To describe my recent interview with English chairmaker Lawrence Neal as unusual would qualify as my greatest understatement of 2021, albeit from the standpoint of just one month in. Despite the research I did a few years ago for my book “English Arts & Crafts Furniture,” I didn’t become aware of Lawrence until Peter Follansbee suggested him for this series of profiles. Had I known of him five years earlier, I would certainly have wanted to include him in the book, along with a few others who keep Arts & Crafts traditions alive in silver, glass and wood.
Lawrence is a practicing craftsman in an unbroken line stretching back to designer Ernest Gimson. While engaged in the process we today would call “finding himself,” Gimson had taken some lessons in chairmaking from Herefordshire chairmaker Philip Clissett in 1890. Later, having established his workshops at Daneway House in the Cotswolds, west of London, Gimson encouraged Edward Gardiner, a young man in a family of sawyers who lived nearby, to learn to make chairs. Gardiner later moved to Warwickshire, where Lawrence’s father, Neville Neal, began learning from him in 1939. So I imagined that Lawrence would be full of stories, perhaps even willing to talk about such abstract notions as the meaning he finds in his work.
Nope. Instead, he was more chill about his life and work than pretty much anyone I can recall having interviewed, ever. At first I found his “Just the facts, ma’am” responses disappointing – where was the personal stuff, the color?
But as I worked in my own shop yesterday, my strength, along with my hemoglobin level, temporarily reduced by chemotherapy, the well-intentioned comments from some readers about the healing comforts of “making sawdust” jostled less happily around my head. It hit me how familiar, in the end, I found Lawrence’s “Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts“; it brought so many of the people with whom I worked at small shops in England in the 1980s shooting right back. Look, this is my livelihood. Sure, it’s a gift to be able to turn a drawing into a practical three-dimensional object. But there’s no need to wax romantic. In my own woodworking-and-design-icon-deprived muddling way, I’ve spent most of my adult life as a cabinetmaker. It’s simply what I do. Yes, my work gives me great satisfaction, and it’s easy for me to go on (at length) about how wondrous it is to have any kind of practical skill. But on an hour-to-hour basis, I’ll tell you that spending a day amid the wood chips, whether I’m building a set of paint-grade bookcases or a solid walnut sideboard with hand-cut joinery throughout, is work, not something I’m inclined to romanticize. Amid my frustration at my reduced productivity, Lawrence’s low-key attitude quickly turned into balm for my soul.
Lawrence was born in Stockton, Warwickshire (pronounced “Warrick-shirr”), in 1951 and has spent most of his life firmly rooted there. His father, Neville Neal, was a chairmaker; his mother was a housewife. He has a younger sister, Janice.
When Lawrence was a boy, Neville spent his days working at Gardiner’s Warwickshire workshop, but he had a shop of his own in an outbuilding at the Neal family home, a “pretty brick cottage” built in 1843. The same outbuilding had housed Neville’s grandfather’s business, a barbershop. Lawrence went out to play with tools whenever his dad was there; he remembers a shavehorse and a lathe, a small bench and “a big sash cramp he’d put the chairs together with.”
After Gardiner died in 1958, Neville stayed on at his mentor’s shop for a couple of years. When another workshop became available in 1960, Neville took it over. It’s where Lawrence works today.
Neville and Victor Neal, Lawrence’s father and grandfather, respectively, in Edward Gardiner’s workshop during the 1950s.
Lawrence left school at 15, without taking GCSE or O-Level exams. He went straight into the chairmaking business, working with his father and a fellow who wove rush seats. “It was taken for granted that I would carry on with the chairmaking trade,” he says. Chairmaking had become part of the family; sometimes his granddad came over and joined them in the small workshop.
“I suppose I took the easy option,” he goes on, though he may be the only one alive who would call his life course “the easy option.”
“I’ve always enjoyed working with wood and any tools, really, so it wasn’t a problem going into the family business. My parents had to keep an eye on me when I was a kid, because I was forever getting into the tools and modifying the furniture in the house if I got half a chance!” One day his mother caught him “sandpapering the Welsh dresser, which didn’t please her too much.”
Lawrence in the ’70s, on a ferry from Harwich (pronounced “Harritch”) to Hook of Holland.
Lawrence takes the making of a chair through the entire process, from tree to finished seat. Early on, he felled his own trees, though he has not personally cut down any trees for chairmaking in many years. He and his father had an arrangement with the owner of a nearby woodlot; they’d choose a tree, fell it and take it to be sawn and dried. He still gets ash from woods near his home and has several people he calls on as additional sources. Sometimes he goes farther afield, within a radius of about 50 miles – to the Cotswolds in one direction, the Malvern Hills another. In addition to ash, he builds chairs in English brown oak, which he buys from a local timberyard.
He’ll select a tree and the sawmill will slice it into planks. Starting with green planks, Lawrence breaks the material down with a circular saw, then cuts it into smaller blanks. He turns the back legs, boils them, then leaves them in the bending frames for around a week. Next he saws the wood for slats; he planes the slats to thickness, boils and bends them, then mortises the back legs to accept the slats. He starts by drilling a row of holes, then trims them by hand with a chisel. Next he might do the spars (stretchers) and seat rails. He turns the former on the lathe and shaves the seat rails on the shavehorse, then dries them “properly” over the stove until he has the chair ready to assemble.
Lawrence used hide glue when he first started out; there was always a glue pot on the stove. Now he uses PVA. (This is the kind of disclosure that warms my heart.) He finishes the chairs and weaves the seats himself. Most chairs get a wax polish; Lawrence and his father used to make their own, from beeswax and turpentine, but he says “it was sticky, to be honest, and particularly ash chairs, which are light colored, tends to [collect] dust and dirt, which makes them look a bit grubby.” Today he uses a commercially produced wax made by Myland’s. Some customers want their chairs stained to match other furniture; recently, some have asked him to paint them grey. He prefers to leave the wood natural with a clear finish.
Rush for seat weaving.
He gathers rush from local rivers, mainly the Avon, harvesting between mid-June and mid-August. I asked whether he had to get permission from local government authorities. “We just ask the farmer,” he replied. “The river authorities and all that don’t seem to bother with us at all. You’re not really doing any harm, because [the rush] just grows back the following year.” He twists the strands of rush for the seat’s top side and edges, then weaves them around and around the frame “until there’s a seat.” Like you do.
Lawrence has spent the last 30 years with his partner, Alwyn. She worked at a solicitor’s firm (a law office) until she retired. “She likes life in the village,” Lawrence says, “the various clubs, things like ‘Knit and Natter’ (known in the States as ‘Stich ‘n’ Bitch’), the Women’s’ Institute, walking clubs and so on. There’s quite a lot going on, really, but COVID has put a stop to that.” Stockton’s population is about 1,000; its economy was long based on a combination of farming and two cement works, which took advantage of the plentiful area limestone. Many of the village houses were originally built for cement factory workers.
Lawrence and Alwyn have “quite a lot” of his chairs “scattered about the house.” He considers the chairs “very comfortable,” not least thanks to their woven rush seats.
None of Lawrence’s children is interested in going into chairmaking, though he says his middle son, Daniel, who works in digital marketing, has been getting into woodwork of late. Lawrence’s daughter, Laura, works at the solicitor’s office where Alwyn used to work. His eldest child, Joe, was a musician; Joe died in 2018.
Even Lawrence, who wants the craft to continue, describes his career in chairmaking as “almost more by accident.” The craft, he says, “could easily have died out at some point. A lot of [credit for its survival] is down to Edward Gardiner. He struggled to find work in the ’20s and ’30s. He’d started with Ernest Gimson in the late 1890s. He went back to [his] family sawmill during the First World War, then returned to chairmaking following Gimson’s death.” Neville, Lawrence’s dad, started with Gardiner in 1939, left when conscripted, but went back after his time in the army. “Since my dad took over in 1960, there’s been plenty of work,” Lawrence says. “There was a bit of a craft revival in the ’60s, and from there on it’s not been difficult to find work really, at all.”
Neville Neal in the 1980s.
Lawrence has trained a couple of apprentices, Sam Cooper and Richard Platt. That project began when a friend, Hugo Burge, offered to sponsor two apprentices; he paid them while Lawrence trained them to build chairs for his customers. Hugo lives at Marchmont House near the village of Greenlaw in Berwickshire (“Berrick-shirr”), Scotland; his property has several outbuildings that he has turned into creative spaces. When Richard and Sam left following the onset of the pandemic in the spring of 2020, they opened their own workshops, so they’ve been in business nearly a year. While Lawrence appreciated the opportunity to pass his skills on, he missed building chairs himself while training his apprentices – all he had time for was prepping and planning. “It was a bit strange, really,” he remarks about that time.
Lawrence has no plan to take on other full-time apprentices; he’s unwilling to commit another two or three years. Instead, he says, “I’m enjoying working by myself.” He gets by on a government pension and doesn’t “desperately need” to make a lot of chairs, so once again he’s enjoying the process of making.
He and Alwyn live in a modern house, built in the ’70s. They sold the family cottage – neither he nor his sister wanted to live there.
These days Lawrence gets a lot of repeat orders from families who bought chairs in the past. Other orders come from parents who want to buy chairs as a wedding gift for their children. In recent years, he’s also received plentiful work through interior designers, a phenomenon he attributes in large part to the internet. Then again, it’s a nice echo of how those we now know as luminaries of Arts & Crafts design – the Voyseys, Barnsleys, Gimson and their peers – sent prospective patrons or clients who had attended their lectures or seen their work published in magazines to trusted workshops.
