My Debut Album Dropped Today!

Great Googly Moogly!

It’s official. Today your boy dropped not one, but two musical releases. My LP and my EP are out in the ether for your listening pleasure. My songs no longer belong to me. They now belong to the world, whether the world wants them or not. Yup, at the tender age of 47, I can fancy myself a recording artist. Bucket list. Check.  

There’s a story behind every album and, if my dear reader will indulge me, I’ll seize this space to share mine. At the risk of drowning the music by swimming too far into the muddy waters of narrative…

I’ve been a music junkie (think: legit junkie) since I was 13, which was when, after years of fighting my folks over the matter, I was finally allowed to quit piano lessons. Quitting piano may well be my biggest regret, though I have so many regrerts to choose from. 

I tried to reconnect to the piano in college, but I worked two jobs and tried bo build a resume while pursuing my coursework. Try as I might and dream as I did, I was hella busy 24/7, leaving no time for the 88. I landed a great teaching gig before I graduated. I quickly became an unrepentant workaholic, which I proudly justified as a consequence of my commitment to corrupting the youth. I taught a full load, advised three student clubs, taught summer school, completed a master’s degree, and did everything in my power to become the best damn teacher I could be. I was obsessed. And once I felt like I was on the path to mastering my craft, I spread my wings and flew to Barcelona to sharpen my saw. That city inspired my artistic ambitions, but the way I pursued that teaching job, which I loved, left me little room to pursue much else. I later let the job in Berlin consume me even more. Then came love, then came marriage, then came baby in the baby carriage. Still no 88. On Saturday this baby turned 11. Somehow. 

It took a pandemic to bring me back to making music. That damned pandemic pulled me from my classroom, shook my foundations, and agitated my anxieties. I was penned in, locked down, disconnected, drunk, and downright indignant.

I was unmoored, seeking an anchor. I started a podcast (then another podcast) to create a space for connection. That helped. But I pined for a pursuit that was meditative in nature because the nature of meditating as we commonly conceive of it is lost on me. So on May Day 2020, the moment after I posted this short meditation on YouTube, I literally dusted off the keys and got to work. Fate dealt us lemons and I was hellbent on making lemonade. I was gonna be a piano player. But I had no plans to write songs, let alone record an album. 

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Can I tell ya about the album now?

After two years of playing piano and producing podcasts, I decided to devote a season of my podcast to exploring the working lives of artists of various mediums, from painters to poets to pianists. I hoped that talking to artists would give my audience a sense of the complexities and nuances of the working lives of artists. I also hoped that spending quality time listening intently to artists would shape my creative practices and my vision as an aspiring pianist. 

Then I got the cockamamie idea that I could write songs that reflected the tone and content of the conversations I recorded with my artists on my podcast. Silly as this sounds, this sleight of hand empowered me to write. How so? First, I had a subject and a feeling to explore. So there was a boundary there. Second, the song wasn’t about me or my incoherent feelings. This helped with the whole ego thing. Third, the song was a gift, an homage to my podcast guest. I was inspired by the drive to share this gift. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I had a deadline: the song had to be written, arranged, recorded, and produced by the time the podcast aired. So my idea, however cockamamie, paved a path and created boundaries. 

The running joke is that I recorded the best damn songs ever written…about podcast conversations. For a lack of competition, I reckon I’ll take that title. And the Grammy for Best Songs About a Podcast goes to…me! Go me, go!

The first song on the album is the first song I ever recorded. It’s probably the best song I wrote. It helps that Marty Kondziolka, my childhood pal who happens to be the Polish Sausage King of Chicago, drives the song forward with pitch-perfect drumming. In fact, I like this song so much that it’s the first and the last track on the album. Giorgio Morandi’s Bottles is a meditation on my podcast conversation with Berlin-based contemporary artist, Benjamin Rubloff. 

In our discussion, der Rube referred to this proposition by Philip Guston: 

When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you––your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics––and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out.

Guston’s expression of the problem of consciousness, of ego, of audience, and of intent became the motif of Giorgio Morandi’s Bottles. Morandi was an Italian printmaker and painter who metaphysically meditated on still lifes and landscapes as Italy careened from crisis to crisis. My dear Patrick Baker, who also careens from crisis to crisis, was moved by my song.

Dr. Baker has an international spirit, an Italian heart and an Etruscan soul. He seizes ripe moments to escape Berlin to his northern Italian Shangri-La where he ferociously tends to his olive grove and practices breathing. I was gleeful when I learned that Baker felt connected to Giorgio Morandi’s Bottles. I mean, my first song found a loyal audience of one. What more could I ask for?

Around this time last year, after a night of bellying up to the bar, I decided that Patrick needed to play music with me. Not to record. Just to connect. To commune. To create. To careen away from the crises, one chord at a time. Soon enough he lugged his acoustic across the neighborhood and we set down to make sounds. First song? Giorgio, natürlich. 

