I recorded these songs during an afternoon in August at an apartment that was not my own. It had been an idyllic summer, with nearly every weekend spent out at Rockaway Beach with friends and loved ones. There were caprese sandwiches and negroni picnics, mermaid parades, endless joints and countless beers, and sunsets spent in the sea. One of our frequent beach-going compadres was J Grabowski, a painter and a poet that I had become close with over the last couple of years. He was going up north for awhile and asked me to housesit for him while he was away, and I happily agreed.

J’s apartment is a little shangri-la, a shady haven amidst the chaos of the city. You walk into his place and time seems to stand still, like you could be anywhere from today to 50 years ago. The narrow halls and lived-in rooms extend like fingers to the backyard, where you find a moss garden enclosed by a hand-laid stone walkway, with ferns, trees of heaven and a japanese maple along the perimeter. In one corner of the garden there is a pyramidical stone surrounded by little rocks with crosses painted on them, a burial ground and resting place for the dead birds that he finds back there from time to time. After watering his plants and tending the garden, I would hang out for hours either reading one of the books of poetry he had stacked up in his painting studio or listening to old blues records and playing along on his guitar. He had this vintage nylon-stringed Silvertone that I’d always been fond of, the kind of guitar you would have ordered out of a Sears Roebuck catalog in the 60’s. It was a worn, well-used guitar, that had probably seen some shit and had a lot of soul.

I knew that I wanted to record something in his studio while I was there, to make a “record” of this time/place, and had gotten his blessing to do so. I brought my Tascam 4-track and set up a microphone in the corner, Robert Johnson-style, and banged these tunes out in a single session. After what had a been a long and arduous process involved with releasing my first EP, I had been wanting to try something a little more rough-hewn, less precious. I dusted off a couple of old songs that I had always wanted to hear on a classical guitar and some new ones I thought would go well with them. When it came time to record it felt like the whole world was contributing: birds chirped in the distance, the chair settled in time, and the cicadas let out their 17-year song in the making alongside my own.