To learn more about Lawrence’s chairmaking, see this video and this one. Also check him on Instagram, where he shares images of covet-able chairs, along with some amazing historical photos of his forebears at work.
Neville Neal weaving a seat in 1971. Lawrence is in the background.
Sometimes when life knocks you off your feet, you find yourself in a surprisingly happy place when you pick yourself back up. Such is the case with furniture maker Jeff Miller. Most woodworkers know Jeff’s name through his many articles, books and videos for Fine Woodworking, Popular Woodworking and Wood Magazine. (He also has upcoming articles in Mortise & Tenon and Furniture & Cabinetmaking.) Jeff has taught at woodworking schools across the United States, from the Northwest Woodworking Studio and Port Townsend School of Woodworking on the west coast to the Center for Furniture Craftsmanship on the east, and others – Red Rocks in Colorado, Marc Adams in Indiana, Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking in central Kentucky (now Pine Croft) and Highland Woodworking in Georgia. He has presented at Woodworking in America, Weekend with Wood and the Association of Woodworking and Finishing Suppliers, and at more clubs and guilds than he can easily call to mind. He has won numerous awards for his woodworking, among them theDistinguished Furniture Design Award from the Chicago Athenaeum Museum, and for his publications, including the Stanley Golden Hammer Award for his 1997 book “Chairmaking & Design.” The Chicago History Museum has Jeff’s “Spider Handkerchief Table” in its permanent collection. And you will soon find his work on the prestigious back cover of Fine Woodworking magazine.
Jeff calls this intersection “the centerpiece of this rocker: a particular piece of insanity” to design, “and an even worse piece of insanity actually making it.”
So it may come as a surprise to learn that professional furniture making was nowhere on Jeff’s radar for his first 27 years. Music was his passion, and in that department, as in academic performance and his commitment to physical fitness, he was no slouch. For college he applied to the University of Rochester, home to the Eastman School of Music; Oberlin, with its distinguished Conservatory of Music; and Yale. In the end he chose Yale because the curriculum emphasized academics as well as music studies. He minored in literature – Russian, English, French.
While at Yale, Jeff took a semester off and dipped his toes in the field of instrument making, learning from a then-recently published book, “The Amateur Wind Instrument Maker.” Guided by the book’s instructions, he made several baroque and renaissance wood instruments. Looking around his scantly furnished apartment, he decided he could use some tables and chairs, so from plans he made a few pieces he now calls “just awful!” Those projects gave him confidence that he could learn to use a lathe and other tools, as well as make what tools he needed. With experience, he took on better pieces. Friends saw them and asked him to make them some furniture, though he says it was still on a strictly amateur level.
After that semester off, Jeff returned to his formal studies and graduated in 1978 with a Bachelor of Arts in music. Like many musicians, he picked up gigs as a freelance musician in New York City. When he learned the Chicago Chamber Brass quintet was looking for a trumpet player, Jeff auditioned and got the job. He moved to Chicago in 1983 and launched a career as a professional musician, touring the eastern United States and recording a CD.
The recording Jeff did with Chicago Chamber Brass.
A serious runner for both fitness and fun, Jeff was training for one of the runner’s ultimate benchmarks, a marathon, when he noticed his legs were swelling. A nurse friend urged him to see his doctor.
“The next day I was in the hospital,” he says. “They did a kidney biopsy and pretty much within a week my life had changed.” He was 27.
The original diagnosis was lupus, which his doctor thought had caused the kidney disease. Jeff’s mother was visiting from New York at the time; they read that lupus was chronic and fatal. (This information came from an outdated medical textbook and was – and, happily, remains –no longer accurate.) Jeff recalls all too clearly “that moment where I could almost see my mom…mentally collapsing…and the blood drained out of my head completely, and it was just one of those moments where everything seemed to fall apart around me.” The medication to treat his condition made him weak and jittery; he went from running a fast 8 miles to not being able to run across the street. It was clear he could no longer play the trumpet at his former professional level. He left the quintet.
As a therapeutic diversion Jeff took up building furniture in his nurse friend’s basement. He’d work, nap, then go back to it. “It was my salvation,” he says, “a creative outlet that was the salve for losing music – and I felt I was actually better at it than at music.” He was still rather naïve, but he learned quickly. Just as exciting, he adds, “I was also designing, and learning more as a designer, which helped push my skills tremendously.”
About a year after starting in his friend’s basement, he had lined up enough paying work to cover rent and moved to a shop of his own. He split off the front to use as a showroom and kept the back of the building, along with the basement, as a shop. Coincidentally, his shop today is just a block away from his first shop in West Rogers Park, home to many new immigrants; he relishes the everyday experience of hearing seven or eight languages in a stroll through the park.
Jeff’s shop today is in a former post office.
Although Jeff gave most Yale alumni events a pass, he said yes to one in 1986 at the Hilton on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. He’s glad he went; he met a young woman there, Rebecca Wurtz, who was training to be a doctor. “We were talking, and she said, ‘Oh! I have this idea for a bed!’ She sketched something out and I was terribly impressed that she could sketch.” They had dinner and, he says, “just hit it off.” They moved in together and were married a couple of years later. Their son, Isaac, was born in 1993; he’s now in graduate school, training in social work. Their daughter, Ariel, was born the following year. With a degree in creative writing from Oberlin, she is an aspiring writer and illustrator.
“City Bed,” a design based on the bed Jeff made for his wife, Rebecca.
Starting out, Jeff found a lot of people ordered beds. He’d done some work for a local company that made futons, as well as easy chairs for futon-like cushions. After a year or so he moved beyond bedroom furniture to another part of the house on which people proved happy to spend money, the dining room. He started with tables. Inevitably, people asked about chairs. Through what Jeff now calls “an excess of confidence” he began them. As he came up with increasingly sophisticated chair designs and translated them into functional pieces, he gained proficiency. He also appreciated the many lessons that came with the process of making the same piece multiple times: “If you’re paying attention and are critical in terms of design,” he says, “you can constantly improve.” Most of the work was commissioned by local customers, but once he got a website, Jeff began to get orders from around the country.
“Windsor Bed.”
Buried in beds.
Jeff’s first article for Fine Woodworking was on how to build a Windsor bed. He’d been reading the magazine for several years and had learned a lot, so he sent in a picture with a query. After all his academic writing at college, it didn’t feel like a big deal. He got the contract – his first editor was Sandor Nagyszalanczy – and has written about 35 more in the years since then.
A few articles in, Jeff was thinking big. He submitted a proposal for a book on chairmaking and design. He’d completed a commission for 75 chairs ordered by a convent. The first 50, he says, were “this amazing logistical feat” – aside from the slog of repetition, he had to figure out a way to store the chairs once he had them assembled. He started with a stack on one side of the shop, then moved to the other. With his book proposal he included pictures of the stacks, which caught the editors’ eye. Jeff got the contract. While working on the book, he also leapt into the world of teaching, an experience he found useful in conveying how best to write and illustrate the how-to. “It helped me to understand what students needed to learn.” And writing, in turn, “helped me to clarify and refine what I would teach somebody,” says Jeff. The writing, teaching and making came together as “an amazing trio, each feeding the other two.” Ever since, he has found this combo “the most satisfying part of what I do. It’s not any individual element; it’s all three together.”
“Timpani” table. Shop-sawn mahogany veneer and ebonized mahogany.
At this point in our conversation Jeff switched back to his musical training, which he considers invaluable for its transferability to woodworking. First, he says, “as a musician you have to understand that your body is this crucial part of your ability to play. It is your primary instrument. That helped me so much in my woodworking, to understand that the tools were just extensions of what I thought and was trying to express in the wood. Using your body correctly in music and in woodworking makes a huge difference; it informs how you plane, chisel, saw and shape pieces.”
Second, Jeff goes on, “I think of my designs as musical compositions also. That makes a difference in how I think about the piece as I design it and how I build it. So many woodworkers find plans for what they want to build, and then they build. As a musician you’re given a ‘plan’ for a piece of music [the score], and you have to understand that playing the notes as they’re written on the page is just the beginning of turning that piece into a musical expression. The same is true for woodworking. You can build the piece precisely to specification on the page and completely miss what the person who designed it was trying to get across! When you build a piece of furniture it’s more like playing a jazz solo than following specs. You’re choosing how a curve goes, you’re picking wood as part of an artist’s palette. Every nuance is important.”
Third, “understanding musical composition also helps you understand designs in wood. There can be little motifs that appear in both small and large scale. The flow of lines in music is a huge influence in the flow of the lines in my furniture.”
“Arch Table.” Cherry.
Even a cursory click through the gallery at Jeff’s website illustrates these connections between music and design in wood. His pieces are both fluid and sturdily made. The back of a chair curves and swells to hold its sitter; there is rhythm, harmony and crescendo. Jeff’s love of technical challenge – how to achieve a flawless intersection of curving, angled parts in a rocker that must also support its sitter safely and comfortably, how to cooper a hexadecagon for a table inspired by a timpani drum – comes through in each design. And beyond these artistic and technical feats, he has garnered a national clientele – no small feat in its own right.
“Spider Handkerchief Table.”
“Toccata” rocking chair. Ash. (Yes, the arm supports run through the seat.)
But Jeff lives with another formidable challenge, and his example here is no less inspiring. “The kidney disease has been a huge factor in my life for exactly as long as I have been woodworking,” he says: 37 years. “There have been periods of stasis when I’ve been fine; in others, a variety of crises. I lead a very healthy life. Still run and work out. I’m on my feet all day working in the shop. And yet I have been through more than most people I know.”
