New Years can be any day, any month, any hour you need it to be. I believe you can dive into something or get rid of it at any moment. It’s nice that once a year...collectively we all think about similar things for a few weeks. It’s probably why so much gets going in this first month. There’s an energy because we’re all in this New Year new hope thing together.  12 years ago, Jim and I wrote our first song together sometime in the middle of the summer. 2 years later we dropped our last names and became “Jim and Sam” most likely in the spring and recorded our first record together in Sweden a few months after that. On Nov 3, 2016 we decided to play a show every day for a year and one February morning 14 months later we started an outline for the documentary we made. Those are the “sticky/bullet point bio moments,” but in between we lost, we won, we drank coffee, we did yoga, rescued our dog, met the most incredible people and collaborators, learned the hard way, got lucky, got unlucky, got married, panicked, became Aunts & Uncles, worried we were on the wrong path or that things were taking too long, came up with ideas we didn’t follow through on, followed through on some really good ones, wrote songs, traveled too much but don’t regret it (especially that one place...and there’s hundreds of those), played over 800 shows, fought here and there...most likely everywhere (even in that one photo where we look like we’re having the best time, definitely in that one), had years that felt like nothing happened, lived ten years in one, learned to start something and commit to it and not just to begin or to finish but to really be present. It doesn’t have to be Jan 1 or Nov 3 and it doesn’t have to be big. Usually the best things are the simplest. The small shows, finishing a verse, or that conversation with someone you didn’t expect to meet in Lithuania. So if we’re all closing our eyes and blowing out our New Years decade candle together (which would give me a panic attack with all that saliva blowing around) I would wish for you to commit to something everyday that makes you feel good. That’s it.  Alright, now it’s time to show up.

- jim and sam
january 2020