One day I was alone in the apartment that I shared with my girlfriend Genevieve in Inwood and I wrote three songs. The first song was “One Line Epitaph.” This song eventually became the most popular song in The Navigators Catalogue (so far).  I had already written the music for it, so it wasn’t completely written in one day.

Feeling pleased with myself, I thought I would try my hand at another song that I had music for, but no lyrics.  That song became “Run to the Rock.”  While it would never be a hit, it…

I lived in a lot of cold places in my twenties. I wrote a song about them, and mentioned five different places in which I’d been cold. I changed the names of some of the places, but other than that, it’s all true.  I wrote:

I could feel the wind

I could see my breath

In a log cabin I nearly froze to death

And it was cold.

Now technically, the log cabin was an addition to a a home built around the 1970s.  It was a log cabin that the landlord had moved from Indiana, and we had been told that it was from the…

I think there are a lot of people familiar with the Jack London story, “To Build a Fire.”  The story is a simple story about a man in the Alaskan wilderness who does not take the cold seriously until it is too late. I think I read the story in middle school. It may have been one of the first stories that I was exposed to that did not have a happy ending. Even though you don’t even know the man’s name, you don’t want him to die- or his dog.

While that story and this song share a title, I don’t know how much…

I got dumped a few days before my 29th birthday.  Getting dumped is always bad, but getting dumped by someone you live with in New York City creates all sorts of problems. I managed to stay a week at my friend Amy’s and then my friend Wes put me up for a few weeks at his place. I would then bounce around while all my stuff was in storage. One place that I landed was on in my friend Topaz’s room. He lived over restaurant in DUMBO. Topaz is a great performer/musician who now lives in Austin, Texas. Check him…

I've had a lot to say about this particular song. In fact, you can check out a previous blog post. I wrote the chorus when I was living with my band, Satori, in a log cabin. The chorus was directed towards a friend of mine, Brian Gager, who had been hospitalized and diagnosed as bi-polar. I knew nothing about the disease at the time, but I kept singing, “Get out of touch, get out of touch, you know too much.”  

Brian was a very bright young man. He was a great composer and songwriter.  I think we both had a…

I probably wrote this is an hour one day in Inwood. My girlfriend, Genevieve, was on tour with her theatre group, so I had some time to myself. It must have been shortly after 9/11, because the line about “fighting through that senseless war” was about soldiers being deployed to Afghanistan. The line “I crossed the waters” was about how I often uprooted myself to be with the women I was with.

The first time, I did that, I was twenty years old, and I moved to New York to be with my girlfriend, Ramona. I only…

Shortly after recording Glory, Glory, I began to date my wife, Jesse. I remember the day we met- not because it was love at first sight, but because it was mother’s day and my birthday, and there had been a woman poet who went on before our gig who proceeded to get naked on stage, and had a merkin to boot. So, you remember things like that.

We were both with other people at the time, so we weren’t really looking for love. I think that was our first show. Two girlfriends later, I was single and I asked her…

I wrote this song in early 2000 around the same time that I had my first pass at “When Your Ship Goes Down.” I had wrapped up recording Lost and Found, and I was living in an attic room on Hilliard Avenue. Read the post on “Fairy Tales”, so I don’t have to repeat myself here. The short version: I had recovered from cancer, and had been pining for some time over this girl that I’ve been calling “Glory.” Not sure why I’m changing names. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind, but it makes it easier for me to write, I…

A recent story on NPR was was from an astronomer discussing how earth’s axial precession (a slow wobble that takes 26,000 years) means that the constellations gradually shift each year, and that your astrological sun sign (Aries, Taurus, etc.) might not correspond with the actual constellation on the Zodiac. In other words, you could be labeled a Taurus (like my sister), even though your birthday does not fall on a day that the sun is in Taurus. Of course, every astrologer already knows this. Astrologers…

I wrote this song twice. The first time was in Louisville, Kentucky. I was living in an attic room on Hilliard Avenue. I had finished recording Lost and Found, and I was just waiting to get it mixed and everything. I think it was early spring. Unfortunately, I wrote it on my old computer- which was about fifteen years old. It’s not that it crashed, but I can no longer pull up any of the files on it or transfer it to anywhere else. So the only thing that remained about the song was the chorus, which I…