“The specific diagnosis may have been incorrect, but there was no doubt about what was happening to my kidneys,” he continues. “They were failing.” In 1993, six years after beginning his life with Rebecca, Jeff had his first kidney transplant. “I remember thinking we were just on a roll in the shop. I had two employees at the time. We were working well as a team, had plenty of work.” One day he got a call from the hospital at 3 p.m.: “We’ve got a kidney for you. We need you down here at 7 p.m.” to get ready. “That completely upended my life again. Over and over, there have been things like that.” The transplant was successful and allowed him to get back to work.
Meanwhile, Jeff had become friends with the father of one of Isaac’s preschool classmates. Like Jeff, John was a skier; they went on ski trips together with another friend. In 2002 Jeff’s transplanted kidney began to fail. “I was really pretty sick,” he remembers. But he wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity for great skiing, so he would “just marshal my resources and ski.” One day when they were skiing hard at Vail on one of their favorite runs, John was halfway down the mountain when he tore his ACL. Jeff and his other friend got off the mountain and stabilized him, then took him to the local hospital. That night they were staying with Jeff’s sister and Jeff was huddled by the fire, shivering, when John asked “what do you have to do to donate a kidney?”
“It’s based on blood type,” Jeff replied. John said, “If mine matches, one of my kidneys is yours.” Of course, notes Jeff, “he was high on painkillers and beer when he said that.” Jeff didn’t believe his friend would feel the same the next day. But back in Chicago, John insisted. Jeff’s cousin also offered to donate a kidney, but hers would not have been as good a match.
“It’s this unbelievable thing that he pushed and went forward with it,” Jeff marvels. “How do accept a gift like that from a friend?” John’s operation started in the morning, then Jeff was brought in for surgery that took seven hours. “I’m back in my room…and they force you to get up and walk. John walked in that night. He was a wreck. He said ‘I want it back!’” Of course he was kidding; for him, the act of giving the kidney was what mattered. “He described it as the most important thing he’d done in his life. It made it so easy to accept that gift and be grateful for it.” Five weeks later John was riding his mountain bike. They skied together the following March. But a transplanted kidney doesn’t last forever; John’s donated kidney failed around 2011.
“Stained Glass” chairs. The pattern inspiration came from a stained glass window of modernist design. The backs are solid stacked laminations, scooped out, with routed inlay. Cherry, walnut and ebony.
Now Jeff moved to a new protocol, peritoneal dialysis, which involved “a suitcase-size machine you carry around, and boxes and boxes of fluid.” Imagine driving to a woodworking school and teaching a week-long class with that gear.
And there’s more. “They don’t tell you that your native kidneys, if they shrivel up, can become cancerous. One of the problems with peritoneal dialysis is that you have a tube in your abdomen.” (Apologies to you squeamish types.) The tube irritated his intestines, which led to infections. Sometimes he had to stay in the hospital for 10 days. During one of these stints his doctors ordered an MRI that found kidney cancer. “That,” says Jeff, “was probably the toughest period for me.” They removed the cancerous kidney, only to find, the following year, that the other kidney had also developed cancer.
At this point some might plunge into despair. Not Jeff. Instead, he felt gratitude. “I just feel like I’ve been so fortunate and appreciate so many aspects of what I do, despite the fact that there have been periods of real misery. It’s important to appreciate everything you’ve got. Whatever you get is a gift. So many people wander through life without appreciating that.”
People who find themselves faced with such challenges are “more alive,” Jeff thinks. “There are these moments where…things are miserable, and then all of a sudden they’re not so miserable and everything around you is more wondrous. I can remember moments where all of a sudden I’m walking and [realize] ‘this feels great!’ I can even remember where I was when that sort of thing happened.”
These days, Jeff goes to a local dialysis clinic for treatments three times a week, a process that lasts 4-1/2 hours, plus travel time. (Read that again.) He schedules his appointments in the late afternoons to allow him maximum time in the shop.
“988” chair. Jeff designed and made this piece for a show in Chicago, “Beyond Function: The Art of Furniture.” An experiment in prototyping shaped chair seats, it incorporates 988 stainless steel screws. By adjusting the screws, the user can adjust the fit and feel of the seat.
If you follow Jeff on Instagram you may be as taken as I am by two items that show up occasionally in his feed: Lola the shop dog and his fluting engine. Lola, a blue heeler, belongs to Juan, Jeff’s erstwhile assistant. (Jameel Abraham calls Lola “one of the finest people” he has ever met.) Sadly, Lola and Juan have been out of the shop since June, thanks to the pandemic and then Juan’s decision to attend grad school in furniture at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Jeff and Lola.
Jameel Abraham’s Instagram post from January 27, 2020. “This is Lola, perhaps the most well-mannered, sweet, affectionate animal I’ve ever met. She did exactly as I asked, and happily posed for several photos. She had the most beautiful black and white mottled coat. Her eyes and general manner [were] so full of soul.”
The fluting engine is a device Jeff made based on David Pye’s circa-1950 invention. Jeff was intrigued by the tool, which makes evenly spaced flutes on curved surfaces, inside or out. A bit of sleuthing turned nothing up since the description in “David Pye: Woodcarver and Turner.” Around 2018, Jeff studied the description in the book with a view to making a fluting engine of his own. He puzzled over it for a few months and built one as a side project. The biggest problem he encountered was figuring out the geometry of the cutters, which required a few variations in the grinding, forging and heat treatment to get things right. In action, the fluting engine makes a mesmerizing sound – for a user or spectator, it’s easy to love. On the other hand, it’s “incredibly infuriating” as it requires adjustments for every variation. But such frustration goes with any relationship. Bottom line: Jeff is hooked by the device, the process of using it and the texture it brings to his work.
Mahogany bowl.
Butternut bowl.
As someone at heightened risk of infection, Jeff has been staying close to home since last March. He’s working on a couple of chair designs and a variety of commission work, along with projects of his own. As with many of us, he says “all sorts of design ideas are always percolating.”
In fact, he says, “my head is exploding with ideas. Dialysis takes a huge amount of time and energy. I wish I had more energy.” But Jeff’s glass is full — with “appreciation for being alive, for experiencing things. The sense of gratitude for being able to do what I do is amazing.”
It was November 13, 1942, and his mother was living with another woman and her small child in Los Angeles, California, while his father was working as a psychiatric social worker in the army, stationed in Texas. After the war his parents divorced, and his mom remarried.
Drew’s stepfather was a classical violinist and his mother was a serious pianist. Drew also spent many afternoons with his father, an art historian, visiting artist studios, galleries and museums.
Drew with his good friend Mike, the neighbor’s dog. Photo taken around 1948.
He and his half-brother, who was 8 years younger, spent their childhood in West L.A., which Drew says was then a nice place to grow up in. A self-described quiet and shy child, Drew struggled with rote memorization at school and never yearned for a paper route in order to buy things like most of his friends. He preferred making things, and his parents always made sure he had access to art supplies.
“Nobody had much money in our family at the time so I was always encouraged to do art things and try making stuff,” he says.
Instead of having him study for his bar mitzvah, Drew’s parents signed him up for weekly art lessons with Adalaide Fogg and Mary Gordon, liberal progressives who painted, made jewelry and prints, and supplemented their income by opening up their studio to provide lessons for children.
After high school, Drew enrolled at San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge) to study anthropology. He had always been interested in the topic and while the school wasn’t his first choice the anthropology department there had recently hired Dorothy Lee, “a really brilliant woman who was fed up with teaching at Harvard to be the department head,” Drew says. Lee was interesting, connected easily with young people and eschewed standardized, formal education. Drew thrived and in two years took enough courses minus one to satisfy an anthropology degree.
Drew disliked the San Fernando Valley and was falling in love with San Francisco. (This was San Francisco in the 1960s after all.) So he transferred to San Francisco State, which he loved – except for the anthropology department. In one class Drew stated an ethical objection to a field method used by anthropologists. The instructor, who was the department head, suggested that it would be a good idea for Drew to consider work in a different field. Drew managed to pass the course and earned his bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1964.
While at San Francisco State, Drew had fallen in love with the university’s dark room and ceramic studios. And in 1966, he earned a master’s degree in painting and sculpture. Although there was a woodshop on campus, there were no instructions on how to use the tools, Drew said. And while Charles Haywood was writing in the U.K. at the time, Drew had never heard of him and publications like Fine Woodworkingdidn’t exist.
“Interestingly, while I was in the art department at the graduate level at San Francisco State University, I had no idea that they had an industrial arts department,” he says. “I literally didn’t know it existed.” Turns out John Kassay, who later went on to write “The Book of Shaker Furniture” in 1980 and “The Book of American Windsor Furniture: Styles and Technologies” in 1998, was teaching on campus at the same time Drew was a student. “It wasn’t until 30 years later while on the phone with him one day that I found out he was teaching right where I was,” Drew says. “For me it was all learning on one’s own and sometimes woodworking was part of it and sometimes it was not.”
In graduate school Drew became friends with a guy who grew up in a “real all-American middle-class kind of family,” he says, which was quite different from the way Drew grew up. The dad in this family had a little woodworking shop, complete with a table saw, and together, father and son were building a boat. Drew would visit this family often, and says he learned a lot about woodworking while helping build the boat.
