Some Notes On Fire And Rain

Last but not least, I'll write a bit here about the creation of Fire and Rain. This is the final album in the cycle, the "winter" one. I wanted to end with an album that felt like winter, like a loss of hope and a sacrifice of the sunlight of summer to darkness...but that also acknowledged that, in the end, the wheel will come back around. It's a cycle, remember? Not a line.

So, that was part of the inspiration behind this album. The other part was Ryan Adams' album 29. I've sort of personally "cancelled" Ryan Adams from my musical cosmology, for reasons that I've written about on this site before, but that you can also read about in the New York Times. But, way back when, at the height of my Ryan Adams fandom in 2005, he released three albums in one year, and that trilogy ended with 29, a massive tonal and sonic departure from the other albums he'd released that year (and, arguably, anything else he'd ever released). Even by Ryan Adams' standards, 29 is dark, like, really dark, stylistically inconsistent, and badly in need of some trimming. But that's why I love(d) it. Ever since, I've wanted to make an album like it, and for better and worse, with Fire and Rain, that's what I did. I consciously kept from editing myself on this album, unlike on the others, to the point that I'd planned a twelve-minute album closer which, upon recording, ballooned to twenty-nine minutes, and I just left it that way. That's not to say there wasn't quality control or thought put into the album, but just that I wanted to make sure the usual, sensible limitations I put on a song or album wouldn't hold me back from seeing how dark I could go.

If that makes you want to hear the album, you'll probably love it. If it makes you want to never listen to the album, you'll probably hate it.

Stylistically, I'd say it shares the most DNA with Ride, actually: there are a lot of jammy, instrumental passages, weird sonic experiments, and the like. I struggled sometimes recording Ride while trying to keep track of all of the separate tracks bouncing around in my Audacity projects, but the size of the project files on a few of the Fire and Rain tracks were absolutely enormous compared to the Ride songs. There's a lot going on sonically here, at least by my standards.

And did I mention lots of the songs are weird? Like, pretty weird? There are only three songs here that sound to me like anything else I've written, and two of those ("Please Don't Let Me Go" and "Blackbird Girl") are the saddest breakup songs I've come up with, ever, while the third one ("Fire and Rain") is nineteen minutes long. I'm lucky if I can play a third of the songs off of this album without having to look up the chords and lyrics as a reminder first. That said, while I feel like I've grown immensely as a songwriter, guitarist, and producer through the process of making all of the albums I've put out this year, Fire and Rain is the one that has had the most impact on me, and makes me the most excited for what I'll write next. Coming through the darkness and finding yourself on the other side definitely allows you to see the world in a new way, though that's about all I can say to recommend the experience.

Anyway, to the song notes!

I got it into my head at some point that I wanted to write a story song about a haunted ghost train and a battle between good and evil where evil wins. I mentioned a mariachi band in the lyrics, and then thought "What if I actually played the mariachi band's song within the other song?" Suddenly, "Badlands" was nine minutes long and felt like the perfect way to open this ridiculously long and convoluted album.

In my head, "Ghosts Of The Highway" and "Fear" have some sort of strange, symbiotic relationship. This existed before the fuzzed-out static that punctuates both songs was added; in fact, it's why it was added. "Ghosts" is a new song, written during the Triptych sessions. "Fear" is a song I adapted from a poem that I found in an old notebook during the sessions. A decent amount of the Triptych songs were initially written over snippets of music and chord progressions I'd written and/or recorded without lyrics randomly over the last fifteen years, but "Fear" is the odd song where the lyrics existed first and about fifteen years after I'd written them, I sat down and wrote music to go with them. I really like the way it worked out, and should probably try writing more songs this way in the future...

"Neal's Jam" used to be called "Crazy Stairs," and was renamed as a tribute to guitarist Neal Casal, who is a huge influence of mine and who passed away while I was recording the album. The main riff in the jam is actually paraphrased from a riff he played during a version of The Cardinals' "Off Broadway" performed live in 2009. So, it's "Neal's Jam" in more ways than one, I suppose. The jam has always been paired with "Enemy," which is a song about how bad things can get when you don't get out of your own way.

"Blackbird Girl" was a phrase and an image that came to me while out on a run (where a lot of song ideas come to me, strangely enough). I wrote this song from the perspective of someone who might have cause to address it to their own "blackbird girl," who had flown away and never returned. It was called "Haunted Heart" at one point and "Blackbird Song" at another.

