Until I Let You Go
It had been about four months since the break-up. A lot had happened. I’d spent about five weeks in my friend Wes’ apartment. I’d written a play, an epic poem, and a couple of songs. I’d moved into my friend Drew and Geri’s apartment, and we built the walls for three bedrooms in a loft apartment. It’s amazing how productive you can be when you are feeling sorry for yourself. That’s not so crazy, I think. When I was still, I didn’t like how I felt, so I just kept moving.
I had done all my writing at Wes’ apartment, and the rest of the summer as I bounced from couch to couch, I didn’t really have the peace and quiet I needed. Or sometimes it was just that I didn’t have my guitar or my computer. But I was taking notes. A lot of ideas that would later become songs were started during that time.
Still, I thought of myself as a songwriter, and I felt like I should have been writing every day but wasn’t. I don’t know what I expected. By the end of that summer, I was building a loft apartment on weekends- an apartment I occasionally lived in, but occasionally I was staying at my friend Ethan White’s place because there really wasn’t any place to lay my head in the construction mess that was the loft apartment. It wasn’t until we had built the bedrooms and I had moved all of my stuff out of storage that I was finally at rest enough to write a song- “Until I Let You Go.”
The song was the end of Act I of The Heights. I can’t say that I had moved on, but I realized that I had to move forward emotionally with my life. It wasn’t that I had let go, but that I recognized that letting go was the only option available.
A guy I had met several times, who had been a record executive in the eighties and who I thought might be able to help my career, was having dinner with me at a diner at what point and his advice regarding my heartbreak was to remember that “You can’t lose what you can’t live without.” I’d filed that line away for later use. It wasn’t until I finally had some peace and quiet from the insane life that I had created for myself that these words found a home.
The Recording
Bob Brockman asked me what to name the file for our session, and I said, “The Heights.” He thought I meant for this song, but I was thinking about the album. So he kept referring to this song as “The Heights.” I had corrected him a couple of times, but eventually I just let it go. It seemed like a promising start. NuMedia in SoHo was a top-tier study. There were dozens of gold and platinum records on the walls. It seemed like a promising start to something.
When I had started the song it was just me and an acoustic guitar playing to a click-track. I didn’t really have a band anymore. It had been about a year since we’d been dropped by our booking agent, and our label didn’t have any plans for us going forward. I had fought that end and tried to stop the inevitable, but we had sold the van, and an album that I had recorded- Love and War- was unfinished. But then I ran into Bob Brockman again.
Bob and I had worked together shortly after I was recovering from cancer. He was a nice guy, and easy to get along with. He had worked with some very successful people- most notably The Fugees. He had been hired to help me make a demo, and we had gotten some great work done, but nothing had come of it.
It was nice to work with Bob again, and little by little The Navigators had come on board. First, Brian Griffin joined me, followed by Naren and Darren. We had gone our separate ways after the band had flamed out. We hadn’t exactly broken up, we just didn’t have any opportunities to make music together. Our last real gig in New York was at Mercury Lounge, and because of a transit strike, we had a dismal turnout. The result was that that had been our last gig together.
I had always had high hopes for that group, and I always felt like we deserved to have been given a serious listen. These sessions rekindled that feeling, but in the end, it was not to be. The studio would soon close down, and I would have no outlet for my music unless I made it by myself, and I had little gas in the tank for that for some time.