I wrote a lot of the songs on After the Wrecking Ships while living in an apartment in Brooklyn owned by Foxy Brown’s mother. She was always coming into our space at odd hours, criticizing me for the unwashed dishes in the sink and the like. That has little to do with the record, I suppose. 

After The Confluence, I played a lot of shows with Alex and Buck and Ty. We were developing a sound that blended acoustic textures with ethereal electrics. Some of that sound was reflective of the Brooklyn I was living in. Sarah and I had a beautiful little garden out back and grew tomatoes. It was peaceful and could almost be pastoral in the spring. But of course, it was Brooklyn. And the subways and buses were loud and very inorganic. There were people everywhere. It was also post-September 11th. That was a big deal. It influenced my writing. 

A lot of the songs on this album are about New York. “All the Weight” is set on the corner of the East Village where Sarah ran a clothing shop. “Bushwick” is the part of Brooklyn where I taught public school. “Little Fists,” though it talks about Baltimore, is really about feeling small and insignificant in a big and fast-moving world. Even “Chicago” is in part about not wanting to leave New York. Of course, there’s also “Shiloh” on this record, which has nothing to do with New York. This was my first attempt at a historical song. It’s of course about the Civil War battle in 1862.  I guess I have a mini series of these songs, including “Soldier’s Song” on Strange Light and “Coming Home” on The Fire in My Head.

Alex produced this record. Much of what we aimed for was to capture the arrangements we were working out live. We recorded in his great new space in New Paltz, NY. I loved working up there, and Alex and I were a great team. There was still a sense of discovery and newness on this project. But we also had a newfound maturity and sense of what we did well. 

One of the coolest musical moves we made on this record happens on the very first chord of the opening track, “Jefferson.” Alex had a few musicians: Jon Natchez and Frisbay, among them, play long tones of a chromatic scale (on baritone sax and trombone). We then used those notes to make melotron-style chords, riding up the faders of the notes we needed. 

A number of the songs on this record became central to our live shows. We always played “Red” in the early days. “Times Square,” too. We hardly play either anymore, but “Jefferson” and “Chicago” are still in heavy rotation. “Boxes,” too. I think “Matador” is my favorite on the record, though we don’t play it much. It’s dark and heavy, and I love the mallets that start the tune.

After we released this record, I was asked to write a song for the CBS-TV show “Without a Trace.” By this point, I had moved to Atlanta and met Will Robertson. We met at an open mic, and my musical life changed. I wrote my song “Fire Sign” in part on a plane returning home from Eastern Europe and in part on our back porch in Atlanta. Will and I recorded the song in his bedroom. We re-released After the Wrecking Ships with slightly different art and the bonus track cut in.

Very curiously, years later a DJ from Florida named Pete Finley did a dance remix of “Fire Sign.” I'm not so fond of the genre and it took me a while to get my head around it. But it was heard by a DJ in Germany named Steve Brian who did another version. And slowly but surely EDM mixes of "Fire Sign" starting spreading around the clubs of Prague and Ibiza and the Netherlands. In what is probably the oddest turn in my career, I started getting calls from other DJs to work on new songs with them. I took the calls and added a sort of nightime job to my daytime role as a folksinger. Other tracks of mine have been remixed since ("The Blood and the Wine," "George Square," "The Faded Red and Blue," etc. And if you search me on Spotify or YouTube, much to my chagrin, the first things that often come up are these versions of my work.

But I'd rather you hear my pure versions. And you might as well start with "Fire Sign."