I’m excited to announce a new album titled Wind Under the Door.
It’s been four years since I released the farewell-to-America song, “Changing of the Tide”. We are moving back to Central Europe from Tennessee this November, so the time has come for yet another farewell.
A few of the songs in my upcoming EP are a tribute to my home country. As Americans, we are a varied people with many different ideas, but the beauty of our landscapes unites us. Whether we’re gazing over the wavy dunes of White Sands National Park or watching the sun set over Lake Superior, nature shows us how small we are in relation to our surroundings. I remember staring wide-eyed at the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park, in awe of the iridescent, moving colors before me. “From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, this land was made for you and me.”
In My Creative Space
My latest songs evolved quickly once I started recording. I try to record new material while it’s still fresh so it doesn’t lose its spontaneity. For example, when I was writing “She’s a Rocket,” I recorded myself drumming on my studio desk, and it ended up in the final song.
For the title track, “Wind Under the Door,” I wrote the cello part in 2018 and didn’t actually record it until this year. By letting it sit for a few years, I was able to come back to it with a renewed vision. Yatziv Caspi recorded drums in his Berlin studio, adding a rhythmic glue to the legato bow strokes and picado finger picking. Yatziv also played on three songs from Kinora, so we have a history of collaborating together. With his in-depth mastery of percussion instruments such as udu and tabla drums, Yatz is able to match the song’s atmosphere with ease.
The mysterious “Buffalo Harvest” is a tribute to the indigenous tribes of South Dakota. It describes their synchronization with the migration of buffalo. The line, “I lay my head down on this ancient earth, and stare in silence at the ghost horizon,” evokes the expansive history that lies under the surface of the plains. I took my handheld recorder into the woods to capture the sound of birds. I play some fujara (Slovak shepherd’s flute) on this dreamy track to evoke the sounds of the forest.
When creating “Into the Narrows,” I started with the drums and built the song from that foundation. By reversing my songwriting process and layering the instrumentation around the drums, “Into the Narrows” takes on a flavor of its own. The crackling sound throughout the song is a field recording of footsteps on a gravel road, recorded near Dívčí Kámen in the Czech Republic.
I don’t want to spoil all the fun so I’ll leave the meaning of “She’s a Rocket” open to your interpretation. The playful story takes us across Arizona, from Marble Canyon to Catalina Foothills, laden with whimsical references to space travel.
Lastly, “This Love” is a sweet romance, with a lilting chorus that begins, “Your homemade paper whispers, echo in my dreams when evening falls.” The soft, fingerstyle guitar brings this short album to a close as we drift off to sleep.