To the Places We Lived
In February of 2019, I used this same website to announce that I was making a new record, and that it would be my last, and that I would offer a pre-order so I could cover the costs of making said record. In the intervening almost-three years, much has happened—to all of us I imagine, but I can only speak to my own experiences. Some of this is your business (or, better put, I’m willing to share it), and that which is not won’t show up in this space, at least not right now.
We began tracking the album, which I had already decided would be titled To the Places We Lived, in April of 2019. We recorded ten songs over the course of ten days, and then used a couple more days for additional instrumentation and vocals. The record was more or less finished, I thought, but I wanted to sit on it a while and be sure before moving on to mixing. I was under no contract, no deadline, and if this was indeed going to be my last record, I wanted to be sure I had said what I wanted to say, in the way I wanted to say it. My intention was to make a sort of sonic sequel to Nowhere Nights, the album of mine people seem, still, to be most fond of. A more personal intention — one I had not shared with those beyond a small circle of friends—was to make a record my father would love. At the time, my father was ten years into a diagnosis of Parkinson’s and Lewy Body Dementia, and had progressed to the point that he needed more care than we could give him and so, while he still spent a fair amount of time home with us, he stayed nights in a home for people who need a little extra care. By the fall of 2019, I was still sitting on rough mixes, and my father’s condition was progressing to an extent that had us wondering how much time we had left with him.
In February of 2020, my father passed away.
In March of 2020, of course, most everyone’s life changed in some way. Amid the individual and collective waves of sadness, anger, fear, anxiety and grief — amid the global pandemic and its numerous fallouts—I learned my wife was pregnant.
That summer, I started to tinker a bit with the songs, adding and subtracting pieces here or there, trying to get closer to an album that might have reminded my dad of his favorite artists (who subsequently became my favorite artists), artists whose albums he had worn out on our turntable or in the cassette player in our car: Petty, Springsteen, Steve Earle, Dr. John. My dad had many favorites whose voices and styles I could never dream of emulating (Aretha, Roberta Flack, Bobby Bland, Johnny Cash, Stevie Nicks), but that handful of artists whose work would now be swallowed up by the ever-expanding Americana genre—on my best day, I could get somewhere in the neighborhood of their ballpark. I wanted this record to be nine or ten of my best days. It was getting there.
The “Dangerous Ones Thing,” as I’ve come to call it, happened that July, and I suddenly had an inbox full of offers from managers and booking agents (most of which disappeared as quickly as they came once I made it clear I had no desire to tour beyond a handful of shows or make any records after my next), and a whole bunch of ears willing to listen to my voice that hadn’t been there before, or maybe had stopped listening when I was incarcerated and felt ready to pick up the conversation again (those folks seem to have stuck around this time, and for that I am very grateful). By the time all that happened, I had long since taken down the pre-order, and put To the Places We Lived on hold in order to revisit Let the Bloody Moon Rise, an album I made in 2012 that never saw a proper release.
My daughter was born that November, and the last year has been filled with all of the joys, challenges and sleep-deprivation that come with early parenthood. There have been other joys and challenges too, of course. Our dog needed emergency spinal surgery six months ago, and has had a couple of setbacks since, but is healing and happy. My work at the Alano Club of Portland has become both more difficult and more rewarding, as our organization has worked to continue delivering resources, services and supports to a community that faces an unprecedented crisis of its own. The rest is, as I said, not anyone else’s business, at least not in this space, right now. My point is simply, To the Places We Lived was never far from my mind but it was not often the first thing on my mind.
I say this all to say, the album is done. Well, the recording and re-recording and taking apart and putting back together is done. There are rough mixes. There will soon be finished mixes, and then masters, and then, in the fall of 2022, a release. The process of making this record has been unlike any I’ve experienced before, and it’s one I hope to never repeat. However, in the end, I made what I wanted to make: I made a record I believe my dad would have loved, and I believe you’ll love, if you hear it. Nearly every person I’ve ever played music with over the course of the last 20 years contributed to this record, and some new friends did too, and that might be the thing I’m most proud of.
I don’t know that I needed to explain the last three years but I wanted to, because I wanted to make the album available for pre-order again to those who may have missed it the first time, and include all the extra limited edition things (photos, lyric books, private house shows) that I offered to people the first go-round. So, if you’d like, you can pre-order To the Places We Lived HERE. If you do so, you’ll get access to rough mixes, lyrics, photos, and updates (though at this point the only updates will be mixes, masters and release), so there’s that. Thanks for listening, and thanks for reading. See you out there somewhere, I hope. — KA
