going up!

elevator songs is out now - listen & purchase

My new album, Elevator Songs, made in collaboration with Grammy-winning vocal band Roomful of Teeth, is out today. I’d be thrilled if you’d listen and purchase a copy. We’re also going on tour in a couple of weeks. Details are here.

1.

An elevator is a transitional space. Transitions can be—often are—quite vulnerable. I’ve sometimes wondered if the heavy silence that fills elevators is a function of that vulnerability: pursed lips protecting soft bellies during short trips to the surgeon’s office, the divorce lawyer, a hotel room. Long before people stopped talking to each other on airplanes, there was an unspoken rule that you didn’t talk to strangers in elevators.

2.

On Halloween night last year, I snailed my way into a hotel elevator in downtown Brooklyn, weighed down by a pair of guitars and a disintegrating box of vinyl records. A woman in her fifties, wearing a gold lamé dress and the subtle fragrance of gin, stumbled in happily, too drunk not to make eye contact. I smiled at her. “Mother of the bride,” she chirped. I congratulated her, asked about the wedding.

“Beautiful. It was beautiful.”

I wanted to know more, but I’d reached my floor.

3.

One feature of the touring musician’s brain is that no matter how many hotels you’ve stayed in on any given tour, you manage, always, to remember your room number for the precise duration of your stay, and not a moment longer. You will forget it promptly upon checking into the next hotel.

4.

In the summer of 2023, as I prepared to write the piece that would become Elevator Songs, I sat with members of Roomful of Teeth in a sun-drenched dance studio on the campus of a sprawling art museum in Western Massachusetts, where I queried them about their experiences on the road. Over the course of six hours, I heard tales of tepid hot tubs, capsule wardrobes, in-room steam rituals, and the odd civil war reenactment conference.

5.

Elevator Songs is a kind of thought experiment: if we were to exit the elevator and follow those mostly silent strangers into their rooms (in a totally uncreepy way), what would we see and hear? Newlyweds coiled close to one another after a road trip through Utah? A fashion/travel influencer with a mobile podcast recording studio and a soft spot for Carl Jung? A struggling indie rock duo? An emotionally bombed out U.S. Army veteran? Would the laws of time and space hold, or would they give way to something more plastic?

6.

The loose container of this thought experiment gave me permission to write about whatever I wanted. Refreshingly—at least for me—there was no particular political project, no overarching theme. Some of the songs are drawn from stories I heard during our loose getting-to-know-you workshop in Western Mass; others spring from my imagination.

7.

It’s said that every sophomore record
Is a diary of planes and motels,
And strip mall record shops,
The arguments that run for hours
In rental cars all packed like Tetris,
Lobby coffee, daily bomb threats 
Nothing to write mom about… 

— “Sophomore Record” (Room 1211)

8.

Yesterday, walking through Brooklyn on my way to a recording studio, I watched a young father scold his towheaded toddler for “skipping four” while counting his steps in a crosswalk. I wanted to shake him (the father) by the shoulders and assure him that in two years, he will lament the fact that his toddler no longer skips the number four. In this moment, I am tired of being itinerant. The romance of the road is dead, replaced by a desire to be at home with my children, the younger of whom only recently stopped skipping fifteen.

9.

fourteen sixteen seventeen eighteen

10.

Going up.