By Michael Gaither

Chuck Brodsky is widely known as a songwriter’s songwriter and a heck of a storyteller. (Fun fact: How many storytelling songwriters have nine songs in the Baseball Hall of Fame?)

Lately, Brodsky has quite a story to tell. This Friday, he returns to The Ugly Mug Café in Soquel for his annual run of California shows.

In addition to an evening full of great story tunes, the Ashville, North Carolina, resident — he’s lived there for three decades — is likely to reflect on one particular event: being home last fall when Hurricane Helene hit.

I caught up with Brodsky on the phone recently: “The devastation is just beyond what you’d believe. If I pull out of my driveway, in the first two miles I’ll probably see 10,000 trees that are down alongside the road. And lots of cut up trees that are just waiting for the day that they’ll get picked up. Roads are still out. We still can’t get to certain parts of town. It’s just crazy.

“But right from the start,” he adds, “anybody who had a chainsaw was out trying clear trees that were blocking roads or pulling them off of houses. FEMA got here pretty quickly. And lots and lots and lots of work started happening immediately with emergency stations set up for water and food and such.”

Brodsky’s house is built in a hillside. “The house is OK,” he says, “but the hill under it collapsed right up to the support posts for my deck. Three or four inches from a steep drop.” He is raising funds through a GoFundMe campaign (linked to his website at chuckbrodsky.com) to help pay for the reconstruction of the hill and build two retaining walls he’ll need to safeguard the future of his home.

Since there’s a song in everything, especially for a writer as prolific as Brodsky, he’s just released a new tune called, “The Sound of Wind and Rain.” You’ll find it on his YouTube page, and you can hear it on local stations including KZSC and KKUP. It’s a beautiful, haunting tune about surviving the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. “I wanted to share it,” he says, “because I think it speaks for everybody in western North Carolina in the way we all (still) flinch when it rains or the wind blows, particularly with the winter rainy weather coming soon.”

The song is very analogous to how many of us here out West felt during aftershocks following the 1989 earthquake. Brodsky was living here, then, too. “I remember things like a bus going by that might rumble enough to make you think it’s an aftershock — or an airplane going overhead and you’d feel the vibration in the building and think it was another aftershock.”

Speaking of being local, Brodsky’s no stranger to local audiences. He lived in Northern California in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “I had a friend who talked me out of keeping my Berkeley apartment that I had for years because I was going on the road for six months at a time, coming home for a month, then going back out for six months.” She said, “Let’s call the guest room yours.”

Closer to home, Brodsky also fondly remembers that “The White Raven in Felton was one of the first places I ever started playing.”

And for those who might not have had a chance to hear Brodsky back in those days — or more recently when he makes it out our way — you’ll find that he’s a writer who’s always been “looking for unique angles to write about. I want to write songs that haven’t been written before. Nothing against love songs, or ‘my baby left me’ songs, but lots and lots of people write those songs.

“I’m more interested in writing songs where the subject matter is a little more unusual. Or in telling stories of underdog people or ordinary people who do extra ordinary things.”

Of course, some of those stories can be tricky to write about in these divided times. Brodsky adds, “I’ve got my own feelings about what’s going on in the world that I need to express. We have family and friends who do not think like us, and we just have to find common ground. You don’t want to add to the division.”

Besides, “If you only preach to the choir, you’ll just get a lot of people agreeing and nothing gets done.

“Live music is a great way to bring people together. I want everybody who likes acoustic music to come out and find something that’s of value to them. That’s my goal, anyway.”

Michael Gaither is a performing songwriter, DJ at KPIG radio and in a previous life was also a writer for The Santa Cruz Sentinel.