Got three minutes?

This is my week to stop procrastinating, or so I’ve told myself. One thing I had been meaning to do is to upload Crimson Sky on New Year’s Morn, my new album, to the distribution universe.

It’s a process that can take up to six weeks, so I set a “release date” of May 19 and a “pre-order date” of April 21. But in the meantime you can hear 30 seconds of each track by clicking on the name of the album up there or scrolling to the bottom of this post and clicking on the album cover. The clips each begin about a minute into the song.

These 12 tunes were all written in a burst of creativity that began New Year’s Eve and continued into early February. They’re songs about love, and peace, and Jesus, although not all of them are exactly spiritual.

This is the 22nd (!) album I’ve made since I started making homemade music back in the 1970s, but only the third I’ve released into the wild so that you can stream it on places like Apple Music or Spotify or however you stream music in these streaming times.

You should be able to access the first two by searching on your streaming service for “Bluhm Ten Thousand Days” or “Bluhm New Dog Old Tricks” to reach the albums I created in 2010 and 2025, respectively. There’s also a collection of my recordings from 40 years ago over on SoundCloud.com.

If all goes the way it’s supposed to be, in about six weeks you’ll be able to search for “Bluhm Crimson Sky” to hear and/or download the new album. It’s fun to be living in an era where an amateur singer-songwriter like me can share his little efforts with friends or anyone else with the patience to listen.

There’s a lot of us out there, and we don’t have to wait for some gatekeeper to discover us anymore. The beautiful thing about modern times is we’ve been granted the ability to open the gate ourselves.

Of course, without gatekeepers there are a lot of us out there who should not quit our day jobs, and I may be one of those in your eyes and ears. But if there’s an audience waiting, it’s easier than ever for us to find each other. That’s what’s beautiful.

Cover reveal

I picked up my guitar on the morning of Jan. 1 and glanced out the front window of my house, which faces east. The sunrise was a brilliant red, calling to mind the old aphorism about red skies and sailors.

I grabbed my pencil and wrote, “Crimson sky on New Year’s morn, Old sailors take it as a warning; Crimson sky on New Year’s night, Sailors ready for delight.”

That seemed like a good start, so I lifted the guitar again. I decided to try starting the song with a more exotic chord than your plain vanilla C or D or G, so I droned out an Asus2, which has a strange, lovely sound made by pressing just two strings side by side (four strings on the 12-string guitar).

I called out the lyrics I’d just written, and my mind seemed to say the moment called for a rather standard transition to G and then D.

Somewhat to my surprise, the words that I sang next sprang from the Old Testament book of Joshua.

“As for me and my house, we’re gonna serve the Lord.”

A short time later, I had a composition of eight verses that have not changed much since then, my first new song of the new year. And the adventure was on.

I had ended the old year by crafting a medley of songs about peace and love that I dubbed “Peace Trilogy,” reminiscent of Mickey Newbury’s “American Trilogy,” and a romantic song for Mary titled “What You Mean To Me.” “Me And My House” continued that musical momentum, but I couldn’t have foreseen what the next six weeks would bring.

Between then and now, 11 more songs emerged — 10 newly minted and one ancient cover — and now I have enough material for an approximately 40-minute album. Wednesday night I fiddled with ideas for the album cover, and a natural title came to me: “Crimson Sky On New Year’s Morn,” my first lyrics of the new year.

They are songs of peace and songs of love, folk songs and rock songs, serious songs and silly songs. I have eight completed recordings that may or may not require further tweaks, and I have six songs yet to be turned into what I hear in my head.

As I said a few days ago, I expect to be ready to share these recordings in the spring. At this pace it may be the very first day of spring. In any case I have the structure of a 14-song album and now a title and a cover.

On New Year’s Eve I made a list of 9-15 creative projects I thought I’d like to produce in 2026. “A collection of new songs” was the 15th idea on the list. I could not have suspected it would be the first project I’m likely to finish. It’s going to be an interesting year.

Creative breakthroughs

It’s 5:01 p.m. Monday and it’s still light out — sunset is 10 minutes from now — and so the promise of springtime continues to grow.

Dean Wesley Smith wrote today about authors’ reluctance to toot their own horns. It seems we want to appear humble, and so we don’t use “power words,” like “captivating” or “compelling,” to describe the work we love enough to send out into the world alongside those millions of other books.

I have used the tag “shameless self-promotion” when I write a post that’s mostly about one of my books or songs or albums, but maybe there is a little shame in there after all. Maybe I’m a little ashamed to describe myself as an author when my book sales are barely in triple digits most years, or as a singer-songwriter when my royalties over 16 years total 90 cents from the various streaming services.

But you know, my stuff IS compelling, darn it. I read bits from A Declaration of Peace or See the World! and I realize this guy has something to say. Maybe I only sold $200 worth of books last year because I didn’t tell enough people.

And then there are the songs that have been popping into my head of late. When I released New Dog, Old Tricks last year, I decided to send the songs out into the world with just my voice and my guitar, no overdubs, no harmonies.

For this work in progress, I’m playing with as many bells and whistles as I can coax out of my GarageBand recording software. This will be the 22nd album I have produced since 1972. Most of them exist only on tapes and hard drives in my basement, but the last two are available on Spotify and Apple Music and wherever else music is streamed and sold. This next album is shaping up to be pretty amazing.

The songs are heartfelt, some songs are funny, some are reverent, two or three are irreverent, but I think when you hear them, you just might be, well, captivated.

The album will arrive in the spring, which you may have noticed is just six weeks away — the Milwaukee Brewers pitchers and catchers report tomorrow. When the album gets here, if I may be shameless for a moment, you will owe it to yourself to check it out.

And hey — think about buying a book, will ya?