Tumblers & Grit (20th Anniversary Edition) is an expanded and remastered version of the R.S. Field-produced 2004 album, featuring two previously unreleased session outtakes, the original demo of “Bells of Odilia” (one of American Songwriter’s 50 Country Songs Everyone Should Know), and two live performances recorded at WPLN in Nashville just after its release.

Joining Richards and producer Field (Billy Joe Shaver, Steve Earle) for the sessions at venerable Music Row recording studio House of David in the winter of 2003 were guitarist Kenny Vaughan (Lucinda Williams, Marty Stuart & The Fabulous Superlatives), keyboardist Steve Conn (Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris), fiddler & mandolinist Chris Carmichael (Alison Krauss, Taylor Swift), fiddler Ketch Secor (Old Crow Medicine Show), bassist and vocalist Jared Reynolds (Ben Folds, Allison Moorer), drummer Shawn McWilliams (Scott Miller, Hank III) — and the just-unretired “A Team” legend Lloyd Green (The Byrds, Don Williams, Johnny Paycheck) on pedal steel guitar and dobro.  

Originally released in July 2004, Tumblers & Grit received rave reviews across America and Europe. The Philadelphia Inquirer anointed it “Honky tonk heaven,” and U.K. music magazine Maverick gave the album 4 stars and wrote, “As far left of centre as Gram Parsons was in 1973, and surely to prove just as vital and influential in years to come.” 

Some more kind words written about Tumblers & Grit:

“Honky tonk music that sounds right at home with the masters like George Jones and Lefty Frizzell. A refreshing musical tonic, as bracing as that first sip of morning whisky. This is the good stuff.”
	~ Vintage Guitar 

“A masterpiece of honky-tonk philosophy, gritty vocals and rock-flavored energy.”
	~ Nashville City Paper

“Best Off-Music Row Albums of 2004”
	~ The Tennessean

“3 1/2 stars”                   
	~ Los Angeles Daily News

“Richards unleashes a series of songs that poise him to walk beside songwriting legends like Lyle Lovett and Guy Clark.”
	~ F5 Weekly

“An incredible album not near enough people have heard.” 
	~ Peter Cooper, The Tennessean

“One of the finest country albums to be made since the 1960s golden age.”
	~ Hybrid Magazine

“His melodies and storytelling follow in the footsteps of Billy Joe Shaver and John Prine.”
	~ East Bay Express

Nashville Gas (Alternate Sheboygan Choir Version)

Your imagination is the single most important asset you possess. It's your power to create mental pictures of things that don't exist yet and that you want to bring into being. It's the magic wand you use to shape your future.

And so in your own way, you are a prophet. You generate countless predictions every day. Your imagination is the source, tirelessly churning out images of what you will be doing later.

The featured prophecy of the moment may be as simple as a psychic impression of yourself eating a fudge brownie at lunch or as monumental as a daydream of some year building your dream home by a lake or sea.

Your imagination is a treasure when it spins out scenarios that are aligned with your deepest desires. In fact, it's an indispensable tool in creating the life you want; it's what you use to form images of the conditions you'd like to inhabit and the objects you hope to wield. Nothing manifests on this planet unless it first exists as a mental picture.

But for most of us, the imagination is as much a curse as a blessing. We're often just as likely to use it to conjure up premonitions that are at odds with our conscious values. That's the result of having absorbed toxic programming from the media and from our parents at an early age and from other influential people in our past.

Fearful fantasies regularly pop up into our awareness, many disguising themselves as rational thoughts and genuine intuitions. Those fearful fantasies may hijack our psychic energy, directing it to exhaust itself in dead-end meditations.

Every time we entertain a vision of being rejected or hurt or frustrated, every time we rouse and dwell on a memory of a painful experience, we're blasting ourselves with a hex.

Meanwhile, ill-suited longings are also lurking in our unconscious mind, impelling us to want things that aren't good for us and that we don't really need. Anytime we surrender to the allure of these false and trivial and counterproductive desires, our imagination is practicing a form of black magic.

This is the unsavory aspect of the imagination that the Zen Buddhists deride as the "monkey mind." It's the part of our mental apparatus that endlessly spins out pictures that zip around with the energy of an agitated animal. If we can stop locating our sense of self in the relentless surge of the monkey mind's slapdash chatter, we can be fully attuned to the life that's right in front of us. Only then are we able to want what we actually have.

But whether our imagination is in service to our noble desires or in the thrall of compulsive fears and inappropriate yearnings, there is one constant: The prophecies of our imagination tend to be accurate. Many of our visions of the future do come to pass. The situations we expect to occur and the experiences we rehearse and dwell on are all-too-often reflected back to us as events that confirm our expectations.
Does that mean our mental projections create the future? Let's consider that possibility. What if it's at least partially true that what we expect will happen does tend to materialize?

Here's the logical conclusion: It's downright stupid and self-destructive to keep infecting our imaginations with pictures of loss and failure, doom and gloom, fear and loathing. The far more sensible approach is to expect blessings.

That's one reason why I'm reverent in composing my messages for you. If I'm to be one of the influences you invite into the intimate sanctuary where you hatch your self-fulfilling prophecies, I want to conspire with you to disperse fear and invoke relaxation and joy.

