer. Someone told me there’s a girl out there, with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair. I found her in California.”

 

 

Jonathan writes:  “Like the man said: ‘Won't nothin' bring you down like your hometown…’  I love how Earle apologizes to Thomas Wolfe at the beginning.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom Hansen is the author of American Junkie, a memoir of his life as a heroin addict and drug dealer and the forthcoming novel This Is What We Do, coming from Emergency Press in June 2012. He writes for The Nervous Breakdown and is an editor at KNOCK Magazine. He lives in Seattle.

Jonathan Evison’s most recent novel is this year’s bestselling West of Here. Set in the fictional town of Port Bonita, on Washington State’s rugged Pacific coast, West of Here is propelled by a story that both re-creates and celebrates the American experience—it is storytelling on the grandest scale. In his teens, Evison was the founding member and frontman of the Seattle punk band March of Crimes, which included future members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. He is the executive editor of The Nervous Breakdown.