🎼 Skip the Pundits for Some Sunday Sanity

My special guest was a singing Downeast Maine biologist, writer and songwriter Jim Coffman

Updated post-streaming: We had some technical difficulties, but it was still great, after another shitstorm of a week, to focus on music and conversation on another Sunday Sanity show. Watch and share on Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn.

Because of weird microphone issues that muffled my guest’s guitar, I did some editing. Here’s a better version.

Amid the nonstop surge of imperious, wrecking-ball-style actions emanating from the Trump / Musk command center, it's essential to take a breath, dump the dueling pundits and news flood and simply convene to share songs, poems, insights, ideas and emotions. By now you hopefully know I’m a musician and songwriter along with my journalistic pursuits.

That's what my Sustain What "Sunday Sanity" webcasts tried to do through the pandemic years. Watch some great moments from previous shows below.

And that's we’re doing again under the current Trump-driven superstorm of disruption and hate mongering. This week's show features a Sunday Sanity first timer Jim Coffmam. He’s a longtime biologist at the MDI Biological Laboratory and a talented songwriter and musician whose band, Banned from Eden, is a mainstay around Downeast Maine. Jim also writes about science and societal disruption on Medium.

Here’s a taste of Banned from Eden with Russell Snyder playing drums and harmonica simultaneously (something I’d never seen before I moved to Maine four years ago) and Jim on his combined electric mandolin / guitar along with Jeff Walls on bass.

If you have a song or sonnet you want to share, send me a note at revkin@substack.com.

Here was master instrument maker Fred Carlson with his frog-shaped banjo:

And the brilliantly offbeat Joachim Cooder (yes, the son of Ry Cooder) on another astoundingly cool and weird instrument.

Here’s the YouTube Sunday Sanity playlist:

The full five-year Sunday Sanity playlist