Good Morning Hank, it's Friday.

So, our tour ended last night in Los Angeles. Almost every night for the last month I've stood at the side of the stage during your set and watched you play because I love your music and I love watching you perform it and also because it brings back memories.

I think about the first time I saw you play in front of a crowd, 45 people in Grand Rapids, Michigan almost a decade ago now. Or I think about other nights: Edenborough, the first VidCon or 8/8/08 in Chicago when Harry Potter fans were singing your song so loudly, I could barely hear your voice over theirs. And I think about how later that night in 2008 we hung out with Amy Krous Rosenthal, my friend who died earlier this year.

Here's an Amy story I've been telling on tour: so back in 2005, Amy, who was a children's book writer and memoirist and professional Seeker of wonder in the world invited me to one of her readings and at that time I was in one of my periods of intense unwellness. I felt like I was losing my whole self to intrusive thoughts spirals. But this particular episode was accompanied by a chest-crushing depression.

I found nothing enjoyable, I struggled to get out of bed, the usual. It was at once absolutely excruciating and completely boring. Susan Sontag wrote that "Depression is melancholy minus it's charms".

Somehow I managed to get to the event but I wasn't having much fun at it because I was alone and I was stuck with these invasive thoughts I couldn't stop having and also Amy kept wanting people to participate in what she was doing and I hate audience participation. It just makes me very nervous because 1) sometimes the audience doesn't deliver and also 2) I have paid for the show to be entertained not to be part of the entertainment. So anyway, I was just in a terrible mood and then seemingly out of nowhere Amy started talking about how back in World War I all of these British soldiers who didn't understand why they were being asked to fight and die for tiny patches of ground far from their home started singing a song to the tune of that New Year's Eve song "Auld Lang Syne".

They would sing: "we're here because we're here because we're here because we're here". It was this recursive lament and acknowledgment that there was no "Why?", that life in the trenches was meaninglessness all the way down. But that night in 2005, Amy completely transformed that song for me without ever changing the words.

Amy made me understand that we were here, meaning that we were together. And even when we felt alone we weren't really because we were part of this vast and deeply interconnected Us. And also that we were here, even if only for a little while.

And maybe we'll never know why we are here but we can still proclaim and hope that we are here. That night Amy made me understand that hope is not foolish or idealistic or misguided. Hope is true.

And I really believe that. I really believe that hope is the correct response to the arc of history. Hank, some years are longer than others and 2017 has been a long one for me.

Its been good and bad and difficult and amazing and joyful and terrifying and very long. But we're here. We are here.

Hank, I'll see you on Monday.

J: And now um Hank? Will you?

H: Yeah, I am extremely scared. Is there somebody that has a laptop with an internet connection? [Sings]: "I am getting kinda tired of this. Pre-publication media blitz. You've got all of muggle kind under your spell. Don't you know the whole world has already gone and reserved a copy at Amazon? How many more books could you sell? Now give me my book or go to hell. 'cause I need Harry Potter like a Grindylow needs water and as Saturday approaches my need grows. (This is the craziest (?) thing that's ever happened in my life.) Accio Deathly Hallows. Incendio book sells embargo It'll be like Phoenix tears on a broken nose. Oh, Accio Deathly Hallows.