In 2015, I brought Will Robertson, Bill Titus, Jordan Katz, and Mathias Kunzli out to Jono Manson’s ramshackle studio in Chupadero, NM. To get to Chupadero, you typically fly to Albuquerque and then drive up through the desert into Santa Fe. Then you leave town and head for the hills. It’s very quiet and very dark up there. The only sounds you hear are from the wind, the summer rains, and the coyote. 

This record was recorded mostly live. By that, I mean, Jono set up mics in front of all of us, and we recorded the songs as we played them. Unlike some of my previous albums, most of these songs were new to us. We worked out arrangements on the fly. Bill, Will, Jordan, and I had performed a lot together. But Mathias was somewhat new to our ensemble, and his palette and sensibilities informed the feel of many of these tracks.

All of these songs pair with stories in my book The Free Brontosaurus. Each song is from the perspective of one of the stories’ main characters. I would summarize the story before we’d record so we could channel the character’s struggle a bit. 

This whole project began when I was taking a run in Berkeley, CA, where we were living, and I passed by a yard that had this odd looking Brontosaurus statue in the front lawn. I did one of those double takes where I ran past and then back pedaled to look again. There were a lot of strange people in Berkeley. Hoarders, junk artists, old eccentric hippies, etc. We lived next to one such guy. He was pretty crazy, rarely made eye contact, had a house that was bursting with junk (stacks of magazines, antiques, and various collectibles). He lived alone, and I never saw him with any companions. But one day, a guy came to visit him who was about my age, and they sat on their back porch drinking beer and laughing. I decided it was his son even though that didn't fit with anything I knew of him. That brontosaurus and our neighbor inspired me to conceive of a world of characters all of whom struggled to fit in for one reason or another. They were lost and vulnerable. But they meet each other in the stories, and ultimately they find hope and a measure of happiness through those interactions.

Then I gave each character a song. Sometimes I wrote the songs and stories simultaneously. Sometimes a whole song (like Broken Crown) came first and then influenced the story. On the best days, the details in the story gave me lyrics for the songs, lyrics I doubt I would have come up with were it not for the story. For example, the character George was a traveling salesman. So that went into the song, "Wishing Well." The lyric is, "I feel like a traveling saleseman." I never would have come up with that lyric if not for the story.

Writing this record was different than all of my other projects as I tried to embody the issues the characters had. Of course, I made those characters up. So I suppose they were still incarnations of my own emotional world. But I wanted to distance myself from the intimacy of my previous book/record combo (140 Goats and a Guitar and Some Kind of Cure). That project felt very confessional and exposed. The songs on Cardboard Boat are just as confessional, but they are more veiled. Still the stories I created gave me a new language to draw from and new experiences to refer to. Sometimes I was stuck on a lyric, and I’d go back to working on the story, and somehow I came up with something in the prose that then could be used in the lyrics. 

Once the basic tracks were down, I got a few other friends to lay other parts down and invited Sara Watkins to sing backup on each song that pairs with a female character in the book. Actually, I saved the female part for Broken Crown for my wife, Sarah. 

I don’t like picking favorite albums. Like choosing between your children (kind of). But I think Cardboard Boat is my best album.