1960s San Francisco
After graduation Drew, who at this point owned a small table saw, started a small business making stretched canvasses for professional and more well-off artists. He also started to make some sculptures and, as funds would allow, would occasionally buy a new tool from Sears.
Drew loved living in San Francisco in the 1960s, and that decade proved formative.
“It’s part of my story,” he says.
He was involved in civil rights and anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, and drawn to people who were producing the Whole Earth Catalog.
“Back then we would walk everywhere,” he says. “We would walk across San Francisco. I lived in a neighborhood, it was pretty much a slum, and we would walk to China Town and say, ‘We have $3 for dinner. What can you make us?’ And they would make us dinner. It would show up. And there were all kinds of stuff happening in various arts and it was all accessible. It wasn’t a pricey play to live like it’s become.”
“At our wedding, April, 1971,” Drew says. “Sonoma County, Calif. Photo by Jalaladin, a friend in the Bay area Sufi community.”
Around this time Drew met his wife, Louise. He had heard about a woman named Ann Halprin who ran a modern dance studio. He and Louise met at one of the studio’s summer workshops on experimental dance theater. “A couple years later we were living together and then a couple years after that we were getting married,” he says.
“Adventure playground built with partner Jay Beckwith,” Drew says. “We used new exhaust pipe seconds and recycled parts of the existing playground.” This playground was located at a Bay area daycare center. If you look closely in the background you can see Drew and Louise’s 1952 Chevy Travelall, which they drove across country several times. Photo is from 1969/1970.
Around this time Drew and his friend, Jay Beckwith, began building adventure playgrounds for kids, essentially sculptures for kids to climb on. “We were using our art-school mentality to cut up existing structures with funny angles and put it all back together in a totally different configuration,” he says.
One night, while watching a friend of a friend’s slideshow from a trip to Nepal, Drew says he felt an attachment to the landscape and Nepalese people, and how closely they were living to an outdoors life. At the time, a lot of young people were traveling to India and Nepal, and Drew and Louise decided they wanted to do the same. Drew, a fan of Bernard Rudofsky’s “Architecture Without Architects,” wanted to take photographs of people and write a book about the vernacular architecture they found along the way. Louise also became interested in the book, with a focus on finding out more about the people they met and how they lived their lives.
“I was a little kid who marveled at the building of the Hollywood Freeway and I even thought I’d be an industrial designer someday but somewhere in my teenage years I became more interested with what you could make with your hands without a bunch of machines and big bucks and spending a lot of money,” he says.
The two saved a little money, “way too little,” Drew says, and began driving east. Along the way they spent a summer at the Lama Foundation in New Mexico, then continued on, visiting Louise’s parents in Chicago and dropping off their old Chevy truck in New Jersey on a farm owned by an artist friend of Drew’s father. And then they flew to England, intent on reaching Nepal.
A Year in Europe + an Apprenticeship in Coopering
Drew’s passport photo for his 1971-1972 trip overseas. “I packed a suit and tie, ‘just in case,’ but never used it,” Drew says. “There isn’t a single photo of me during that adventuresome year.” Film was valuable, and Drew and Louise saved it for photos for their book, “Handmade: Vanishing Cultures Of Europe And The Near East” (Harmony Books).
Initially Drew and Louise wanted to do their entire trip on public transportation and by hitchhiking, thinking that would put them closer to the people they wanted to meet.
“But we found out we were lousy hitchhikers,” Drew says, laughing.
So they traveled by bus and train. Their first big stop was Greece – winter was coming, so they decided to stay put. Drew took a train back to Munich, bought a used police motorcycle and brought it back to Greece. The motorcycle, it turns out, was a lemon and although Drew says they spent half their winter in Greece trying to fix it they enjoyed their time in places they were stuck.
Once the weather began to warm they took a ferry to Turkey but soon they realized their motorcycle wasn’t going to make it. Back to Munich they went (tax regulations made it impossible to sell or even give away the motorcycle in Turkey) where they found some American soldiers willing to buy it. They saw a “for sale” sign on a Volkswagen Beetle, “a really good one,” Drew says, and they bought it. By now they had given up on Nepal and instead had their eye on Scandinavia. “We thought we could explore some rural parts of Western Europe, starting with the Swiss Alps,” Drew says. And that’s where they met Kufermeister Ruedi Kohler.
This is a 1980 photo of Ruedi Kohler, the master cooper Drew apprenticed with in 1972. To watch a documentary about Ruedi, check out “Swiss Cooperage: Two Days in the Workshop of Ruedi Kohler” (Country Workshops/Image and Word) here.
Ruedi was one of the last traditionally trained Swiss coopers and he made wooden, open buckets for use in Alpine dairies. “They were really quite beautiful and very specialized to the area where he lived,” Drew says. Drew and Louise bought a bucket and put it in the back seat of their Volkswagen. Every day, as they headed up to Norway and Sweden, Drew looked at that bucket and wondered how Ruedi made it. “I knew enough about making stuff to realize I couldn’t do it,” Drew says. “And I had no idea how he did it with his tools.”
Drew and Louise drove around for several weeks, considering a permanent move to Norway. Ultimately they decided against it but before moving back they had an idea: Maybe Drew could apprentice with Ruedi. “Ruedi seemed to be really kind and definitely very skillful and he lived in this beautiful log chalet in a kind of obscure corner of the Alps,” Drew says. “And I thought maybe he would take on a student.”
Ruedi agreed and Drew began a 10-week apprenticeship in single-bottom coopering, working six days a week. Because of the language barrier, Ruedi would simply show Drew how to do something, Drew would try, then Ruedi would show him again, over and over, until Drew improved. Drew wrote down questions on a little pad of paper and every once in a while a local schoolteacher who knew rudimentary English would come by and translate Drew’s questions and Ruedi’s responses.
“I still have never found anyone as skillful as Ruedi,” Drew says. “And he turned out to be even nicer than we had thought – his wife and family also.”
Planting Roots in North Carolina
Once Drew’s apprenticeship ended, he and Louise were ready to move back to the U.S. Although they loved the San Francisco Bay area they wanted to experience a different kind of environment, something less urban – but they weren’t sure where. So they picked up their old Chevy at the farm in New Jersey and began driving it back across the country.
While in Greece a publisher from Harmony Books, a division of the Crown Publishing Group, who Drew and Louise meet at the Lama Foundation, sent them a letter stating interest in publishing their book. So once back in San Francisco Drew began writing, processing film, making prints and even working on the book’s layout. Louise worked on it, too.
It was the beginning of the Foxfire books era and having spent a year traveling in rural Europe, both Drew and Louise knew they wanted to live in a less material world. They considered Vermont, but didn’t want to be involved with its winters. Other places they deemed nice were too expensive.
While at the Lama Foundation they had met a guy who owned 100 acres in North Carolina who had the intention of starting a craft community. Drew and Louise happened to run into this guy again and he said they were welcome to stay in a small house on the property while they looked for a place to live. So, they did.
“We got everything done with the book,” Drew says. “Winter was over and we took that old Chevy truck back across the U.S. to exactly where I’m sitting right now.”
Drew and Louise lived in this double-board cabin from 1974 to 1980.
The guy’s plans fell through, and Drew and Louise, who had fallen in love with the seclusion and beauty of the southern Appalachian mountains, bought his 100 acres. And although they eventually built a new house, they’ve never moved off the property.
Initially they had no idea how they were going to earn a living but they were confident they’d figure it out. “We always figured things out,” Drew says.
While they never wanted to farm for a living they were interested in small-scale farming and making a bit of income off of it. Drew was interested in farming using draft animals, and they wanted to grow their own food. “We just wanted to experience it,” he says. “We wondered what the possibilities were, what we could do.”
Drew shaping a bucket stave.
In 1977, Wille Sundqvist visited which, in part, prompted Drew and Louise to start a craft school focused on traditional woodworking. “But I don’t want to talk about Country Workshops,” Drew says. “Too much has already been written about Country Workshops.”
That’s fair. Still folks equate the name “Drew Langsner” with two things: “Country Woodcraft,” the book he first released in 1978 completely reviving hand-tool woodworking in the modern world, and Country Workshops. In 1978 Drew and Louise opened their home and farm to students to learn about traditional woodworking. Instructors at Country Workshops included Wille Sundqvist, Jögge Sundqvist, Jennie Alexander and John Brown. Peter Follansbee, who spent time learning and teaching there, had this to say on his blog when he learned Drew and Louise were closing it down, 40 years after they opened: “Many green woodworkers in America and beyond can trace their roots to Drew & Louise, even if they don’t know it …”.
Country Workshops took place in the building on the left. Drew and Louise still live in the house on the right.
Although it may seem like it, Drew says it’s not always easy for him to connect with other people. “I’m not that gregarious or maybe kind,” he says. “But I’ve always been attracted to that kind of thing. One of the best things that ever happened during the 40 years of Country Workshops had to do with meeting the people who came as students and as teachers.”
During the last 20 years of Country Workshops Drew organized and hosted 17 international craft tours where people not only looked at craft work but met craft people – in their homes. “It seems to be something that Americans want to do but a lot of other people don’t understand that attraction at all,” Drew says. “They don’t particularly care if this potter has three kids who all play musical instruments or they’re just cuter than hell. They just want to get in that guy’s studio, buy some stuff and go. People like myself and a lot of the people that I took on those craft tours, we wanted to spend the day with the potter and meet his wife and see what his house was like and check out their neighborhood and have a meal with them. And we often succeeded in doing something like. It was my love of anthropology pasted into craft.”