"Ice On The Mountain" came from a dumb idea I had to inspire a new song: I wanted to try to write a song called "Ice On The Mountain" because it was the opposite of "Fire On The Mountain." This is the song that resulted, inspired in part by an accident I'd recently experienced while out mountaineering.

"Amie" was, weirdly, the first song I wrote after writing "The Light" in 2016. It didn't make it onto to Asphalt Ghosts, though, because it didn't fit with the rest of the material and because the picking pattern was really hard for me to play reliably at first. So it got shelved until this album came along, when I resurrected it, rewrote some of the lyrics, got the picking pattern down, and changed the title from "Salmon" to "Amie," a reference to the nigh-unattainable woman in Chretien de Troyes' medieval romance "Lanval." This story has some parallels to that one.

"Kurzweil Transmissions" is named for the scientist who first conceptualized the AI singularity, but this is basically just a brief instrumental written in A that randomly finds its way into the middle of songs like "Caroline" and "Palace," as well as covers like Bob Dylan's "Isis" from time to time.

The "Not The One" > "Fire and Rain" > "(Rise)" sequence certainly has enough lyrics and music to speak for itself, but if you're interested in my thought process behind putting it together the way I did, here's an excerpt of an email I wrote to a friend a few weeks ago attempting to explain it: "I feel like I've been in an apocalyptic mood since March of 2020, and only now, as I'm hitting summer break in 2021, with COVID not quite the looming specter it once was, and a little time to do something other than work in my office, am I able to look back on the last sixteen or so months with anything approaching objectivity. I feel like it was/is the most dystopian time I've ever lived through: massive systemic failures of our corroded institutions, collapsing of personal relationships, deaths of friends and family...you know, all the hits, but all at once and with the overwhelming sense that all of this is in all likelihood just the beginning of something even bigger, rather than an isolated string of "bad luck." I think we'll be forced to de-industrialize, de-technocratize, and de-globalize whether we choose to or not, after much longer. One of the more indulgent portions of the huge pile of new music I dumped onto my website the other day is actually about this...sort of? You might enjoy it, you might find it a bit too meandering, but it's the only real sonic monument to the last sixteen months that I've recorded so far, so maybe that will serve as a better response than my hammering away at these keys for five or six more paragraphs..."

And that's the best I can do to sum up Fire and Rain.

Some Notes On Maps

I wrote about the history of the Triptych project, and the double-LP version of Maps that eventually came to be Ride and Maps in the notes for Ride, so if you're interested, you can check that out there so I'm not repeating the same thing in these notes. The important part here is that Maps is the third of the four new albums I conceptualized as a loose cycle, but it's also kind of a sister album to Ride.

The reason I called what would have originally been a double-LP Maps was because I thought of all the songs on that album as maps themselves. I've always thought that stories (and, by extension, songs that tell stories) are maps, in a way. They not only present us with a sort of conceptual geography that tells us about the lives of the characters in the story, they also may even provide a fictional physical geography (Tolkien is a good example of an author who does this). Often, they are also maps that describe the author or songwriter's life, too: where they've come from, where they are, and maybe even where they're going. Road-tripping or traveling songs feel this way to me especially: there's a flavor to the experience of looking over a map to plan a trip and to the experience of hearing a new song for the first time that are, in some way, the same feeling for me.

So, these songs are songs, but they are also meant to be maps. To, among other things maybe, me. This is why, against my better judgment, the album cover is a picture of me. It was a happy accident that in this particular photo (taken unexpectedly during a fantastic hiking day, that's a legit smile), I'm wearing my "If Lost, Return To Luigi's" shirt: a fortuitous reference to where I've come from ("Back To Ohio," anyone?) for the cover of an album that, ultimately, finds me wondering where I'm going next ("Maps," "...Still Following The Roads").

The songs here are a bit more acoustic in their arrangement than the ones on Ride, and though the albums are, conceptually, sisters, these don't aspire to the same level of sonic complexity as those. There isn't much as stripped-down as the Wilderness Amen songs here: most of the songs have multiple guitars, there is, occasionally, some piano, but you're not going to hear the kinds of long instrumental passages you hear in many of the songs on Ride and even Fire and Rain. That was intentional. If Ride is the "summer" album, a shimmery, outward-looking affair despite some heavy ruminations on life and love, Maps is the "fall" album that intends to live up to its title: this is the most autobiographical album I've ever written, and it felt immediately to me as if those songs needed to focus more on the words than on five minute guitar jams. So that's what they do.

