Okay, let’s start with how this album came to be.
Our little son was born on Christmas, and while he had many fine qualities, he was a dogshit sleeper. I’d rock him for hours in the middle of the night in that weird comatose half-awake feeling and, because it helped to hum, songs kept coming out. I’ve written a million songs, starting in my prepubescent early teens, even more in my prepubescent early 20’s, then almost every night since, but something felt different here. There wasn’t as much forethought or labor involved. I didn’t have the energy for bullshitting. I just wanted to start helping this little baby make sense of the world he was coming into. Maybe I didn’t have much advice to offer, but there was a lot I was thinking about -- as a kid of a generation in the middle; as a dad trying to raise a kid with light and optimism when things can seem pretty fucked up; as someone living in an era of big things happening with such small people at the helm.
Songs came out about all that, plus other ones about trips with dad to racetracks in Wisconsin, getting older, people in my life, love and sometimes feeling unworthy of it, death of course, lullabies and little hymns, songs about doing my best not to succumb to the mental health stuff that runs in my family — in most families — and wondering if I have any say in the matter. A line from Springsteen in a recent interview probably describes it better than I’m doing: "All I do know is as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher.”
It’s a personal album, and can be a heavy one, but there’s no self-pity here: I know I’ve been lucky. Ultimately I’d like this album to be a declaration of war against the cynicism and aloofness and above-it-all shit that’s dominating too much of the airwaves and too much of the culture. It’s better to dive in, be engaged, to feel things. I read somewhere that hope is a discipline. I guess it’s about that.
It all came together in ~20-30 songs. They’ve been narrowed down into the 12 (well, 11 plus a reprise) that form this debut LP, which is called Richer Soil. I wanted to go somewhere to record it, and spent five days down in Nashville at a beautifully vibey place in Berry Hill called Creative Workshop alongside Skylar Wilson, a brilliant producer who has his hands on a lot of the music I’ve loved of late. Working with him, I understood why — he’s just one of those special people. The piano you hear him playing is from the Johnny Cash Show, and the musicians you hear are mostly from Steelism, an instrumental steel band in Nashville who is a real wrecking crew. Within two days of meeting each other, we had the core tracks for 9 songs down.
The only real ambition has just been to make something that leaves it on the table and feels good and real and honest. Is it good in the broader sense? I don’t know, and I’d love to say I don’t care, but it’s more complicated than that.
I take heart in the words of Mary Oliver:
"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”
Thanks for listening.