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? You’re not supposed to start with your biggest statement, and maybe if I’d thought about it, I would have ended the song with that. So the song just hung in the air for a while, but there were bits and pieces of my life at that moment. One such moment is when the power went out in New York. The whole island was without power, which was a first (and a last at this point). I managed to find my brother and walked to the Upper East Side, which wasn’t too bad of a walk, especially since I had moved to Washington Heights, which was another hundred blocks further. How do you navigate New York without a cell phone or a subway?
It wasn’t long after that I was in Michigan. I had spent many a summer getting away to a little town called Northport and was fortunate enough to have a moment to breathe there to enjoy the shimmering sunsets and the wind in my sails blowing strong.
This is yet another song that I finished in Washington Heights. All told I finished “Pull Yourself Together One More Time,” “Thank You For Tonight,” “Everybody Wants a Piece of You,” and “I Want to Be.” I think I wrote them all in one week, which was a big output at the time. I’d been storing the songs in me for some time, and the relative quiet of the Heights gave me the mental space to complete them.
It should be said that Washington Heights isn’t all that quiet. On my block, in the evenings, there was always someone playing cowbell along to some Latin disco of some sort. At one point, I even tried to learn Spanish, but it seemed like a frivolous pursuit at the time.
Somehow the pain was fading away. The world didn’t seem so bleak. The future seemed bright. I had played my first show at the Bowery Ballroom, and we had the whole room singing along to “Sooner or Later.” I had certainly voiced by complaints to the universe, but this song was a moment of gratitude, and that’s how you follow up a big opener: gratitude:
Thank you for this life.