The Wort Hotel, in Jackson, Wyoming, was the first place I began to play music and actually get paid for doing it. Years before, John Fahey and Leo Kottke had sat together on the same stage, under the same lights, playing music that would shape decades of guitarists. Playing there felt like sleeping with a textbook under your pillow, hoping to absorb something through osmosis.

That was in 1990, and after five years of living out of my van and playing shows in the western US and Canada...