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 out. He wasn’t there much, since he was on tour a lot, but his room-mate Ethan White was.
Ethan was a great keyboard player, and a great guy in general. In addition to having played with Topaz, he also played in a band called Tortured Soul, though I’m not sure if they were a thing yet. At any rate, he was trying to convert a commercial space that wasn’t quite meant to be an apartment. There was a toilet, but no shower.
One day while I was there he asked me to help knock down a wall that was cinder-block, I think. My memory here is a bit hazy. He had a sledge hammer, and we took turns knocking the wall into rubble. It was hard labor, but it was also kind of therapeutic. I imagined myself knocking down my own past to make way for a brighter future. At any rate, the chorus of walls falling down got stuck in my head. I didn’t have any idea what the verses might be.
I kept thinking that the chorus would make a good song, and I began writing the music for the song around the time I settled with my friends Drew and Geri in Bushwick a few months later. We were in the middle of building walls at that point on a loft that was going to have three bedrooms by the time we were finished. This was a very busy time for the Navigators, and I wasn’t doing a lot of writing of new material.
It wasn’t until I was living with my future wife, Jesse, that the verses kind of came to me. By that point, the walls of my music career had seemingly come crashing down. I was unemployed, had sold the touring van, had lost my label and my booking agent. I could have written about how my own walls were falling down, but I don’t think I was ready to acknowledge that. Instead, the song is about how the walls of a world we knew were crumbling around us- yet all was not lost. The song is surprisingly hopeful. Listen closely to the third verse, and you will a hear that the falling down of the walls was really an opportunity.
When I started recording at NuMedia with Bob Brockman, I had been so frustrated over the experience of trying and failing to record the album that would become Love and War, Vol. 1, that I started looking at the songs that I had written before. I wanted to record the album of heartbreak and loss. This album in my mind was called The Heights, which sounds a bit like the musical In the Heights, but that musical wasn’t out yet. I had moved to Washington Heights about a year after I had been dumped, and the songs I envisioned on the album were all the songs of my dumping until I met my future wife.
The name The Heights was reference to the fact it was a low point in my life, and also that I managed to recover from my emotional pain in Washington Heights. The songs are all strong, and let’s face it, break-up albums are some of the best. I’m hoping that will be my next release.
At any rate, I think that song might have been the first song I recorded at NuMedia with Brian Griffin. The band was sort of defunct, but Brian liked the idea of working with Bob, and jumped at the chance. Next thing I knew, Naren was playing on the song adding his characteristic spacey-guitar sound. The song was basically finished at NuMedia, but we never mixed it. For some reason the song was never at the top of our list.
In hindsight, I don’t think the song would work on The Heights. I mean, I began writing it during my homeless break-up phase, but I didn’t finish it until after Love and War. I don’t think anybody but me cares about my trying to keep all the songs of a particular period together, and this song like many others does pose a few problems. Where does it belong? I have since concluded that a song is not written until it is completed, and that is the part of your life-story that it belongs to.