Some notes on individual songs:

I went back and forth on opening the album with "Back To Ohio," and even on whether it should be included on the album at all. It's one of my oldest songs, and while I like the sentiment behind it, these days I tend to find the lyrics a little simplistic and the song itself a little flat. But, I'd recorded it for previous albums in 2005, 2007, and 2016, and never ultimately included it, and it felt like it was time. Plus, when you take the album as a whole, I think (I hope!) it works as a solid mission statement for the idea of songs as maps. You learn a lot about me (or at least how I think of myself) in this song, simple as it might be.

Once in my twenties, I got so high at a party that I passed out and woke up the next morning in the front yard of a random house that I didn't remember at all. At that party was a girl named Molly, who I knew nothing about, but had decided in my own head was The Most Amazing Girl Who Had Ever Lived regardless. Once I finally made my way home the next afternoon, I sat down and wrote this song about the version of Molly that existed in my imagination (instead of the real Molly, who I'm sure was a great person but was not my ridiculously exaggerated Supergirl, obviously). Writing the song seemed better than continuing to project my own insecurities and problems onto a random girl I'd briefly met once. And it was!

"Note To Self" is literally a song I wrote as a note to myself, to remind me of lots of important things that I forget at least a few times every day. The chorus intentionally has a bit of a Tom Petty thing going on, which I like.

"Dusty Roads" is another old, non-album song that finally gets its day here. Like "Back To Ohio," the lyrics are clearly written by a much younger me, but I love playing this song so much I wanted other people to be able to hear it, warts and all.

"Dreams" is an autobiographical song inspired very directly by "Bob Dylan's Dream." I couldn't figure out what to call it for almost a year, and then Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" came into the news thanks to that skateboarding guy on TikTok (what even is culture anymore) and I got lazy. Jokes aside, this song makes me sad a lot and sometimes I just can't play it.

"Ways To Fly (Part II)" (or, as I write it on setlists "Ways 2 Fly" because I'm clever) is intended as a sequel to "Ways To Fly," wherein the narrator has in fact found a way to fly after all. It's meant as a happy ending...but maybe an illusory one, because as Dr. John Osterman reminds us, nothing ever really ends. I recorded this song without any overdubs after being inspired by Wilco's song "Where Do I Begin," which has always sounded to me like it's just Jeff Tweedy and a single guitar, though I don't know that for sure.

"English Girls" is an instrumental I wrote for a short film that didn't get made back in 2007. I've enjoyed playing it since, and it was fun to spruce it up a little for this album.

Originally, "Maps" was the opening track on the album, which I guess make sense. In the end, I decided it was important to pair it immediately with "...Still Following The Roads," so it went to the back of the line, so to speak. It's one of my favorite songs, and there's a bit of a harkening back to "The Light" (from Asphalt Ghosts) in the chorus: the idea that "following the roads," while quite romantic-sounding, might be a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

"...Still Following The Roads" is directly inspired by Howlin' Rain's "...Still Walking, Still Stone," the closing track on their album The Russian Wilds. I was listening to that album obsessively during the recording of Maps, and as "...Still Walking" serves as a sort of outro/coda/refrain to the previous song, "Walking Through Stone," I wanted to create an instrumental coda to "Maps" to wrap up the album as a whole.

Some Notes On Ride

As some regular readers might remember, at one point this whole recording project was known as Triptych. As I've said and written before elsewhere, the idea was to record three albums, forming the sonic version of a medieval triptych: three "panels," one story. The story would be the cycle of the seasons, literally but also metaphorically. There would be a folksy, acoustic album with a sort of spring/summer feel, a jammy, electric album with a sort of summer/fall feel, and then a darker, "winter" album to close things out. The cycle, of course, would move through birth, growth, death, and then rebirth: in nature, in individuals, in relationships, in the trajectory of human society. You know, relatively unambitious stuff.

This sort of ended up happening, but got a little muddled along the way as I wrote more songs than I'd planned and struggled with the idea of leaving songs I liked unrecorded for the sake of some loose concept-album plan. In the end, I ditched Triptych and recorded everything I wanted to record instead, ending up with four albums instead of three. Wilderness Amen stuck around as the first album of the cycle, as I wrote a bit about in the notes for that album already. But, early on, Ride was part of the triptych's middle album, a double-LP called Maps. The first half of Maps was going to be electric, with generally big-picture, abstract lyrics, while the second half was going to be more acoustic, more reflective, and more autobiographical. Both halves of the album would feature songs that were more structurally complex and had more layers (overdubs, harmonies, etc.) than my recordings had previously had. If you've listened to both, you can probably guess that the double album got split into two albums and ended up being Ride and Maps, respectively.

