The writing
The Heights is a reference to Washington Heights where I lived after a tumultuous period in my life. I mark the beginning of this period as happening right after I was dumped by my girlfriend of several years. It was a devastating blow for me as any breakup is, but with the added challenge of having to find a place to live while coping with the loss. I spent over three months without a fixed address. Thanks to my friends, I was always able to find a place to lay my head.
I spent the summer dating online and couch-surfing, with extended stays in Hell’s Kitchen at my friend Wes’ and DUMBO at my friend Ethan’s. Ultimately I moved in with my friends Drew and Geri, but this required that we build three bedrooms in a giant loft apartment. Our three bedrooms created a second floor of sorts. It was kind of a weird place. But it became my home for the next nine months.
While my love life was hurting, my music career starting to take off. During this period, I went from playing the taproom at The Knitting Factory to playing at Bowery Ballroom. The Navigators recorded and released Meet the Navigators. We got a manager, and we began playing out of town, and ultimately signed a record deal with Velour Records.
Somewhere in the midst of all this activity, I began dating a woman I’d met online. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and initially our relationship was mainly about me (a cancer survivor) offering support to someone facing her worst nightmare. She had moved back home to Texas to be with her family, so all of our correspondence was online, and later over the phone. After months of this back and forth, and after her recovery from surgery, we met in person. We seemed to hit it off.
Truth be told, I wasn’t looking for anything serious, but things got very serious very quickly. After a month of dating her father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. She eventually decided that she had no choice but to go back to Texas to be with her mother. I was having more success with my music than I had ever known, and I simply couldn’t go back with her, so after a very intense six months, I was single again.
It was around this time that I ended up in Washington Heights, and I reflected on the events of a very tumultuous year and a half. Throughout this whole time, I felt that my muse had abandoned me. I had written less than a song a month, which was not much of an output for me. The weird thing is that when I began to assemble all the songs that I had written for the album, I didn’t have any I cared to leave out. I thought they were all good, and together they told a complete story- though not in the order that they were written.
The Recording
The Navigators with Phelim White and Andrew Emer recorded three of the songs: “Sooner or Later”, “Russian Roulette” and “I See You Clearly.” We were actually in a studio to record what would become Glory, Glory, and I had presented many of these songs to the band, but our sound was a lot more rock and roll then the songs that I had written. It also hadn’t occurred to me that there was an album here. I was still thinking in terms of songs, and not albums, which is why we didn’t release a full-length album.
It wasn’t until I was playing with Brian Griffin, Darren Eboli and Naren Rauch that I had even began thinking about releasing songs bundled around the time that they were written, and when I did, it was to record the most recent songs that I had written, which became Love and War: Vol. 1, for which the second volume never got recorded. In fact, just about everything that could go wrong did go wrong for me and my music career at that time. We got dropped by our booking agent, and our label stopped pushing us.
I ended up at NuMedia working with the Grammy-winning Bob Brockman. I still hadn’t released Love and War, but the effort on trying had soured me on the material. I began to go back to the songs that would become The Heights. When I started recording with Bob, he asked what to call the file in the recording software. I said, “The Heights” because that’s what I envisioned the name of the album. Bob thought that was the name of the first song, which was “Until I Let You Go,” and he kept calling the song that for months. We recorded a few other songs at NuMedia- “I Can’t Hold On” and “Russian Roulette”- but the studio shut down before we could finish.
Over the next decade or so, I took a few stabs at the rest of the songs, but I never felt that they were finished. It wasn’t until I was gathering the material for Standing on a Rock, that I rediscovered The Heights. I withheld all of the Navigators songs that we had recorded at NuMedia that would have been on The Heights because I was going to finish that album. At some point. I wasn’t sure when.
Andrew Lee, who had mixed Standing on a Rock was eager to get started on the next project. I sent him over all the songs in whatever condition they were in. The original idea was that he would let me know what I needed to work on, and then when summer came along, I could focus on those tracks. A few months passed, and he sent me the first mixes.
I was a bit surprised. There were some songs that were in a semi-finished state, but I had thought that most of them would need work. When I first heard the mixes, it just didn’t seem right to me. But then I listened to them again. And again. I thought that some of the tracks sounded “beat up”, but Andrew had managed to add some sparkle to everything. From that moment on we began to work with the tracks as they were changing a part here and there, but largely keeping the original feel.
It’s not a textbook way to record an album, but the seemingly transient haphazard manner in which it was recorded, really reflects the time in which they were written. The music alternates between overflowing and sparse, because it seems that I either had too much going on, or plenty of space to reflect on the noise from before. I hope you enjoy it. There certainly won’t be another album like this