Country Workshops shut down for good in 2017.
“During a lot of years Country Workshops, particularly, was a struggle but because of the people we were dealing with it was a pleasure,” Drew says. “A really good ride. And we survived. We did five years longer than I had ever thought and we were able to put together enough savings so that we’re able to live out here and not worry much. Instead we worry about the country and the world.”
A Love of Learning – And Sculpture
Today a typical day for Drew starts with a shower then reading, first some news and then 20 to 30 minutes of something more serious. “I’ve become much more interested in what I sometimes think of as getting the education I should have been paying attention to in high school and college,” he says. “I’ve been doing some, not heavy-duty, but definitely serious reading the last 10 years – philosophy and various things to do with the arts and history and thinking and stuff like that. I’m liking that a whole lot.”
Next comes exercise, something he’s been doing for years but given some recent health setbacks he’s now more focused.
“I make my own breakfast,” he says. “Then I take a walk, which is something that Louise has been encouraging forever but is more important now that the cardiologist has prescribed it.” He typically walks around their property for an hour, including down to the mailbox and back, which is two miles.
“Then I usually fool around for a while and we have lunch,” he says. “And then I try to do some outdoor work on something and usually there’s chores or things that need to be fixed and then before supper I try to get in a couple hours in the shop working on my sculpture projects. I have a hard time working on that stuff until I’ve cleared my mind of what needs to be done around this place which is too big.”
When the weather’s good Drew spends time working with the young forest that’s developing on the edge of their fields – lots of pruning, thinning and weeding. And then there’s always firewood work and work on the driveway and other light farm work.
“I just don’t worry about what I can’t do anymore,” he says. “Louise, she hasn’t made peace yet with the fact that she can’t keep up with getting rid of the bittersweet and the poison ivy. I do what I can, I get help when I can and I don’t let that bother me.”
In the evening he does more reading.
Prior to the pandemic Drew would try to sail one day a week on a nearby lake. He and Louise also enjoyed spending time with their neighbors, and visiting their daughter, son-in-law and grandson in California. Now those visits are FaceTime.
Bhuto Dancer II – Drew recently finished the painting and next will work on the base.
Drew has been spending a lot of time with his “Bhuto Dancer II” (which he talks about in “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now”), a sculpture made from a fallen remnant of a scrub apple tree.
“Right now I’m involved with the real painting on it,” he says. “It’s no longer just flat white and it’s been a really tough one to paint to get things right. I didn’t have an exact vision at all how it’s going to be once painted. I’m getting there, I’m almost there. And then I have some other old pieces of wood that were hollowed out that I’m saving. There are some that are real easy to work on but the one I want to do next is another one that is very unique. It’s a hollow log with dried fungus all over the surface which I’ve stabilized with lots of glue and epoxy. I have a form and what I’m trying to do is work with it to the point where the observer doesn’t think it’s a piece of a tree anymore. It’s an experience that you have visually and tactilely that has actually nothing to do with how it started as a tree except that it can only be thought of as that as it is a tree that grew that way. And that’s that.”
Drew has made many small sculptures, including bowls, and several big outdoor ones.
“My hope for the future is that I get some kind of exposure and success with these things,” he says. “And so far I’ve had absolutely none. And I’m unwilling to try to market myself as an artist. I’m hoping to be discovered.”
‘I Like Life When it’s Good’
When talking about a life philosophy, Drew says he simply tries to be honest and fair.
“Just the golden rule,” he says. “I don’t like to see people get cheated and I don’t want to have anything to do with that kind of thing. And I want to participate as much as I can and try to feel. I like life when it’s good. It’s a struggle. This year, of course, was an extra tough one with two big medical things plus America and Covid. But I’ve done pretty well.”
Drew dealt with both prostate cancer and quadruple bypass surgery this year. His bloodwork has been very promising where the cancer is concerned. Heart health, he says, never ends. Drew’s father died from a heart attack at age 56. And while Drew has lived a pretty heart-healthy lifestyle the last 30 years, he knows he carries those genes.
“A phone conference with my doctor ended with him saying I want you go and get a stress test this afternoon,” Drew says. “I foolishly put it off for a week but I did it. And at the end of the test the evaluating doctor said, ‘I have some bad news for you. You flunked the stress test. The doctor and I want you to go to the hospital right now.’ By the next morning I was getting woken up from four bypasses. So that’s something.”
Living 50 miles from the nearest hospital, Drew says he was very fortunate the doctors ordered him to go to the hospital when they did.
For years Drew says he was involved in organizations trying to change politics in their area, environmental pursuits and peace pursuits.
“I still support those things as much as I can but now I just want to live,” he says.
In the meantime Drew is approaching life with the same anthropologic curiosity he’s had since he was a college student.
Right now he’s reading a 500-page biography of Francisco Goya, the painter. He’s excited to finish “Bhuto Dancer II.” He loves listening to music late at night – mostly jazz, but also some blues and rock-and-roll – often with headphones.
“It’s so easy for me and Louise,” he says. “There’s so many things that we’re interested in that are so fascinating to learn about. Just seeing how plants grow, what goes on. Did you see the popular movie ‘My Teacher the Octopus?’ Our world is just full of that fabulous kind of stuff. I don’t want to get dragged down by the things that are dragging us down.”
You can order “Country Woodcraft: Then & Now” (Lost Art Press) here. “Green Woodworking” and “The Chairmaker’s Workshop” are available from Drew personally, here. Simply include a note with the title(s) you wish to buy, and your mailing address. Payment is accepted via PayPal.
Caleb Rogers lives in a spot that, while enviable at any time, seems especially so in the midst of a pandemic: a cabin of around 500 square feet, close to California’s Joshua Tree National Park. From his desert home he can see just three houses within a space of many miles, and of those three, two are abandoned.
He mentions his surroundings by way of illustrating why, beyond what he calls his addiction to the news, the pandemic has not affected him much. He sees his cat and does his work. Once or twice a week he drives to town to buy food, puts on a mask to go into the store and goes home. Once or twice a month, when making deliveries, he gets a glimpse of how the pandemic is affecting other people. He drives to Los Angeles to deliver a piece and sees the lines at the supermarket, “a line of 40 people waiting to get into Trader Joe’s, wearing their masks, and everyone’s on edge. We just don’t have that here [in Joshua Tree]. We have the wind. That’s the movement we have here. I feel like a tourist when I go into the city and have a peek at the way people are living. And all the shops that are closing! Rodeo Drive! I was in awe of all the boarded-up shop fronts. The city is really taking a hit. People seem to be so divided. Thank goodness I’m still working, I still have jobs. I’m really grateful.”
Born in 1974 on a small horse ranch near Albuquerque, New Mexico, Caleb grew up moving around a lot. His parents separated when he was 4. Because his mother, a writer, has always been “a bit of a gypsy,” Caleb and his sister often found themselves in a new school.
Sometimes they moved far afield. “What I remember about growing up,” he reflects, “was living in England. That was the first time I felt settled, the first time I recall seeing my mother happy where she was.” His mother had taken the family there for a holiday, then stayed four years, from the time Caleb was 10 to age 14. It was the longest time he’d spent living in a single place.
Caleb (right) with his sister and mother, probably at his grandmother’s country house in Chappaqua, New York, circa 1980.
His mother’s love of travel rubbed off on him, and his own love of travel has had a deep influence on his work. By the time Caleb took up woodworking in his early 30s, he’d left junior college and hiked 500 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, moved to Guadalajara and hitchhiked to Guatemala. There he met a young woman from England. Smitten, he followed her back to London and eventually on to the cathedral city of Winchester.
As a practicing Buddhist, Caleb’s girlfriend had a butsudan, or Buddhist altar, in their home. Butsudans come in a variety of forms, from simple raised platforms to elaborately decorated cabinets. Despite its significance to its owner, the cheaply made object puzzled Caleb, who “thought it needed to be replaced….”
“It was more of a personal aesthetic,” he says – an aesthetic informed by the conviction that a piece’s form should express the values or ideals it represents. Inside the altar is a scroll that symbolizes the soul; it’s a focal point for meditation. “But her butsudan was particleboard veneered with walnut!” he explains. “Sweetheart,” he told her, “I get the practice, but please let me build you something better.”
Butsudan in poplar with asanoha (hemp leaf) motif.
“I see it everywhere,” he continues, referring to how cheaply most things today are made. “Part of my drive, to this day, is to strike that balance, to remind people of the importance of living with something that’s beautiful, that’s handmade. That really does drive me to get here to work every morning. I find that the quality of one’s life goes up, the fewer things one has and the more personal those things are. Most people have a lot of stuff; that takes up a lot of space. For myself, I find living with a few things that have been made by hand enriches my life. It makes life easier in so many ways. I don’t seem to need as much, to go out and buy something new. I get so much satisfaction from the things that I do have.”
Inner and outer doors of a tall butsudan in poplar and western red cedar.
But back to that first butsudan. Caleb knew nothing about woodworking when he decided to build it. He simply thought he could make something better. At the time, he was working in a pub; one of his customers was a woodworker. “He saw my doodles for the altar,” Caleb says, “and showed up the next day with a box of hand tools, everything I needed to get going in our spare bedroom. I picked up a pallet – there were always pallets at the back of the pub – and in a few days I was able to finish the butsudan that I had drawn up.” He calls that first piece “relatively crude” but is glad to know it’s still in use.
