About “The Nocturnal Among Us”

Making “The Nocturnal”
“The Nocturnal” is a collection of songs that I wrote over the last 3 years. It is my first record as a solo artist (I have put out two records with my former band, north19). It is also the first time I have worked with a producer (JD Foster, who has worked with Calexico, Richard Buckner, Patty Griffin and many others) and recorded in a studio outside of Seattle.

To date, making “The Nocturnal” is the most fun I have ever had playing music—it was hotter than hell, humid, sticky, and we were up in Maine in a big old farmhouse with no internet or cell phone reception. We drank too much and had a lot of coffee and went into town everyday to get huge ice cream cones. Maine has some incredible ice cream. It is the first time I have felt such a synergy: 5 people in a house with nothing to do but make music. We tracked 14 songs in 6 days. Later, we had the honor of being joined on 3 songs by Austin Nevins, the guitar player for Josh Ritter and many other artists.

We finished the tracking in mid-August, and the next week I got married to my long time love, so it was a pretty magical time all around. In October of 2009 we met up with JD again in Portland, OR, and spent a very intense week mixing. During that week, the trees turned gold and fall rushed in. We got the final product in our hands at Christmas, and released it in the US in March 2010.

About the themes of the record
“The Nocturnal Among Us”, while a complete joy to make, is a somewhat somber album. A lot of it is written about a complex and tragic event that I was involved with in my childhood, which I have spent years trying to understand. I’ve never been able to properly articulate what happened, but I think it is time.

I was heavily involved in a sports team (whitewater kayaking) growing up. The coach was somewhat of tyrant and ruled our lives with an iron fist, but I still loved him and respected him and felt very much shaped by his influence. I first learned to swear on the kayak team, an unfortunate trait that I have yet to shake. I also developed a love for long drives in hot vans and an incurable thing for the ever-present Outdoorsy Bad Boy. (Whom luckily, I did not marry.)

To make an extremely long story short, it came out years later that this coach had been systematically grooming and then molesting the young boys and men on the team. These were my friends, my teammates. I had been through everything with them. They came out with it one by one. One of them lost his life. The pain of what he had gone through was too much. I dedicated the album to his memory and to the rest of the now-grown kids who are still struggling to understand what happened.

The song “So Long, Summertime” is my tribute to these boys, and to my own sullied memories of the experience. It is my attempt to move on and forgive, although probably I will never forget. When I sing “when I call you, I swear I’ll be home, when I call you I’ll pick up the phone this time.” I mean it. I wish to god I had known what was happening and could have helped before it was too late for my friend.

So that is the overarching theme that makes this record feel sad. Not all the songs are about this incident, in fact a lot of them are about love, broken cars, happy ghosts, birds, and things that have nothing to do with sad things like molestation.

About the title
“The Nocturnal Among Us” is the title of a poem that was written by my cousin, Caitlin Walsh. Caitlin was an incredible poet and scholar and died in her early twenties. Her passing shook my world to the core and has tinged my music ever since. Her sister, Alison Walsh, is a visual artist living in Brooklyn. She painted the cover art for the record, and the title of the painting was “The Nocturnal Among Us” after Caitlin’s poem. I loved the sound of these words, and feel they fit in well with the records themes. I am very honored to use them as the album title. In a small way, we can keep Caitlin’s artistic visions alive.


About the subjects in the songs (part II)
I try not the censor my writing—although it is hard because I have a VERY loud inner critic who has a lot to say on the subject. I generally just write about whatever comes out. Sometimes, it is love, and more often it is lost love. (I predict I will write the “wedding album” with lots of happy love songs next…)

I had a few songs on this record, in particular “Dreaming My Life Away”, about the day to day frustration of being a musician: cars that never seem to work, never having enough money, eating rejection for breakfast, and the general feeling that I am, well, dreaming my life away.

I also write a fair amount about insomnia- something that I have struggled with for the last few years. Songs like “The Nocturnal Among Us” and “Crooked Sea” were at least partially born in that hazy dream state I get into in the dark of night when sleep just won’t come.

On the songs chosen for the record
When we went to Great North Sound Society, we recorded 14 songs, which was pretty much every song I had waiting in the wings of my head. That would have made for a very long record, so Eric (my longtime drummer) and JD (Foster, our producer) helped us narrow it down to 11 songs for the main record. We put 3 more out on “The Nocturnal EP”, which is a little EP I sell at shows. 1 of the songs didn’t quite make the cut, and went back to the drawing board. It may appear on the next record, or it may just go away. Forever.

On the response so far
Releasing one’s own CD is a roller coaster ride. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s not so good, and it’s always an adventure. I pretty much dedicated the last two years of my life to making this CD and releasing it properly in the US and now in Europe. It is often hard to know where to turn to, and what the next step is, and I felt like giving up on many, many rainy mornings. I spent a lot of money that I didn’t have. CD’s are hard things to sell in this day and age.

But building a fan base on a grassroots level is an incredibly intimate and powerful experience. I’ve had people drive hundreds of miles to a show just because they liked a song they heard on my website. I played in a women’s detention center in Rochester, Minnesota, and the women cried their eyes out and asked my to play “Crooked Sea” twice. I sold out a show in Chicago even though I’d never stepped foot in that town. And now, I’m working on building a base in Europe, which is incredibly exciting.


Any information that might be worth knowing
For one, I am not nearly as serious as my promo pictures would suggest. Nor am I as sad, although this record did scour through some of the more unfortunate incidents in my past. It’s hard to get a good record picture unless you are staring out into the distance. I’ve heard the same is true about hat modeling.

I also work as a fisheries biologist, and spent many hours on motor boats in all kinds of weather. I have worked in Bristol Bay, Alaska, cutting open dead salmon and avoiding bears. I am now (slowly) leaving that world to dedicate myself full time to music, but part of me will probably always be cruising across some lake somewhere at full throttle.

I started off as an opera singer, and even went so far as to live in Salzburg, Austria and attend the Mozarteum. I had to take a crash course in German and often had no idea what class I was attending. After I left the Mozarteum, I swore off music forever. And then I heard Alison Krauss.

Yes, I blame her for taking me down this lonely road of country-folk, for de-railing my career as a biologist, and for leaving me eternally in need of cash. I don’t remember any particular song, just her voice and the way it talked to me. It was pretty much downhill from there.