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'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…

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…

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…

I remember writing “Why” when I was living with my girlfriend in Inwood. She was an intensely intuitive person, and we had had a whirlwind romance in Louisville, before moving up to New York City. I think the song reflected the challenges of returning to New York after my bout with cancer. I was 28 years old, and I was finding it difficult to find work. Five years earlier it had been a different story. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to be in New York. Jules was a much more certain person. She would go after…