Many years ago —so long ago that Frozen had not yet been released— I wrote this song. I have always been a huge Simon and Garfunkel fan, and I was very fortunate to meet Paul Simon in person. My friend Graham Hawthorne, who has played drums with everybody (Cyndi Lauper, Roberta Flack, etc.), was filling in for Steve Gadd on a tour, and I got to go backstage. I didn’t say anything, which I kind of regret. What can I say? I’m very shy.

I honestly don’t recall anything specific that inspired this song. Just the…

There was a time when I measured my songs in the number of pages. I was so proud when I wrote my first three-page song. As a big Dylan fan, I felt that it was perfectly okay to have long songs. That just meant that you had something to say. I started writing shorter songs around the time of Love and War: Volume 1. Part of the reason was that I had so many song ideas at that time. Sometimes I would write two or more a day, but during this period of my life, songs got shorter, because I had less time. I often…

Why is it that even when we need sleep the most, it doesn’t come? It’s like our bodies are fighting with our minds. Sometimes you just lie there and think of all the things you should have said or done in your life. There’s no lack of fuel for that fire. We have all kinds of cures. Melatonin, bourbon, distract yourself with some tv- the list goes on and on. But one trick that seems to work for me is to write, and this song is the result of one of those sessions. When you write something down, you get a…

So far, I haven’t really dug into the promised darkness. In order to understand that darkness, we have to go back a ways. As far back as I can remember, I liked to sing. When I was little, I would listen to records, so I could sing along. When I was seven or eight, my best friend moved to California, and I was very sad. There was no song that expressed how sad I was, so I just made stuff up and sang while I cried. It never occurred to me that I was doing something unusual. And maybe I wasn’t. Maybe that’s a…

It’s crazy that we call this time that we live in the information age. Sure, we have a lot of information, but a lot of it is garbage. And staying on top of what’s going on certainly doesn’t make you better off. I’d love to say that this was written from a knowing place of appropriate information-distance, but the truth is, I was once like Phil in the song- “an information-junkie and a cable-news whore.” I was plugged in to what was happening, and I was getting the talking points. I knew what was what. Or…

I got to the airport, and I got on the plane back to New York. I don’t know how. It’s odd that I don’t remember that. I suppose a therapist might say that I blocked it out. It doesn’t feel good to be the one that breaks someone’s heart. It doesn’t feel good to take something like a relationship that has the potential to be, well, anything, and to kill it off. And I couldn’t even tell anyone about it.

I mean, people knew. My friends knew that I was in a relationship that had an expiration date on it. I had…

While this is not the last song on the album, this is the last song that I wrote on the album.  I hadn’t written any songs for a couple of months. I wouldn’t write another song for another couple of months. It’s not that it was a dry period for me. The band was doing well. We were starting to get out of town and playing Boston regularly. We were combing through my catalog, looking for songs to play.

One day, I heard that the guy my ex had left me for had stumbled onto a late-night train, and because he was…

In the midst of a tumultuous year, there were a few moments when the world seemed positively friendly. I reconnected with a college friend one night. For an evening we talked about the past, the world, the future, but I don’t think I spent a lot of time thinking about my break-up, and it made an impact on me. I went home and started to write the song, but the opening lines leave a lot to live up to.

Thank you for tonight

I’ll remember this moment for the rest of my life

I mean, where do you go from there…

When I first wrote this song, I thought for sure that I had unconsciously plagiarized the melody. I knew the lyrics were all mine, but I thought I must have heard this melody somewhere before. This haunted me for years. I was afraid to play it out of fear that I would be exposed as a fraud for having stolen someone else’s melody. It’s been over a decade, and I still haven’t heard the song that I worried I might have ripped off because I never did.

What I experienced shortly after I wrote the song was an…

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 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…