+

"You Are a Prophet" is from the soundtrack for my book "Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings," which is available here:
http://bit.ly/Pronoia
http://bit.ly/PronoiaPowells


You Are a Prophet

I wanted to let you know that this is a perfect time for you to learn more about the difference between your fearful fantasies and your authentic, accurate intuitions. 

It's always a good time to do that, of course, but even more so right now. This is an exciting turning point, when the future is up for grabs. Worn-out old habits of thought are unraveling. Structures that have kept us enthralled to fake values are crumbling. The coming months and years will be ripe with opportunities for us to lay the foundation for a new world that's actually fit for the human soul.

And in the midst of this grand mutation, it's predictable that so many so-called leaders are trying to fill up our imaginations with scary visions and angry emotions. They want us to buy into their visions that the sky is falling.

In the face of their toxic paranoia, it's wise to remember that we always have the power to turn away from their fear-mongering and tune in to the guidance of the still, small voice within us -- the still, small voice of intuition that will, if we allow it, lead us very capably through every twist and turn of our destiny, even when our destiny brings us right into the thick of our civilization's massive transformations.

+

Knowing the difference between your fearful fantasies and your authentic, accurate intuitions is one of the greatest spiritual powers you can possible have. So let's explore what it means: knowing the difference between the frightening, alienating pictures that sometimes pop into your imagination, as opposed the simple, warm, clear direction that is always available from the deepest source within you. 

Strangely enough, many people get these two things confused. They are especially prone to believing that the frightening, disempowering images that erupt in their mind's eye are coming from their intuition. 

For many people, if they get an image of a scary future possibility popping into their imagination, they worry that it's a prediction of some event that will actually occur in their lives. For instance, they may have a fantasy of themselves getting into an accident, or maybe they dream of losing a loved one, or maybe they internalize the toxic vision of some talking head on TV who slaps them upside the head with a prediction of imminent doom. When these people get images like these stuck in their imagination, they may begin to obsess on the fear that these things are literally going to happen.

Almost every time, scary fantasies like this are not true intuition. Our true intuition is just not very likely to be fueled by fear, and it rarely if ever motivates us to act by making us feel afraid. 
	
No. Our true intuition emerges from the wise, loving core of our being. It blooms in us like a slow-motion fountain of warmth. It reveals the objective truth about a person or situation with lucid compassion. It shows us the big picture.
	
Fearful fantasies, on the other hand, burn and itch and make us feel like we're coming apart. They drain our energy and cloud our judgment. They fill us with obsessive urges to run and hide or do something desperate and melodramatic.
	
I don't want to say that true intuition is always calm and emotionally neutral. It isn't, necessarily. But I will say this: The emotions that accompany true intuition are never alienating. They don't make us feel superior to other people or fill us with hatred and terror. They don't disempower us or make us feel helpless.

True intuition may rouse our anger, but if so, it is the kind of invigorating anger that leads to clarity and constructive action, and thus it is an anger that ultimately relaxes us. 

True intuition may show us a difficult truth, but it always does so with a suggestion of how to deal gracefully and courageously with that difficult truth. True intuition may reveal imminent changes that could compel us to adjust our behavior, but it always does so in a way that empowers us.

Let me emphasize this point: True intuition may not always reveal that everything will be fine, or that we will be able to continue to live in the ways be have been living -- true intuition is certainly not falsely optimistic -- but if it does alert us to circumstances that are in flux, and how we will have to transform ourselves, it does so with love and poise and clarity, not with fear.

Here's one more thing, *. Just as our true intuition never works by scaring the hell out of us, neither does it flatter us with grandiose suggestions about how superior we are. In fact, it may often gently inform us of some correction that should be made in our attitude. It may tactfully but firmly lead us to the understanding that we have been suffering from some form of ignorance and that we need to wake up and get smarter.
	
True intuition reveals the story of our lives from our soul's point of view, not our ego's. In my understanding, true intuition is the voice of our own personal inner teacher, which just happens to be the divine part of us. The certainty that true intuition provides us is therefore not loud and puffed up, but rather humble and graceful.

+

This is a perfect moment to think on these things, and to add some insights of your own. It's also an excellent time to flush away the fearful fantasies that may have seeped into your imagination -- and thereby make it possible for you to hear your true intuition better.

One way to facilitate this process, by the way, is to cut way back on the amount of terrifying and disorienting images you allow to flow into your imagination from the TV, Internet, newspapers, movies, and other mass media. In fact, I invite you to consider the possibility of going on a media fast for a while and spending more time in nature than you usually do.

In conclusion, my beloved companions on this beautiful, interesting planet, please get to work on seeing your fearful fantasies for what they are and enhancing your connection to your true intuition.

+

"Fear Versus Intuition" is from the soundtrack for my book 
"Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings," which is available here:
http://bit.ly/Pronoia
http://bit.ly/PronoiaPowells


Fear Vs. Intuition

Water In the Fuel

Chris Richards is a songwriter and recording artist from Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The MOJO-4-star-rated "Wisconsin River" is his 6th full-length release.

Nashville Gas (Alternate Sheboygan Choir Version)

Chris Richards

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