KEEPER - Early September, fall bite is on in Ipswich, tide looks good for a first light solo fishing attempt. Thinking I could sleep downstairs, leave 4:30ish, get home by 7 to shower and jet to school, does that sound ok? “Pierce, it’s your daughter’s first day of kindergarten tomorrow.” Right right. Ok. Luckily Seth had sent me this catchy loop a few days earlier and I had been singing weird ideas like this in the car on the way to school. Stayed up late and made this song instead, finished in one night except for some harmonies.

TANNAT - Family trip to Uruguay summer 2023, beautiful people, beautiful country! On the plane ride home I tried to make some rhyming snapshots from the trip, based vaguely on a melody I was had stuck in my head for the five days I was incontinent in the middle of the trip. Tannat is of course the national grape of Uruguay and the first verse is recounting the wild and intense moment when a family member reveals the results of some genealogy research and cheek swab testing.

PAVILION - Ana sent me a voice memo recorded at 2:15 a.m. singing oh so quietly into her phone a couple days after our first kayak fishing date - which was interrupted by the old hook-gets-caught-on-a-mooring-buoy problem. With the current pushing you around things can get dicey trying to paddle back and reach over to jiggle your hook loose off the chain. Sometimes you just have to cut the line. Includes references to one of Ipswich’s finest preschool teachers!

GOLD RIMMERS - Last night of April vacation last year had one of those moments of, “Wait what just happened?” So I made a list of accomplishments or at least activities from the week off. One of them was “Put the cover on the boat, begrudgingly” - long story but it was raining and the boat had been uncovered but not recovered, passive voice intentional. Merged that with a love of Western Centuries “Double or Nothing” and a little bit of Mike Merenda’s “Clambelly Stomp” which I believe hails from our mutual experience working summers on the fry line at Newick’s in the mid 90s.

THIS WINTER - written in the cold, pre-partition basement with cats interrupting takes. Started out with a refrain that never made it in the song, “Come on everybody take a rapid test” - post COVID holiday season, still having these awkward family text threads about symptoms and testing and masking . With snowless, rain-soaked Xmas floods lurking in the background. Sent a demo to the incredible Ken who sent it back saying “Nice song, if you do it to a click I could add some stuff.” Which I did and he did - he’s playing everything besides the guitar on this one!

BUT I DO - Started with some voice memos between Ana and Lizzie which they were generous enough to share. I thought the line “I don’t wanna judge you but I do” was honest and funny in the right proportions, so I asked if I could try putting some instruments around their ideas. One night when they were in NH on a ladies bday xc ski trip, I stayed up late, figured out how to loop some drums, discovered the world of power synths, and plucked out a guitar part through the laptop mic which I never ended up replacing because something about it just worked. Joe dug it so I brought it to the next music retreat and batted around additional lyrics - this is where the “fishes are floating” verse came from.

REASON - All hail the mighty minidisc recorder with a stereo mic. Live recording from my room in Bellefontaine, Ohio when I was an actor/musician with the most excellent Mad River Theater Works. Beautiful couple months in southwest Ohio, thank you Nate Cooper, Sharon Leahy & RIck Good, Bob Lucas for all the love. But man I missed Ana, who was not yet even my girlfriend.

3 DAYS - The night before Halloween 2022 Seth sent me this loop, first time he had sent me a thing after months of “we should do something”’s , so I felt some pressure. After trick-or-treating was over and everyone was in bed I sat on the couch in front of the fire, singing into the laptop mic and pulling verses from my journal that were previously pressed into service in a groovy poolside uke jam with Jeff. Chorus was inspired by Ana’s recent benign growth report from a few days earlier. Sent it back to Seth the next morning hoping he’d be wowed enough to send me more cool loops in the future.

TELL ME SOMETHING - Around that time a text thread with Kevin/Joe/Doug was pretty lively and Kev sent out some lyrics with the refrain “tell me something I don’t know.” Mind if a take a crack at this one? Not realizing that this was a song Joe and Kev had been working on that Kevin had added some new lyrics to. I thought it was some lonely lyrics looking for music. So I headed to the cat stinkin basement & made a synth-heavy draft of “Tell Me Something” , guitar and vox recorded through the trusty laptop mic. Ended up redoing the intro (Sean said the first one stank) inspired by Blinding Lights and building up an over-the-top outro inspired by Radiohead Exit Music. At some point I realized it was really a song about AI/GPT, so Kevin and I reworked the verses one last time to get them more on message. Then went over to his basement lair one night to get him in on some cameo vocals. That’s him saying “what?” at the top and doing the robot monotone voice in the outro. It was also Kevin’s idea to ask Alexa “Are you AI?” and record her response for the breakdown.

HEAVENLY - Seth sent me this about a week after the 3 Days song happened. I took an old song from the archives and stole a few lines to get things moving. (That recording is from a Red Hook rehearsal in like 2005ish, Ruth Keating on body percussion & Shawn Feeney on bass). Half of the song happened that first night but it never felt done til a few weeks later when I was just pulling into the driveway from school. A woman was at the end of my driveway with a wild look in her eye. “Is your wife home? My kids are missing. My husband did your ceiling.” If that isn’t exactly what she said it’s pretty close. Turned out her 2 young kids had been at a neighbor’s playing and all 3 had vanished a couple hours earlier. Ana started calling everyone she knows in the neighborhood, which is a lot of people. I hopped on my bike and started going up and down streets, intersecting with other neighbors on foot, on bikes, in cars. I remember kids’ dad (a master plasterer who had indeed recently repaired our ceiling!) in his loud smokey Jeep tearing up and down the blocks until about an hour later when the three kids came wandering up the street safe & sound.

DEAD LOW - When I first learned to fish in Ipswich, the mantra I learned was “2 hours before high tide or 2 hours after” or more simply, “You want a lot of water” - advice from the Fin & Feather guy in Essex. Same guy told me to use sand eel jig heads, which I have still never caught anything but mussels & rocks on. I was teaching 5th grade in Lawrence at that time and I had these twin girls in my class whose dad was a firefighter. The twins told me that every day after school when they climbed in his truck, he always asked “What boys talked to you and what did they say?” Little did I know I would end up using that line. Anyway I found out he fished for stripers in the Merrimack and on the Cape. Talked to him one day and tried out my “2 hours before or after” wisdom. He laughed and said “I’ve caught fish at every tide man.” And with that things started to shift and some amazing things started happening at the least expected times.

HURRICANE - Sean’s friends were divided all week on whether it was a good idea to do a night kayak float up the Ipswich river on the night Hurricane Lee was blowing into New England. Meanwhile I was hustling all that week trying to finish my 2nd attempt at an outdoor drainage system to deal with the enormous volume of water that flows down my driveway toward my house whenever it pours, which has been a lot the last few years. That week I was also on a Tom Waits kick, & of all the gorgeous songs that man has made, I zeroed in on Ol’ 55 because of how the chorus seems to just keep adding melodic ideas one after the other. I wanted to make a song that did that. This was an attempt.

ARTWORK: The album art is a linocut made by Ben Dugdale, the same generous soul that taught me how to prune my apple trees, gather oysters from the muck at low tide, and catch stripers from a beat-up kayak. Truly a life-altering friendship.

MASTERING: Cal put me in touch with the wonderful Mike Moschetto who put the final touches on these tracks.