After Caleb and his girlfriend broke up, he traveled some more. He taught English, music and art in China and wandered through Morocco, France and Spain. In 2012 he got married and moved to Peru with his wife, then back to China for another couple of years. “No matter where I was, however, I was always thinking about building my butsudans. Something about it seemed urgent to me.” So in 2014 Caleb and his wife returned to the United States and he decided to try making a living as a woodworker, specializing in butsudans. “It took a while before I got my first order,” he says, “but fortunately I’ve been working consistently ever since.”
He moved to Joshua Tree in 2017, when he and his wife separated. It was a way “to rehabilitate myself. [Being] somewhere where other people were not” made it a good place “to get my head straight.” He immersed himself in work. His shop is a rented garage about 20 minutes away from his home, also in the desert. The shop has no air conditioning. “It is hot,” he allows. “But I get very focused when I work, and whether it’s hot or cold, it all seems to blur together.”
Business, Wood, Joinery & Tools
Some commissions come through his website. Before the pandemic, he was doing a lot of work for clients in Europe. Now he works for clients in Los Angeles and closer to home, with most jobs coming by word of mouth. A few clients have become patrons, furnishing their homes with his work. Friends see it and place their own orders.
Tansu in pine and alder with chrysanthemum motif.
Every commission starts with a conversation, followed by numerous emails, and sometimes phone calls. He likes to see photos of the clients’ home, to get a feel for the space and their tastes; that helps with deciding on scale, lumber species and finishes. “My favorite commissions are the ones where my client feels they have a genuine problem which they want to solve,” he says. “I love the idea of organizing space, getting something tidied up.”
When first starting out, he worked in domestic woods. Poplar was readily available; for a while he used it almost exclusively, occasionally substituting alder. Recently he has been using oak and sapele, among other species. When teaching classes he uses pine. “I love the knots, the squirrelly nature of it, the smell.”
Freestanding partition with bending kumiko in poplar, alder and washi.
A distinguishing feature of Caleb’s work is the absence of nails and screws. “I like the challenge of designing things knowing that all the connections have to be in wood,” he says. When he does use hardware, as he did for a recent shoe cabinet, he prefers it to be traditional Japanese stuff. (One source is Hida Tool of Berkeley.) And all of his pieces are knockdown, built with traditional joinery, which he finds endlessly rewarding. “You take the classic mortise and tenon,” he suggests by way of example. “There are so many variations. One joint I use a lot is the dovetail that’s locked into place with either a through-tenon or a blind tenon. It’s very easy to put together, very easy to take apart. It seems to be very strong.” Furniture that can be broken down to flat parts has helped him get commissions from clients beyond Southern California. “At first [clients are] daunted, but some email me saying ‘That was so enjoyable!’”
An example of how Caleb uses a tenoned member with a wide shoulder to lock a sliding dovetail in place for a knockdown piece. Once the tenon is fully home, its rail tied into a larger puzzle of interconnected parts, it prevents the dovetail from being pulled out.
Detail of kumiko.
Caleb is self-taught. Returning to the woodworker who was his customer at the pub in England, he says, “We never built anything together. He just gave me some tools and magazines. Everything I’ve learned is something I’ve figured out – looking at furniture and wondering how it’s put together, how it could work. The tansu, for me, was always such a source of mystery: ‘How do you get a corner to go together like that?’ My love of joinery is a love of problem solving. I like joinery to be hidden as much as possible, a mystery, so you don’t see how the cabinet’s put together. It’s a personal thing. I tend to revisit the same joints over and over, to build the same forms, mostly Japanese-style tansus and butsudans.”
Tall entryway cabinet in alder and birch.
Caleb still has the three Sheffield steel chisels he started out with, gifts from that customer at the pub. He has added a few power tools, such as a contractor-grade table saw for ripping; as a custom woodworker who lives primarily on commissions, he has to respect the time constraints imposed by sometimes-modest budgets. Select power tools help him find the balance between a client’s budget and the time he can afford to invest. Even so, he estimates about 80 percent of his work is done by hand, with Japanese handplanes (known as kannas), Japanese chisels and Japanese saws. “I love being able to cut on the pull stroke. All Japanese tools are designed to be used on the pull stroke, drawing the work in toward yourself, using your body as a clamp or a stop. It feels more intimate somehow,” he says. He appreciates the mobility granted by reliance on so few tools and attributes this preference for minimalism to his childhood – “a few tools in a box, get to a new place, unpack and get to work.”
In addition to commissioned work, Caleb teaches classes at his cabin. In his tansu-building class, students work outdoors, exclusively with hand tools, to build a complete cabinet in one week. “The idea behind it was to get people involved in woodworking,” he says. “People who have an interest in it but felt ‘I don’t have the space for it, I don’t have the tools.’” The class is designed to show them how much they can do with an improvised workshop, outdoors. Most students rent an Airbnb in Joshua Tree.
“One thing I enjoy about doing the classes when we’re outdoors and only using hand tools is moving with the rhythms of the day and the weather, and being quiet,” he says. “The name of my business is Esho Funi Butsudans. It’s the idea of the oneness of self and environment, of how inseparable the two are. When you’re working with your hands and building a piece of furniture, that line disappears. This thing I’m making is very much me. In building it, working with the wood, considering where the knots are, and how the wood may behave five years from now, it bleeds over into me. The two things are just the same. When the piece is finished, it has its own personality, its own character. To me that is…I can’t think of anything, short of having children. Sharing myself. Growing. It’s a therapeutic thing to do, to build something with your hands and return to it every day.”
Lighting
One of my favorite Caleb Rogers creations is not cabinet or an altar, but a light fixture. Floating in the dark, its undulating organic form calling a jellyfish to mind, it’s a delicate confection in tissue-covered reed.
“I’ve always loved lighting, playing around with light. My mother designed sets for the theater for a time. She was brilliant at creating a mood using light.” He describes the process of making these lights: “I start bending the reeds and hot gluing [them] here and there. And then I’ll take tissue paper and white glue and cover the whole thing with tissue paper and put a light in it, and gradually layer that tissue paper until the quality of that light coming through is just right.”
One light he made for a client in Los Angeles was so large that he had to cut it in half to get it in his Nissan Sentra for delivery. To get a feel for the space and the kind of light he wanted to design, he’d spent a night on the sofa at his client’s house, staring up at the space in the ceiling where the client had said he wanted the lamp to be. It took Caleb six hours to stitch the light back together so that it looked just right.
He tries to work quickly and prolifically, to keep his work affordable and the commissions coming in. “Before I start a piece, I build it in my head, maybe 100 times, before I pick up a tool, so that when I do start on a project, I know what I’m doing. I don’t take breaks; I don’t eat lunch.”
Asked how he prices his work, Caleb responds with a reflective question: “How do you price something? What are you willing to sacrifice in your life so you can do this [kind of work]? I keep my bills as low as possible. I don’t have any debt, I don’t have credit cards. I want to be able to do my work and keep my prices reasonable. I try not to think about what, on an hourly basis, I’m making. At first I was making butsudans for whatever someone could pay, just so I could keep working and put the photos on my website.” That generated more work. “I’ve been able to do this as my sole source of income for going on five years. So I’m very fortunate. I don’t have fixed prices. It has a lot to do with the client, what they can afford. I want to build the thing I have in my head and I don’t want to compromise just because I might have to work a little harder or a little longer for a little less money.”
He’s grateful to have a few clients he considers patrons, who commission dozens of pieces for their homes. “For somebody like me, it makes all the difference in the world. If you have money out there, there’s really nothing better you can do than supporting an artist you like.”
As a young child, David Finck, author of “Making & Mastering Wood Planes,” took ceramics classes through Pittsburgh’s parks and recreation department and loved it. At UC Berkeley he discovered a pot shop that was open to anybody to use. And so, for a second time in his life, he started to get really into ceramics. During his junior year David was regularly showing up to class spattered in mud and clay. A woman sitting next to him noticed, as she was also interested in ceramics. She told him about some summer workshops she had taken in Mendocino, and how she discovered she liked making the carved wooden implements and tools more so than the ceramics. While in Mendocino she inquired about a woodworking school and was told one had recently started up, in Fort Bragg, run by a guy named James Krenov.
David was intrigued. He recognized Krenov’s name from his father’s bookshelves. And because David was a California resident and the school was run through a community college, the program was essentially free.
“Now my plan at that point was to get through one last year at Berkeley and then go back to West Virginia and hang out in the woods with my folks and make guitars,” David says.
But now his head was spinning. Krenov was a well-known woodworker and David knew he’d be better off learning some new woodworking skills. It never occurred to him at the time to go to guitar-making school. But even if it had, it wouldn’t have been practical. Few existed, and the ones that did were expensive. So David bummed a car and drove up to Krenov’s school.
“I was swept up in what was happening,” he says. “There was so much amazing work being built. I hung out for a full day and talked to people. The atmosphere there was really good. There was a lot of energy and Krenov was there all the time and I just remember feeling so magnetically drawn to the whole atmosphere. I was blown away by the quality of the students’ work. But at that point I just had one kind of half-assed guitar that I made on the seat of my pants, so I had no idea how I was going to get into that school.”
Turns out Krenov took the community college part seriously and always kept a few spaces open for someone who was retired and someone who was young and promising.
“And then the other 20 spots were going to people who were, you know, amazing,” David says. “Krenov had created this pent-up demand for his teaching through his books so you had people that were steeped in his writing who had been hard at it for 10, 15, 20 years. People would come from all over the world to study with him. So I was very anxious to go to school there.”
