And I know that we can be better, and build.

Solastalgia

This song is really the heart of the record, in multiple ways. Thematically, it captures what I'm trying to do here, which is describing what it's like to live in a time of climate change as a time of loss and regret, of a future squandered and degraded because of past decisions... universal emotions that can be felt personally as much as ecologically. Musically, there's a lot going on in this record but at core, this is a dialogue between two instruments: my trusty Warwick $$ Corvette bass guitar and my Roland TB-3 synth bass machine (hereafter referred to as a 303 because it is the modern update of that classic instrument). As with the organic and the synthetic, the question is, can these two things, which compete for space in the same registers, coexist? Those are the things this record is about. Someone else might do an activist climate record. My record is, instead, an attempt to score the moment.

Another thing is that this song took more time and effort than any three other songs on this record combined. Continuously I was dissatisfied with it. I did not like the synth pads. Then I did not like my vocal take. Then I did not like my backup vocal take. Parts of at least three separate trips to the studio were spent on this track. This is unusual: I either know a song is good within the first hour or so of making it, or I abandon it. Here, it was worth the persistence. This is my favorite song on the record. When we finally finished it, I declared this an excellent fifth track. Charlie Nieland, the record's producer, responded, "I think this might be the first track." In the end he was correct.

Superbloom

“Doggerland” took more than two years from concept to completion. In that time, I grew a lot as a musician. This was especially true once COVID-19 hit New York and I was spending upwards of 23 hours a day at home. I began exploring MIDI instruments as I hadn't previously done, dedicated myself to playing bass guitar, and became more disciplined about singing practice than I had ever done. I developed new techniques for making drums sound more dynamic and realistic. The result was a major step forward in songcraft. There are a lot of good songs I wrote for this record that you are not hearing because, sonically, they wilt in comparison to this one.

A superbloom is when a rare rainfall hits a desert—Death Valley has some of the most famous ones—and the desert suddenly explodes with fiery colors, sometimes only for weeks, before lying dormant again, sometimes for decades. Lying low and trying to hang on until the return of the good times seemed an appropriate sentiment for a pandemic.

There’s Nothing Wrong With Clouds, Except

Each song on this record attacks the issue of climate change from a different angle. This one is about the remaining uncertainties of climate modeling, many of which center around the effects of warming on cloud cover. Around the time I wrote this I watched a TED Talk by Kate Marvel, who explained that the preliminary findings on the question of cloud cover were not good... that low grey heat-trapping clouds would end up where we don't want them, and that high wispy white heat-deflecting clouds would also end up where we don't want them. Simultaneously I was following a number of places where changes in cloud cover and climate had caused serious droughts and upheaval; the American Southwest and, more existentially, the Sahel. Meanwhile Cape Town nearly ran out of water.

Once again, there's a second meaning to the song; the muttered backup vocals refer to the grey heavy curtain of clouds that descend upon the depressed mind and block any vision of a hopeful future. There's no equivalency between individual mental health and global ecological collapse, of course, but both are real and wherever you need this song to be, it's there.

Patterns in the Air

A sort of second half of “Clouds” (similar tempo, same key). I was wandering around Central Park, lamenting how scientists tell us what's going to happen to our atmosphere and we do nothing. I was also looking up at the vertical tax havens on Billionaire's Row with their lights dark because nobody lives in them, and this in a city where the rent is too damn high, and lamenting that no one seems able to fix that either. But also, I was thinking about how most of those places are a home for somebody, and that due to the prior decisions in my life, I'd arrived at a point where I wasn't ready to settle down and make a place for myself even though I should be. I would have had a hard time accepting this outcome if I had been informed of it when I was first starting out in this city.

Fun fact: as a tenor, this song is so low in my range it's actually harder to sing than almost any other song here. After this song, I resolved to never write in this register again, and for most of the rest of this record, at least, I did not.

Environments

Back to the dialogue between my Warwick $$ Corvette and my 303 bass synth. On some songs, they seamlessly locked into a groove. And then there was this song. I did so many remixes and ultimately transposed the whole song up a third to make it work.

Where “Clouds” is about climate modeling, this record is about climate adaptation. I work in the United Nations system, and one of the elements of climate change discussions is adaptation. It's a concept that makes people uncomfortable, because even discussing it is in some sense an admission of defeat; if you're adapting to climate change, you're accepting that there is going to be climate change. But at this point, some warming is baked into our Earth system. So we will have to adapt to new environments.

As with many other songs here, this one has a second interpretation; it could equally be read as an ode to recovering from PTSD, something I had to do after suffering a nasty concussion a few years back. One can recover... but it might change you.

The Land is Changing

I cranked this song out in April 2020, a disturbing time in New York when the pandemic had just hit, case counts had skyrocketed, the whole city was locked down, and no one knew yet how COVID was spread. People were obsessed with hand sanitizer. It wouldn't be until the summer that people realized that it didn't really spread outdoors, so New York’s streets were empty. In the rare moments I took a walk outside, I would glare at passing joggers or bikers, figuring they were a major health hazard, even if they were 20 feet away, because we didn’t know any better yet. This song is really hard to sing.

Exactly The Same Way

A medley of lyrical themes.

• The repeated waves of colonization of Australia by various humans and their catastrophic effect on the local fauna and on prior waves of humans. The standard thing humans do when arriving on terra incognita is to set it on fire. Like, paleontologists can tell first human contact with a new land by the layer of charcoal. From the ashes the humans then proceed to hunt down and exterminate all the large animals—moas, mastodons, giant sloths, dodos, thylacines, etc. We keep doing this. Even now that we know we do it, we still do it. This is the latest in a long line of songs of mine partly inspired by David Quammen’s masterful book on island biogeography, “The Song of the Dodo.” Also I wrote this song in a summer where Australia was on fire, which only added fuel.