The writing and recording of these albums coincided with my recent fall into obsession with the Grateful Dead's songbook, and that influence, as well as the influences of bands I'd already listened to for years like Phish, Trey Anastasio Band, and Chris Robinson Brotherhood show most obviously in this album, I think. "Ride" starts the album with an opening riff and later overlapping guitars, "The Melody," one of my oldest songs, has a new, muted jam section that is one of my favorite things I've ever recorded, "Sometimes" has a pop sensibility to it right up until it takes a very Phish-y left turn at the outro, "Bright Girl" has an acoustic-vs-electric guitar duel near the end, and "Electric Dream" and "Invocation" both build up energy to a crescendo via guitar jams. I'm not as good at composing these kinds of guitar parts as I'd like to be, yet, but this whole project, and Ride in particular, helped me take the first few steps down that road.

"I Love You (Or The Mountains)" and "Ways To Fly" stick out to me as slightly weird fits for this album, but they fit here better than elsewhere and I didn't want to leave them behind. "I Love You" was a song I wrote shortly after "Running," on an afternoon when I had a hankering to write a song that had some of the lowest and highest notes I could sing in it. I ended up with something that reminds me in a weird way of Michael Stipe's vocals, and then figuring out how to record the bridge of the song with a sort of Beatlesesque vibe finally brought the whole thing together for me.

"Ways" is a much older song that has just never made it on an album, partially because depending on the day, the lyrics either hit hard for me or feel a bit trite or sophomoric. So, after singing this song a certain way for ten years or so, I rewrote about half of the lyrics during the Triptych sessions to be something I felt less ambivalent about, and it was the exact change the song needed. How you hear it now is, I think, how it was always supposed to sound. I just finally stumbled on the right words.

So, the most fun part of writing the notes for Wilderness Amen was the random trivia section. So let's do that again!

The subtitle of "Ride (Charley)" is another tribute to my dog, Charley, who passed away during these sessions. He was actually laying on the floor in the studio on the day I recorded the demo of this song, when I was still trying to decide the name of the song's protagonist. He was such a good and quiet dog that I was able to record the whole demo with him in the room. Ride, Charley, ride.

Once, while performing "The Melody" live, I mis-sung the line as "I woke from a dream to the sound of the melody / In a house full of dust, with a mouthful of cats" and it took me at least a minute to stop laughing hysterically and start the song over. I still worry every time I play it that I'll sing it backwards again.

"Sometimes" was the result of my attempt to write a catchy, "disposable" pop song. It's as hard as they say! It was intentionally based on the outro chords to Phish's "Harry Hood," because of course it is.

"Bright Girl" is a little hamfisted, maybe, but I wanted to write a song that was about wanting to fall in love outside of the usual hyper-gendered, codependent, typically toxic model of "love" that movies and music present us with. It's hard to think outside of those ideas when you've lived with them in your face your whole life, but I'll do a better job next time.

"Ways To Fly" is a song about trying to find a way out of depression without taking advantage of others emotionally, and without hating yourself for being depressed. It's hard to do; fortunately, writing a song about it is super-easy.

If you don't recognize the title of "Oread," you should read some of H.D.'s poetry. It's really good. And this pointed-pine-themed instrumental made a great segue into "Jeff Tweedy's 49th Electric Dream," which is a reference to Wilco's song "Bob Dylan's 49th Beard" and also to the fact that this song is basically the same chord progression as Wilco's "Handshake Drugs." Like "Bright Girl," this song seemed a little...unsubtle to me at first. Then, during COVID, my grandpa died and I had to watch his funeral over Facebook because I couldn't travel. It's as bad as the song makes it sound. How do we live lives with meaning when reality has become virtual?

"Emerald Downs" is the name of the apartment complex I lived in for most of my 20s.

I explained "Invocation" to a friend in an email this morning like this: "The original idea of "Mother Roads" as a sort of highway deity or demigod came about through a half-serious/half-joking conversation ["Neal" and I] had years and years ago while trying to drive from the Pacific coast to Ohio without paying to sleep anywhere (partially for the fun of it, but partially because at the time we had a combined $200 or so beyond gas money to our names). I think we were somewhere in Montana at the time, and I vaguely remember a campfire, and maybe a lake (?), but ["Neal"] had built this weird little pagan effigy and burnt it in the fire as a "sacrifice" to "Mother Roads" to guarantee our safety. It felt a little hokey, years later, to insert that character/spirit into a song in the form of a prayer, but once I sung it a few times, it felt right, so I left it that way."