David put together a portfolio. “It was one photograph of my crummy guitar sitting on rumpled blankets on my bed,” he says. “And I wrote a pretty maudlin letter about why I should get in.”
David visited a second time and spoke with Krenov. This time, he brought his guitar and showed it to Krenov in the parking lot.
“That turned out to be lucky because he had a soft spot for guitar making,” David says.
David was placed on the waitlist, but pretty quickly got a spot. “I was over the moon,” he says.
Back in West Virginia, in between Berkeley and Krenov’s school, David panicked. “I remember thinking, Oh my god. I don’t know anything about furniture making. I’ve never cut a dovetail in my life.”
But, it turns out, the structure of the class was good. After spending four to six weeks on fundamentals, students were given the freedom to continue with fundamentals or move on to more sophisticated projects. David thrived. And at the end of the first year, he wanted to stay.
Two pieces David made as a first-year student at James Krenov’s school, displayed at a show held in San Francisco in 1985.
“I was very lucky to come for another year,” he says. “That was an incredibly talented class and there ended up being six people that wanted to stay – and at that point they had never taken more than four. Everyone is just so real and good-hearted there. They couldn’t be bureaucratic about it. They had to bring us all in and we were having a roundtable and discussing, and I remember sitting there and talking with my bench mate who had come from north of the Arctic circle. And we were like, ‘Oh, Dave, you should be the one’ (his name was David, too) and he was like, ‘no, Dave, you should’ and finally they were like, ‘Oh, we’ll just keep everybody.’ It was really sweet. But of course that meant two other students couldn’t come for their first year. But at any rate, it was such a great class. It was very much a highlight of my life – being exposed to a lot of incredibly unique people and Krenov himself and associate teachers.”
During his second year there, David also met his wife, Marie Hoepfl.
Marie Hoepfl and James Krenov
“She was a student in the class and I could gaze longingly at her while at the workbenches,” he says, laughing. “We hung out and got together pretty quickly.”
At the end of David’s second year he moved back to West Virginia and Marie began her second year at Krenov’s school. They ended up spending that year apart, then Marie moved to West Virginia to be with David.
Galleries & Shows
Marie was a middle-school shop teacher at the time, and one of her motivations in going to Krenov’s school was to be a better woodworking teacher. After moving to West Virginia she taught shop for several years across the river, in a rural high school in Woodsfield, Ohio. But as the population dwindled and students moved away, the woodworking program was shut down. Marie took that opportunity to go to graduate school, get her doctorate and eventually provide teacher training in technology education.
While Marie was teaching and in school, David worked as a speculative woodworker (you can view examples of his work here). Krenov had set him up with a gallery in Long Island.
“It was pretty exclusive and an awesome place to have represent you at that time,” David says. “But instinctively, I don’t have a great flair for design. I think to make it as a speculative woodworker you’ve got to have so many things lined up in your alley and that was probably my major weakness. So I was batting like 500 with speculative gallery sales, which ain’t good enough. You’re spending half your time not getting paid and after three years I was getting kind of desperate.”
David’s dad, Henry Finck, in the shop they built together. This photo was taken years after David left home, but reflects the aesthetic.
David shared a shop with his dad, and for a while David and Marie were living in the woods on David’s parents’ property in a 10’ x 25’ garage-type structure lined with books on both sides, with a woodstove. They lived there for about five months then moved to New Martinsville, West Virginia, living halfway between Woodsfield, Ohio, where Marie taught, and the shop David shared with his dad. Once Marie lost her job and started grad school in Morgantown, West Virginia, they rented a house two miles away from David’s parents’ place, where David lived during the week, and they rented an apartment in Morgantown, where Marie lived during the week. For four or five years they made this living arrangement work, coming together on the weekends.
One of David’s lanterns.
Needing to find other outlets to sell his work, David started exhibiting at American Craft Council shows, selling what wasn’t selling in the galleries, and in the process earning himself some nice commissions. He also developed a wholesale item, a limited production run of an Asian-looking lantern – a good bread-and-butter item, he says. He was becoming more well-known, with more commissions coming from around the state, including a substantial commission to design and build seven major pieces for a Roman Catholic church undergoing renovations in Parkersburg, West Virginia. The job, which included an altar, presider’s chair, lectern and more, took more than 18 months to complete.
Diane Lane held this box, which David made, in the movie “Nights in Rodanthe.”
By this time Marie had finished her doctorate and was job hunting. Their first daughter, Ledah, was born. Marie found a job in Pittsburg, Kansas, and in 1994, when Ledah was three months old, the newly made family of three moved.
Writing ‘Making & Mastering Wood Planes’ While Parenting
Marie loved her new job and David became a stay-at-home dad. Marie would get home from work fairly early and the two would switch. Marie would watch Ledah while David worked in his basement shop.
This continued for three years, during which Willa, their second daughter, was born in 1996. But Kansas did not feel like home. David and Marie missed the mountains. Marie got a job at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and they moved back east.
Now with two kids in tow, David was struggling to keep his hand in the craft while also caring for a baby and a toddler. By now he had been teaching the Krenov approach to woodworking in adult education classes at colleges and through craft centers for 11 years. He had gained a lot of experience teaching planemaking, specifically. It was always a popular course and folks were encouraging him to do a more in-depth study of the topic.
“So I just hatched a plan to basically give my weekend workshop in book form with as much detail as I could muster. Whenever the kids were napping or being quiet that was something I could do in the basement shop,” he says. I think it took a better part of a year to do the writing and all the documentation and photography and sketches, and then I ran through five different proof readings with what I call my egghead woodworker friends, just educated people that had either all gone through the Krenov program or were just woodworkers and highly educated. So I got a lot of great feedback from them as well and distilled all that.”
Sterling bought the book. He sent it and, outside of style, his editor had one edit regarding a comma that turned out to be a misinterpretation.
“It was pretty amazing,” David says. “It was already very well vetted when it went off. They took care of it for seven or eight years. And then they finally decided that everyone who wanted to make a wooden plane in the world had done that and their sales were declining so they just gave it back to me.”
David started getting emails from people asking how they could get the book and when was it going to go back in print. Because he had all the computer files, layout, artwork – everything – David decided to self-publish, working directly with a printer in Ashland, Ohio.
“And that worked well for years until I got tired of it,” he says. “Just dealing with the printer and then dealing with boxes and boxes of books and stuff around, and then just filling orders kind of on a daily basis – it’s not primarily where I wanted to be spending my time. So when the final printing dwindled down it struck me that Lost Art Press might be interested in it. I mean, after all, Chris provided the blurb for the back cover. And he showed no hesitation. It was just really wonderful. And I really appreciate the hardcover version, and the nicer-quality aspects of the book as well.”
The Suzuki Method & The Forget-Me-Nots
During this time David was still woodworking in Krenov’s spirit, as he describes it, and building about one guitar a year. Once or twice a year he’d have a booth at a show. He kept teaching, eventually hosting classes at his home shop, which meant more pay and no travel.
Once he finished “Making & Mastering Wood Planes,” David began searching for things to do with his daughters, now 2 and 4. He found a woman, Nan Stricklen, who taught Suzuki violin lessons and so they started taking lessons, along with a 3-year-old friend, on a weekly basis. Ms. Nan did a marvelous job with the younger kids and had a total knack of making it fun while getting information across, David says.
David’s daughters learned to play violin through the Suzuki method.
“I really did enjoy working with them on stuff and the Suzuki violin philosophy encourages that quite a bit where the parent acts as a teacher, especially in the younger stages,” David says. “So it was very much just quality time together, playing with the instrument and trying to get across the concepts the teacher was working on. And we were just consistent. We never pushed it hard or anything like that, but we got our 10 or 15 minutes in most every day for years.”
Four or five years in, David began introducing the girls to regional folk music, “just kind of the heart of Appalachia Old-Time music,” he says. “There was just music everywhere, especially at all the folk festivals all throughout the summer. So they had a lot of exposure to that, especially when they were little. And then, somehow or another, before I knew it we had a family band.” David backed up his daughters and their friend on his guitar. The Forget-Me-Nots played Celtic music throughout western North Carolina.
The Forget-Me-Nots perform in North Carolina.
“I never had a performing gene and this was definitely not a case of stage parents, but rather we’d just play in the park and people would see us and the next thing you know we’re giving a little concert in the park, and then somebody asks and before you know it we were doing 30 or 40 gigs every summer. These girls had a full-fledged band.”
The girls continued to play through middle and high school, with both daughters attending University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) their senior year – a pivotal time for both of them.
“All the way through they were kind of standouts for music for what they did, but as far as classical music goes, which is their primary focus, it’s like, OK, you’re in the top 1 percent – that’s wonderful, but that doesn’t get you a job. You’ve got to be in the top .001 percent to win an audition and be in a symphony, and be even better than that to be a soloist. But that takes the tiger mom or dad and long hours of practice, and none of us were willing to do that. But when they got down to UNCSA, and really perceived all that in a visceral way, they made that decision on their own. That was the year that both of them started practicing three to four, five to six hours a day. They just skyrocketed. And they had great teachers.”
David’s First Violin
In 2011, David’s dad passed away. A year later, Ledah, still in high school, won a collegiate violin competition, giving her the use of a really fine, contemporary-made instrument on loan for a couple years. Now those years were ending and Ledah needed another good instrument.
