We did it!
Dreamer & the Hoping Machine is a real thing now
Dreamer & the Hoping Machine, L-R: Jean Littlejohn, Pappy Klocke, Geb Thomas, Kylie Buddin, Alma Drake, Jon Ranard, Laurie Haag, post-concert, Thursday February 26, 2026 on the stage at The James Theater in Iowa City.
Thursday night a bunch of veteran performers played some brand new music, and it was incredible.
We were 8 tickets away from a sold-out house, on a night when there was so much going on in town, including a gathering of our community’s newest and hottest religion, women’s basketball.
But we played to a house full of sometimes literally screaming fans. We played hard, we played loud, and it was definitively rock’n’roll. And just look at those faces, exhausted but ecstatic, glowing with relief, joy, and the effects of a double-strength infusion of the purest musical medicine available - community-written songs, played loud, by people who know what they’re fucking doing.
Today, I feel slightly wrecked. I was on my feet for 6 solid hours, some of it with guitars hanging on my body, and I sang like my fuckin’ life depended on it, because it does. Our last song was Jean Littlejohn’s stupendously transcendent arrangement of “A Hard Rain’s a’Gonna Fall,” Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize winning epic prophetic masterpiece that he couldn’t have known was about the past few weeks in Minnesota, and Portland, and Los Angeles, and San Antonio, and … well. We had a Pretti Good reason to sing it, and I lost all my fucks and howled out the lines about a poet dying (and I boldly changed the line from “in the gutter” to “in injustice”) and especially the one about the executioners’ faces always being well hidden. It was one of the most powerful moments of my performing life.
I am so proud of our songwriters, their heart-felt contributions to every Family Folk Machine concert, and their almost holy trust in Jean, Jon and I, as arrangers and interpreters. We took some liberties with some of these songs Thursday night, and they held up and were ready for more. Good songs can take a multitude of arrangements, and these, written in some instances by people who had never written a song before, held up.
Community songwriting is essential. I know I keep saying this, but I mean it, and it’s true. And I can’t wait to do more.