• The symphonic elements of this piece are from a Native Instruments patch called Arkhis that I had gotten when it went on sale upon first release, which I suppose means this is one of the first songs ever recorded with that instrument not involved with manufacturing or testing it. Arkhis is the first classical music virtual instrument I've ever had at my disposal that is legitimately good.

• As for the lilting "forgive me" wail in the chorus, weird story. I was at a bar in Bushwick where the music collective the Bushwick Book Club, which features artists performing songs written about the book of the month rather than discussing it like a normal book club, and at intermission I was in the bar and this tune came swimming into my head. I left and forgot about it. Two months later I went back for another Bushwick Book Club, and again at intermission the same melody came back: "forgiiiiive me... forgive me." Like a ghost of my past or something. I am a creature of regrets anyhow. Anyway, this time I recorded me singing the melody on my phone, and it eventually found its way here. Spoiler alert: the sense of being a creature who has outlived its time on this earth is going to play a major part of my next record. And by the way, this is where my "Warwick and 303 must be in every song" rule broke down completely. Neither appear here. Maybe they went extinct.

The Sky Must Be Destroyed

I didn't actually want this on the record at all, but Charlie insisted it was great and it eventually grew on me and made the final cut. I think this is the only song with a bass other than the Warwick—that's a 1979 fretless Fender Precision Bass with a maple fretboard, a monstrously thumpy instrument I bought from Matt Umanov Guitars in 2015.

"Environments" is about climate adaptation. "Clouds" is about climate modeling. This song is about geoengineering... humanity's possible desperate last-ditch effort to deliberately change the Earth system in order to combat our own perturbations of said system. The go-to book about this is the surprisingly funny "Under A White Sky" by Elizabeth Kolbert, which is like the song "There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly" except if the subject was not an old lady but rather the Army Corps of Engineers. The Bond villain-worthy schemes designed to keep Asian carp out of Lake Michigan, or to rid Australia of an invasive toad, are ridiculous... and so is geoengineering. This song was written in the run-up to the climate conference in Spain, where not much was accomplished. So... our future might be ridiculous.

Eyes Like The Ocean

Hahahahaha funny story behind this one. Long ago I was about to graduate from college and had an extra class and nothing to fill it, so I took a course on the history of American popular music. At one point we were instructed to write a song ourselves. "Don't give it a lame title like, 'Eyes Like The Ocean' or something. Be creative," the professor instructed. I took this as a challenge and wrote a song with that title. The verses were dreadful, but the chorus was kind of catchy actually. I then forgot about it for 15 years. And then one day I suddenly found myself humming it again for no reason. I wrote new verses, describing a trip I'd recently made across a desiccated, drought-stricken California to visit a friend. Like so much of SoCal, the trip was hell and paradise at the same time. Literally. Later that summer, the town of Paradise, CA was burned down by wildfires. My question throughout this record is, basically, we've put ourselves in a tough spot, and can we rise to the challenge of getting ourselves and and our planet out of it?

The high keyboards were added by Charlie at the very end, and it's odd because they improbably and vividly remind me of the soundtrack to an animated version of the story of Noah's Ark I had seen as a child on a public TV program called "Long Ago and Far Away," narrated by James Earl Jones, where Noah looks one more time with gratitude on the empty ark before leaving it and returning to the land. The sonic landscape of a story of rising seas, ecological collapse, and rebirth... serendipitously rediscovered here.

This song was going to dramatically end the record, and if you listen to the outro it feels like it. Except then I wrote one more song.

Tomorrow’s Sky

Sometimes songs come together very quickly. A singer/keyboardist friend of mine came over and I was showing her how my production works. She said, "I'd like to write a song off of a bossa nova kind of beat." So I quickly made one using my drum software. Then I said, "Here are some of the ways we can build a track." So I put a couple of MIDI layers off the Native Instruments' Cloud Supply—the best $50 you can spend on a virtual instrument, wow—and then I grabbed my bass and recorded it... and my guitar with an octave delay on it... and 10 minutes later this song existed in totality, minus the vocals, with my friend having sat there on the couch watching the whole time. I told my friend... "actually I might have to have dibs on this one." Later that night, I freestyled the first verse and cannibalized the chorus from an abandoned song.

The second verse, the one that begins "Sometimes I stand alone" is a real coup. I wrote this lyric in high school, no joke. It was the first lyric I wrote that wasn't atrocious. I didn't know what it meant. I just knew that I liked the rhyming in it. It has previously been plugged into at least half a dozen failed songs over many years. And it finally ended up here, written during a global pandemic when standing alone arms akimbo looking out my window taking in city sirens and lights was a nightly activity. Whoa.

About the final line, "And I know that we can be better, and build," is most directly but not at all exclusively about the need to build green infrastructure. I was even going to call the album, "And Build." But then I listened to an episode of the podcast "In Our Time" with Melvyn Bragg about Doggerland, the flat expanse of land that held vast forests and humans as well until the end of the last ice age, where sea levels rapidly rose and submerged it. That sense of a lost land an ecosystem and way of life.... that struck me. Throw in the cover art , a painting by my father of his trip to the North Slope of Alaska—quite possibly the next Doggerland, in its way—and that seemed to be the right title of this record.