“I didn’t have the arrogance or naivety to think that my first violin would fit the bill because it’s just an incredibly sophisticated craft in so many various ways,” David says. “But it was just something I wanted to do at that time and see what happened. My dad having passed, and having access to all the information he had put together, mostly in books and clippings, and all the wood and tools, it just seemed like kind of a neat memorial for him.”
David’s dad, by the way, finished that first guitar and had even begun working on his viola da gamba.
“I never really got a clear answer on why he didn’t complete that instrument other than the fact that he was into a million different things on their homestead. And then his health deteriorated and it was never completed. So my memorial to him was going to be to finish that instrument, and then make a violin, maybe for each girl. We were very close, and it was just kind of an extended grieving period and it just felt right to do that. But my wife, who’s very practical, gave me one of her looks and told me to just skip the gamba and go straight to the violin. Because ‘Who knows?’ she said. ‘You might get lucky.’”
So David built a violin.
“It was really remarkable,” he says. “It was kind of like the same experience I had with the guitar but here it was, more than 20 years later, and I had a much better understanding of woodworking but also the kind of energy and passion that the guitar building ignited within me to begin with. I was just really feeling that with this first foray into violin building.”
David’s first violin for his oldest daughter, Ledah. He named this violin “Gelibt” (beloved) and his second violin, which he made for his daughter Willa, “Neshomeh” (soul). Both names are in honor of his father.
At the time, Ledah was studying at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, still using the violin she had won. She had won another competition to be a soloist with the Durham Symphony, and David had just finished his violin. David and Marie traveled to Durham to show it to Ledah, to see if she liked it.
“We went into a big room and she tried it,” he says. “At first she played her other one and then she picked up mine and played it. And we’re just gasping in disbelief at each other because the sound coming out of that violin was un-freaking-believable! Oh, it was just like my heart stopped. And just to see her play so beautifully. It was just immediately evident this was a special-sounding instrument. So she had no hesitation to give the other one back and a week later she was playing my violin as a soloist with the orchestra. It was just a phenomenal way to get introduced to the craft. And truly inspirational for me and just so wonderful on so many levels.”
Of course, having another daughter dedicated to violin playing meant that David had to try his hand at violin making again. He finished his second violin a couple months later.
“Interestingly, Willa’s violin didn’t have the same immediate reception,” David says. “Ledah had no hesitation, she just loved every aspect of it. And I don’t think of Ledah as a capricious person. Willa, she’s a studied person. And, of course, she’s only 15 or 16 at the time. She took it and said, ‘Yeah, I like it. I’ll try it for a couple days.’ And two or three days later, just out of the blue she came to me beaming and says, ‘I love it.’ So that suited her just fine, too. And within that year she also started winning competitions, really significant ones. She had a great run of performances, auditions for these concerto competitions. So it was all the encouragement I needed to drop furniture and dive on in to violin making.”
That was 8 years ago, and violin and viola making is all David has done since.
“I know a lot more now and I’m more confused than ever,” he says, laughing. “It’s such an expansive field and there are so many different ways to do things and the acoustics are this crazy thing and then there’s the finishing and it’s just endlessly absorbing for me.”
And while it’s one thing to please your daughters – even when they’re serious musicians and critics – it’s an entirely different thing for a stranger to plunk down a big chunk of change and walk away with one of your instruments, David says. And yet, that’s exactly what musicians are doing. And they’re thrilled.
The pandemic, as it has for many craftspeople, has put a damper on sales. Folks are no longer coming by David’s shop to try his violins, and direct marketing at schools and with symphony players isn’t happening. So David has gotten creative, offering home trials, sanitizing instruments before shipping them out and giving them rest periods upon their return and before shipping them out again. He’s also donating 10 percent of sales to musicians’ charities for the duration of the pandemic.
Layers of Understanding
These days David is in his home shop whenever he’s not having dinner with his wife or tending to other chores. The shop is lovely, a basement walk-out with plenty of windows, and a short commute.
David’s home shop.
“One thing about violin making, there are certain tasks, especially shaping, doing the final carving, shaping the back and top and even the scroll, when it really helps to have a completely darkened shop and then just a single harsh light to really highlight the shadows. And I find, as my eyes are getting older, it’s just harder and harder to see those contrasts that really tell you how good a job you’ve done shaping. So it’s definitely a task I like to do late at night.”
David says probably half the time both he and Marie are working on Saturdays and Sundays. “But, at least in my case, it never really feels like work,” he says. “I just feel so incredibly lucky, incredibly lucky but it’s an obsession I guess, whether it’s magnificent or miserable, I don’t know. But it definitely works for me and just to have something that keeps drawing you in and keeps revealing different layers of understanding. And I feel like I’m just kind of scratching the surface at this point. A lot of the technical stuff I’m pretty comfortable with though violin making is pretty distinctive from other types of woodworking. I’m definitely still picking things up there, kind of putting it all together acoustically. Finishes are a challenge for me.”
David says he was definitely in the right vein as a Krenov-influenced woodworker because the Krenov finishing philosophy is very minimal.
“It’s never been a strong suit of mine so that suited me well,” he says. “But that is definitely not the case when it comes to violin finishing. It can be a very complicated process to end up with something both very beautiful and with the right appearance to it, and also acoustically appropriate to the instrument as well. So there’s a lot of artistic instinct to really pull it off beautifully. And that’s a challenge for me. It’s definitely been an area I’ve put a lot of effort into but still see that I’ve got a long way to go. So if things will allow me to do so, I definitely will continue pushing that area especially hard.”
David talks a lot about luck, and areas he needs to improve.
“I don’t know what it is. I think I just have a feel for wood through long exposure maybe and the guitar influence, but I just had really, really good luck with the acoustic side of the instruments.”
But any outsider looking in would not describe David’s success as the result of luck. Instead, they would point to the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours he has spent in his shop, his dedication – near obsession – with the craft, and an artistic instinct he sometimes claims to not have, but clearly does.
Some proof: Today, Willa, 24, and Ledah, 26, both professional violinists, prefer his violins over any others.
David and his family, 2014
A 2018 graduate of Eastman School of Music, Willa joined the first violin section of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra during her junior year in 2017. In addition to playing with RPO, she is the founding member of Copper Hill, a Rochester folk-art band, and in November 2019 she released a solo album called “Ask Me Why” with jazz pianist Sterling Cozza and jazz trumpet player Nathan Kay.
Ledah recently earned her master’s degree in violin performance from The Peabody Conservatory and is currently a member of the Mannes School of Music’s Graduate String Quartet in Residence, Bergamot Quartet, in New York City. She is also a member of the jazz quintet Atlantic Extraction, led by Nick Dunston, and earspace ensemble.
For David, the best compliment is to overhear one of his daughters say, “My dad made it,” when another musician asks about their violin.
Earned Praise
“I’m not an overly confident person, especially in something that has such a grand tradition,” David says. “My goal is simply to make really high-quality instruments for classical players.”
David’s home shop is out in the woods in the mountains of North Carolina – not a lot of high-end players waltz in and out every day. In addition, not having much contact with other makers makes it sometimes difficult for David to figure out where to position himself. But to understand the quality of work, one just needs to listen.
A few years ago, David attended workshops presented by The Violin Society of America at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio. The workshops, quite famous in the violin-making world, David says, serve as a way to get excellent instruction and also “kind of just be with your people.” People come from all over the world to attend. One of the workshops was on acoustics.
“Some makers are interested in that but a lot are not,” he says. “They just kind of go with shop practices that are handed down and end up building fine violins but they don’t necessarily need to know the frequencies that something is vibrating at.”
David brings up a blind study that was done pitting instruments by Stradivari, Guarneri and other famous names against more contemporary ones. The results showed that the contemporary instruments were, actually, slightly favored. The study appeared in a peer-reviewed journal on acoustics and received some flak for its design. So two years later the study was repeated, this time in a more rigorous manner. The results were the same – well-known and talented players and listeners slightly preferred the contemporary instruments.
Back to the workshop: For educational purposes they did double-blind listening tests with musicians and luthiers serving as judges. Players wore dark welding glasses and played behind a screen so the audience couldn’t see what they were playing. In the mix were violins from makers like David, who make a handful a year, and violins from world-famous luthiers.
“There were maybe 30 people in the room and when the violinist played this one opening everybody kind of gasped,” David says. “This was a stand-out sound.”
What David didn’t know was that the violinist was playing his violin.
“I was in a state of shock, as were most of the people there,” he says. “It really was just an incredible shot in the arm. A boost, to say, you’re doing alright.”
David says he doesn’t know why he’s having this luck, thinking maybe it’s a combination of knowing how to work with wood, a long association with it and just really caring about it. Whatever it is, “it’s producing some good results,” he says.
Now 59, David says he never wants to retire. “I just want to do this until I drop over,” he says. Ever since he began woodworking at Krenov’s school, David says he feels like he skipped the work part and just went straight to retirement, spending his life doing what he wants to do with his hours. He thinks back to when he strayed from environmental science, choosing a path of woodworking instead. He credits being able to string woodworking along for all these years in large part, he says, “to my ever-patient and supportive wife. We make a really good team. She understands my motivations having been through that experience herself. So we definitely support each other.”
In the March 2019 issue of Fine Woodworking, David wrote a From the Bench column titled “The Family Violin.” It includes a short video filled with wonderful old photos called “My Father’s Dream.” In the column, David writes: “My personal story is about endings and beginnings, father, son, and daughters, completing one circle and starting another.” And, as David recently discovered reading his grandmother’s memoir, those circles go generations deep and will continue generations on, an interconnectedness much like the beginning and ending of a song.
