"It's all about places, faces and feelings… Now, 'TTFP': Take the … 'Fffff—-fantastic' Picture!" (Friend and Photographic Mentor, Monte Zucker 1929-2007)
I like the moment when “I wouldn’t do that” becomes “Well, let me have a look.”
A friend has an idea. Someone holds out a hand. There’s something I haven’t quite finished, and I want to see what happens next. My good judgment remains available, although I don’t always consult it.
My new album, There Goes My Reputation, comes from my affection for people who still have something in mind. A little hope, a private ambition, a fondness for someone who knows exactly how to make them laugh.
I’m drawn to how much can remain undiscovered between people, and how much pleasure there can be in knowing someone well. Hearing the familiar story again. Catching the look across the room. Being glad it’s them.
There are eight songs here, with a few questionable decisions and some very good company.
As for my reputation, I thought it was doing reasonably well.
The album is available now on Bandcamp and coming soon to all streaming services. I’d love for you to spend a little time with it.
We can know someone for years and still be surprised by what they remember. Especially when we were there, too. Aging could be a factor. Ever remember an acquaintance in high school clearly and forget who you met last week?
We tell our stories with confidence, until an old friend starts smiling halfway through. We promise we’re listening, then hear something that reminds us of a story of our own. There’s affection in these exchanges, and sometimes a small disappointment we don’t notice until the other person stops talking.
I’m interested in that distance between people—and the unexpected ways it closes.
A familiar face can become someone we wish we’d known sooner. A person we barely knew can remain with us for a lifetime. We find ourselves imagining ordinary mornings together, or wondering what another choice might have asked of us. Even a life we’re grateful for can leave us curious about the one we didn’t live.
One More Thing grew from those feelings, and from the pleasure people continue to bring us.
Someone comes along, and suddenly we notice the books piled on the other chair. We consider a shirt we haven’t worn in a while. Nothing has been promised. Still, there’s a little more care in what we do, and we catch ourselves enjoying the preparations.
That interests me as much as regret does: our willingness to make room again.
We carry a great deal into each other’s company. Some of it gets told badly. Some of it slips out while we’re talking about something else. And sometimes we’re laughing too hard at a familiar story to get to the end.
There are people we want to hear from. Things we meant to ask them. We can be certain we know the whole story and still hope they’ll tell us more.
I went guitar-forward on most of the tracks – a throwback to Art Rock. There is an occasional grand piano and the softness of a string ensemble. But mostly, I long for that solo guitar, the legendary Gibson ES-335 to lift out of the rhythm to tell its tale. I hope you enjoy it!
There’s a line somewhere between what makes sense and what almost makes sense.
I’ve become increasingly interested in that line.
Not crossing it for the sake of being strange. Not abandoning melody, musicianship, or the pleasure of a song that simply feels good coming out of the speakers. I still want all of that. But lately I’ve been curious about how far a song can wander from the expected and still bring you along.
Ambergris is a further flirt with that line.
I’ve spent a long time building a musical library, and for much of that time songs behaved more or less as songs are expected to behave. They had stories. They had destinations. People arrived somewhere by the end.
I’m less certain now that they need to.
Life rarely presents itself in a clean narrative. We remember a face but forget the name. We remember exactly what someone said but have no idea why it mattered. A laugh survives for decades. An expensive evening disappears. Something overheard at the next table becomes more interesting than the conversation we were having ourselves.
Memory seems to have its own editorial department, and apparently nobody is supervising it.
That interests me.
So does the distance between what we observe and what we think we know. We spend an extraordinary amount of our lives watching other people, interpreting expressions, filling in missing information and constructing explanations from very little evidence. Sometimes we’re right. Sometimes we’re spectacularly wrong. Most of the time we never find out.
There’s humor in that, but also something strangely human.
The recent expansion of my musical library has given me permission to leave more of those spaces open. A lyric can notice something without explaining it. A guitar can answer a question the words never quite asked. Harmonies can become a little uncomfortable. Silence can be useful. A thought can wander into the room, stay for eleven seconds and leave without showing identification.
And a song can end before the listener has been told what to think about it.
That may be the line I’m flirting with.
I don’t want to live permanently on the other side of it. The line is interesting precisely because you can still see it. Melody matters. Musicianship matters. Emotion matters. So does the simple pleasure of a great guitar playing something you want to hear again.
But every now and then, I like leaning over that line far enough to wonder whether I’m still writing the kind of music I thought I wrote.
I’ve always been interested in the distance between what we see and what we think we know.
We meet somebody, notice a few things, hear half a story, and pretty soon we’ve got them figured out. Sometimes we’re right. Sometimes another detail comes along and the whole explanation falls apart.
That became the territory for Apparently.
The songs move through attraction, friendship, vanity, intelligence, kindness, anonymity, love and loss without asking anyone to be the villain. I was more interested in the little contradictions that make people difficult to explain—and considerably more interesting.
Musically, the record ranges pretty widely: cinematic art rock with an indie feel, guitar-forward arrangements, sophisticated rock, touches of soul and country, unusual harmonies, and plenty of room for the musicians to breathe. There are moments that make me laugh and others that became much more emotional than I expected.
It also turned out to be very good road music.
The kind of record I like when the traffic thins out, there’s some distance ahead, and I can actually listen rather than merely have music playing.
[Insert band photograph]
Apparently is available now on all streaming services.
