Are We There Yet?

Marking multiple milestones, a new live album recorded in Paris with my dad, 20 years in NYC, the start of a tour, & a podcast episode with Jorge Drexler. This is what history feels like.

There’s a poem, written by Rabbi Alvin Fine in the 1940s, that I grew up reading each year at the small, alternative High Holiday services led by Hannah Rosenthal in Madison, Wisconsin. I wrote about the services last year.

The poem begins:

Birth is a beginning
And death a destination,
But life is a journey.
A going – a growing
From stage to stage,
From childhood to maturity
And youth to age

I am comforted by those words. They affirm my own tendency to mark time through anniversaries, milestones, and personal history, and to try to remember what happened along the way. How many years has it been? How old would I have been when…?

35 years ago, I asked my mother to read the poem at my Bar Mitzvah, and to this day it’s a quiet point of connection between us, though I don’t think we’ve ever talked about it.

I know that memory plays tricks on us. Even something you could swear happened a certain way might be remembered completely differently by someone else who was there. And every time a memory is revisited, it is updated with the conditions of the present moment. Over time, our recollections fade, becoming like distant lights seen from across a wide river. You can paddle and paddle towards it, but you never quite reach the light.

But maybe it’s not about reaching the other side of the river. Maybe it’s about the paddling. About the journey. Or maybe it’s about the story—even if the story isn’t entirely true. Because the stories we tell ourselves are who we are. The truth isn’t always in the details; it’s in the impulse to keep telling and retelling who we’ve been, and who we hope to be.

This idea—of narrative as the engine of existence—is something I inherited from my father. He often says, “We worship a story.”

He has two core beliefs about history:

1. “This is what history feels like”—meaning history isn’t just what happened then, it’s what’s happening now.

2. “Let history decide”—we can’t always know in the moment what will turn out to be significant. That’s for history to judge.

Still, I find myself wondering sometimes, are we there yet?

Last year, my dad and I recorded two concerts at the Sunside in Paris—a club we’ve played every year since 1999 (except for 2020, for obvious reasons). So, 2024 marked a quarter century playing on that cramped stage on Rue des Lombards in Chatelet. A milestone, if ever there was one. We decided to document it.

Today, that recording is being released as the live album Ben Sidran’s Are We There Yet (Live at the Sunside). In his liner notes, Ben writes: “Are We There Yet  is what history felt like on those nights at the Sunside in Paris in June, 2024, when the room was filled with swing, groove and the discussion of ideas like existentialism, hard times, and good feelings.  Let history decide.” 

Straight out of the Ben Sidran handbook.

From innocence to awareness
And ignorance to knowing,
From foolishness to discretion
And then, perhaps, to wisdom.

This week also marks another milestone: twenty years ago today, my then-girlfriend Amanda and I packed up a Penske moving van in Madison, Wisconsin and drove to New York City. We had no idea what we were hoping for. I thought maybe we’d stay a year or two—just a little adventure. (Amanda is not convinced it was May 16. But I maintain that the details do not matter! It is the story that endures.)

With Amanda in our Penske van on the eve of our departure from Wisconsin. May 16, 2005

Two decades later, Amanda is no longer my girlfriend. She’s my wife, she’s the mother of our 14-year-old daughter—a lifelong Brooklyn kid— and we are still on the adventure.

That move came just a couple of months after the Oscar win for “Al otro lado del río,” which I co-produced with the song’s composer, Jorge Drexler. I wrote about that moment earlier this year. The song, which translates to “on the other side of the river”, is about hope and a belief that there is a light across the river to which we must row. 

Today I’m also publishing a new episode of The Third Story podcast, featuring interviews with Jorge, Ben, Amanda, and others who were part of that magical, improbable story and its aftermath.

(A version of this podcast was briefly published in March and then removed for technical reasons. It’s back up today, updated and repaired.)

But even in retelling the story, memory plays tricks—Jorge and I recall the night of the Oscars differently, highlighting a key theme of The Third Story: within every version of events, the truth always lies in the spaces between.

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We’ve built a community here in Brooklyn that runs deep. And yet, I often still feel like I’m on the road to somewhere, still asking: Are we there yet?

That may be in part because of all the traveling - the ongoing pilgrimage, quite literally from stage to stage. 

Take, for example, the upcoming tour with Ben in support of his new album, which begins this weekend at Mezzrow in New York. Then we head to Europe for three weeks, including our annual seven-night run at Café Central in Madrid, where we’ve played hundreds of concerts since 1998. (A milestone first commemorated on our 2007 live album Cien Noches.)

Last year, I discovered the Open Folk series in Madrid and played one of my favorite shows ever—entirely acoustic. This year I’m doing it again: the second annual Open Folk Presents Leo Sidran & Friends show on June 2 at Latroupe Prado - the birth of a new tradition.

From offense to forgiveness,
From loneliness to love,
From joy to gratitude,
From pain to compassion,
And grief to understanding

Recently, I got the call to perform with my band at Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City series on June 20. And there was a moment, just a flicker of light, when I wondered: Does this mean I’ve made it in New York?

From defeat to defeat to defeat –
Until, looking backward or ahead,
We see that victory lies
Not at some high place along the way,
But in having made the journey,
stage by stage,
A sacred pilgrimage.

Ultimately I think we’re never really there yet and that there is just a story we tell ourselves to keep moving forward—toward the next song, the next show, the next city, the next version of ourselves.

But it’s worth taking a moment every now and then to recognize how far we've come, to look in the mirror and think: “Tonight Someone Is Me”.

Coincidentally, “Tonight Someone Is Me” is also the name of the first single - released last month - from the Leo & Leo album, recorded in Spain with my friend, Spanish singer/actress Leonor Watling. The full album will be released at the end of the summer, with some advanced singles like this one to whet the appetite.

May the stories continue. May the music carry us. And may the journey—this sacred, stumbling, swinging, searching journey from stage to stage —continue.

Birth is a beginning
And death a destination,
But life is a journey,
A sacred pilgrimage –
Made stage by stage –
To life everlasting.

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