Hi, just wanted to send a message to Arlo, from someone who has been a massive fan since the age of 8, which was in 1988...

I'm writing this from suburban Philadelphia, a little town called Media that spiritually is probably quite similar to Stockbridge or the like. We love our independent coffee/bookshops and leafy hiking trails.

It’s a lazy Sunday morning and my 3 kids are playing Legos peacefully together, with a streaming playlist of your work in the background.

Just heard my oldest (13) sing “I’m your oldest son” and then he looked over at me, reading my print NYTimes, and he said, Mama, have you written your letter to Arlo Guthrie yet? And I said no, but I’m do it now…

Because they are growing up with your music, and the stories, and the deep sense of respect I have for what it all meant for our collective cultural history. And nostalgia for what it meant for me personally.

You see Arlo I first heard your work when I was eight years old. I think it was Washington County on an LP. I remember using tracing paper to copy the cover, your side profile, hunched over, writing.

I was obsessed in the way that kids that age can get obsessed. I begged my parents for more records. I memorized Alice’s Restaurant and would recite it to myself at night, without missing a single one, in the way that we could back then w/out someone thinking we had OCD.

By the time I was 15 I’d collected all the albums, going from LPs to cassettes and then into CD. I’d seen you every year at Carnegie Hall, as that was my annual birthday wish.

I’d tapped into your influences and gave them a shot, and the early folk ones stuck when I was young (Weavers, etc.) and then as I got older it was Joan, Joni that on my headphones that made me cry.

But wow what a loyal Arlo fan I was, and my family just accepted it. I wrote you a letter, forget the year, but it was published in your print newsletter.

Even in later youth, as I went off to college and was surrounded by old-money Ivy League society, I never forgot how to be free and I credit the decade of lyrical depth, the narrative and poetry that taught me it was okay to unconstrained and unapologetic in my wild.

Spent the decade after just working & traveling, was a bit of a hobo. Years in Southeast Asia, then working several jobs in NYC, then the south of Europe and then landed in San Francisco, which was kind of the only place in the US that felt right for the rootless.

Was also driven by the fact that the eco-poet Gary Snyder was still alive and did a lecture from time to time. I’d studied him relentlessly and was enamored enough to make it a draw. SF was still wonderful at that time, before the saturation of tech bros, and it did my heart good. Drove around on a little fake-Vespa, communed with the redwoods, found my career path.

In any case now I’m 45 years old, with my own big family and living back East. The last time I saw you perform was in Minneapolis in 2018, I took my 80-year-old aunt. Time before that was Portland in 2016, I think it was in an old elementary school.

But my favorite was when I was living in Las Vegas a few years before that, and I went by myself. There was a plume of marijuana smoke over the parking lot and it was like all the fun 60 and 70-year olds had come out to play. At some point you asked who was under 35 years old and I raised my hand and I was the only one.

When my oldest son was 10 years old and we were living in San Diego I got us tickets to see you for April 18, 2020. Then COVID hit and it was postponed, but by the time that came around we were gone.

So I never got to see you one last time, Arlo, and then you stopped performing. There’s no regret or sadness here, just like I said, the impact your work has had on my life over the past four decades is just tremendous.

Last thing to note: The other night we rented A Complete Unknown and my mother came over to watch it, with the kids. The look on the 5th grader’s face when at the scene in Newport my conservative Trump-voting mother said, Oh, I was there. Priceless.

I explained to them that “the man in the hospital” depicted was your father. My daughter is 5 and she is the only one who can still connect with my own father, who has Alzheimers.

She just said, Mama, He must be so fuster-ated. That he can’t sing with that other man. Because he’s still there in his brain. But he’s also not there. It melted my heart and it reminded me of how degenerative brain disease has affected millions of people and caregivers for years, and will continue to do so.

Anyways that’s my story, but not really a story, more just a thank-you.

My oldest wants to see the origins of a it all and now we live within driving distance, so might pop up to the Guthrie Center on a road trip one of these days.