We ended up recording a sweet version with Baker singing and playing guitar. Imagine my delight to hear my friend sing my song! That should be enough. But in the spirit of careening from crisis to crisis, I wanted to add a gliding quality to the recording. I wasn't content to tap into the digital toolbox to actualize this. So I suckered my former history student Sebastian into playing cello. 

So Giorgio got a second interpretation and a new life. Patrick and I ended up playing together every Friday for a while. Just jamming the songs we love. We ended up playing what I might loosely describe as covers of campfire songs. By my reckoning, we were seeking to commune over comfort food. We each sang a song that we sang to our girls, back when they could stand the sounds of our voices. Singing and playing together brought us great joy in turbulent times. I wanted to document that intersection of joy and turbulence. So we recorded three campfire songs together, each sweeter than the next. 

So tracks 1 and 10 are Giorgio Morandi’s Bottles. Tracks 4, 8, and 9 are our campfire songs. On track 9, we are joined by my beloved bride Megan, who hangs tight in the harmonies before elevating the track with her vocal performance. 

So there are five originals and five covers. The other two covers on the album are both recorded in the spirit of my conversation with Sonya Naumann, a visual artist working in photography.

I’ve long admired Sonya. She embodies a fascination and an energy that allows her to meet people where they’re at. Towards the end of our podcast we ended up trading verses on Dylan’s Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie. So my first thought was to record a Dylan song. Later I did. It’s track 7. But right after we wrapped the recording, while the mics were still hot, I poured a three finger whiskey and played Angel from Montgomery, a John Prine tune that I know best from Bonnie Raitt’s recording. Prine was the first person I knew of to die of Covid. His death brought me closer to his music. I feel like my conversation with Sonya spoke to the intersection of the poetics of Prine and the blues-infused, alt-folk sensibilities of Raitt. I sometimes regret not writing a song for Sonya. It would’ve been a valuable experience for me. But I take solace in recording two gritty solo piano tracks as reflections on our conversation.  

I also took a lot of solace in bringing my people together for a song I wrote for Berlin-based visual artist, Hannah Dougherty. 

I got Marty K back on drums and Ms. Megan on vocals. I also got my childhood sweetheart Scott Robbin on guitar and vocals. Keep the Pencil Moving explores the problem of artistic intent. Hannah speaks poetically about the power of youth and imagination as it relates to social justice. I tried to capture some of that in this song, which has come to mean a lot to me. 

Dancer and choreographer Elina Akhmetova also has much to say about the power of youth and imagination. 

Elina works in a longform community practice that tends towards collective ecstasy. We delved into how her work deals with processing trauma. For Elina, dance is about a communal commitment to healing. I was deeply moved by this. 

Elina was my student in Barcelona almost twenty years ago. At the conclusion of our conversation she quoted my then colleague, David Pover. Something of a mythical character, whose command of the language would be downright dangerous in less earnest hands, Pover bid farewell in his annual commencement address. Elina never forgot Pover’s admonition that as the graduates go out into the world, they should “be fearless and fearlessly honest.”

That admonition, and Elina’s embodiment of it, resonates with me. So goes the song. Not only did I bring my sweet n’ spicy brother-in-law, Kevin Fleming, into the mix, I got me a choir! Yessir. The John F. Kennedy High School Berlin Choir brought this song to new heights. And the Grammy for Best Vocal Track by a Masked High School Choir goes to…

Sharing my music with my high school kids was unsettling. But this was not nearly as unsettling as the prospect of penning lyrics for one of my favorite poets, Joshua Weiner. Hr. Weiner joined me for a double episode of the podcast. He was, as is his wont, unrelentingly generous. The perfect guest. How could I possibly write a song that would properly honor our conversation? Even more confounding, how could I possibly compose lyrics for the poet? “Hey Thelonious, I wrote this tune for you.” Nein, danke! I devised a pathway out of this ego torture chamber: I wrote a song around an Osip Mandelstam poem that Josh translated. 

Track six is Mandelstam: Voronezh, 1935. It’s a tip of the hat to Josh. It’s also a lament for the victims of authoritarian excesses. Mandelstam was tortured and killed by Stalin. I recorded the song weeks before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I performed it at three Ukraine benefit concerts, most recently at one my students and I hosted, just days after Putin killed “mistrusted loyalist,” Yevgeny Prigozhin. It’s wicked dark. But the bright side is that I actualized my adolescent dream of jamming with not one, but two Kondziolka boys. Mark K. contributed a sax solo that illustrates his complete understanding of the song. Boy is a legend. 

None of this would have been possible without this legend:  

Most of the tracks on the album were produced or co-produced by my squeeze, Brian Trahan. My student two decades ago, Brian has become my teacher. In addition to lending his technical and musical prowess, Brian taught me the basics of how to produce music. His patience and grace and kindness quite literally inspired me throughout the project. In addition to guiding me through rudimentary engineering wizardry, he taught me how to nurture a loving space that allows creativity to flourish. I love this kid!

I look forward to sharing more about Brian and I in the next edition of this newsletter, which will explore my EP, Each Petal a Portal. 

That’s the story. You know too much. But still, I invite you to listen to my debut album, The Bend. 

Yours, 

D