Music
VIDEOS
When you write about homelessness and loss as intensely as I have, and you also happen to be a singer-songwriter, you wind up turning to your guitar to express yourself even more. These are videos of some of those songs. I wrote all of them but "Homeless Brother," which is one of my favorite songs about street life.
(Click on the links at the end of the captions to see the videos.)
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"Homeless Brother"
I've been singing this song since I learned it as a young man, decades ago, busking in the streets of New Zealand. It fit then, and it fits now. This is a clip of me performing the song at a presentation of my book at the terrific Mrs. Dalloway's bookstore in Berkeley in February 2025. The tune was written in the 1970s by Don McLean.
LINK IS HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5MLVJMORg0
"I Will Think of You"
I wrote this years ago after a dear friend died, following a string of deaths around me. I sang it at a memorial for Jill May, a chronically homeless woman who's in my book, "The Lost and the Found" -- I had found her to be achingly sweet, sad and vulnerable as she struggled to find stability, and she was doused with gas and burned to death. After her killer was convicted, Jill's family and the lead homicide detective and I went to the spot where she died and held our memorial.
LINK IS HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJbymab63xs
"Little Bit"
This is a song I wrote about Little Bit, a chronically homeless woman I met in 2003 with photographer Brant Ward when we profiled Homeless Island, the unhoused colony she lived with on a traffic island in San Francisco. She touched us deeply with her desperation and grit, and this song is about trying to get her to talk with us -- which she eventually did. She is in my book, "The Lost and the Found," and was a good friend of Rita Grant, one of the two main people in the book.
LINK IS HERE: https://rb.gy/2pkdjg
"Day After Day After Christmas"
I wrote this song to highlight the terrible inequities in our country, which I've seen so many times as a reporter and which has grown worse with every decade. This is a tape of one of the bands I'm in, Finding Fable, rehearsing the song at Channel 7 ABC TV before performing it live.
LINK IS HERE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qjg_Ma7KMd8