//////Strum
I almost always stay away from revealing too much about this music since there are no lyrics and you should get to decide how it makes you feel and what or who it reminds you of. If your experience of the music is contrary to what I had in mind when I was writing it, that’s ok. There are no wrong answers. Telling you what I meant to convey artistically steals some agency away from that experience and I don’t want to do that.

But as for the granular mechanics of how the tunes were composed and recorded, there are some things I can tell you that you may find interesting. The record is called Strum because every tune prominently features the sound of a plucked or strummed instrument: mandolins, guitars, basses, banjos, pianos, and including instruments that usually aren’t thought of that way like violins, drums, even people (what is the human voice but the sound of cords vibrating?).

During the recording process I found myself progressively replacing synth textures, which predominated our last album Omegah, with acoustic, organic sounds. I wouldn’t say we made things any simpler — it’s still pretty fucking cinematic. But there’s lots of sounds in here that are identifiably human-made: creaky gears, ambient room noise, breathing, chair squeaking, and lots of calloused fingers on strings and frets. Sounds like that make me feel like I’m in the room with the humans making the music, and remind me it’s humans making it.

The album begins with the title track, which is two tunes I’d written previously smashed together. The introduction, in which the instruments pop up one at a time to “introduce” themselves, came out of a never-finished collaboration with the great violinist and synthesist Todd Reynolds. The rest was from a tune I wrote at the Antenna Cloud Farm artist residency in 2017. I thought the two pieces complimented each other nicely and were a perfect platform to convey the intent of the album.

Some Easter eggs:
–Sam’s alto part was very loosely written out, and I wrote “Johnny Hodges” above it; he took my meaning perfectly.
–Hsuan-Fong’s oboe part is inspired by a similar one in ‘Baby Love Child’ by Pizzicato Five.
\\Blair and Glenn’s piano parts throughout the album were all recorded on the same day at Big Orange Sheep so the miking would be consistent.
–Michael Bellar’s creative brain and ears were even more valuable to this recording than his playing; his parts, like Sara’s and Andrew’s, just have his name on the top rather than the instrument. Surround yourself with smart people and then everyone will think you’re smart too.
–John Hadfield’s drums and Mike List’s tabla were recorded on different continents and on different days but you’d never know it from the way they perfectly converse with one another. For an album about stringed instruments, there sure is a lot of incredible drumming on it – see the rhythm section in ‘Gasparilla,’ Hadfield’s drum breaks in ‘Jenny Pop Nettle Eater’ and ‘The House That Ate Myself,’ and Jason Treuting’s playing on ‘Long Time Away.’
–Finally, the snorty sounds giving texture to the background of the intro were provided by my dog Lola.

//////Americannia
The title appeared not only well after I wrote the tune but even after I had started creating a demo and tracking it. The instrumentation changed dramatically over the tracking process. Mostly, it went from “electric” to “acoustic.” I wanted there to be space on the record for an uninterrupted few minutes featuring just the acoustic trio of me, Sara, and Andrew, so I came up with the intro section after the initial idea for the rest of the tune. I scribbled some unplayable ideas for harp harmonics into the bass part, and Andrew translated them into his own inimitable language — it’s real virtuoso playing and there’s no one else who does it this well. I miked this section really intimately; you can hear breaths, fingers, hands, chairs, bodies, even some raindrops hitting my air conditioner. Nils Frahm’s Felt changed the way I listen to music and you can hear his profound influence here.

–When I was in undergrad in ‘93, I would frequently use the university VAX terminal to log into a listserv dedicated to trading bootleg Hendrix live cassettes. One of the people I traded with was a guy in Seattle who said that one day he wanted to build a Hendrix museum there. It turned out to be Paul Allen, and eventually he fulfilled his dream and founded the Experience Music Project, or EMP (what has now broadened into the Museum of Pop Culture). I visited in 2005 and was particularly moved by an exhibit where you could listen to isolated Hendrix guitar tracks. This was of course before YouTube, where this kind of supernerd stuff has become easily available. I’ve been trying to create a version of Hendrix’s multilayered guitar textures that worked in the context of my own music for years, and I snuck it in here under Sara’s solo.
–After the intro, the first section with full band uses instruments and sounds primarily from American folk and country music, most distinctively in Mike Robinson’s pedal steel (I’m hard-pressed to think of an album that features contributions from members of The Philip Glass Ensemble, Railroad Earth, and Shakira’s band). The final section borrows rhythms and harmonies from Black American music: J Dilla, D’Angelo, Hendrix. The juxtaposition wasn’t pre-planned, it just turned out that way. But it’s worth pointing out that when I use the term “Americana,” I mean all of the above, not just the former.
–Sara is surely one of the best improvisers in the world, regardless of instrument. A cell phone went off in the beginning of her solo and then I got worked up and was whooping and grunting while she played and you can hear it all in the isolated stem, but that solo was too good to ask for another so we left it all in. Maybe we’ll put it on YouTube one day.

//////Gasparilla
I grew up in Tampa where the Gasparilla Festival takes place (named for a probably made-up pirate named José Gaspar who supposedly sailed along the Gulf coast of Florida in the 19th century). It features a pirate ship landing, a parade of drunk pirate cosplayers (Ye Mystic Krewe) tossing beads and fake doubloons into the crowd, a children’s parade, and a music and arts festival. It’s really silly and I love it. None of that has anything to do with this tune other than I wrote it after seeing the music festival one year. I almost cut this for not sounding like the other music on the album but it was too much fun. I especially enjoyed working with Otoniel, Jhair, and Samuel, three absolute legends making guest appearances.

–Samuel and Jhair recorded their tracks in my home studio a month apart. As with the drums and tabla in Strum, it still feels like organic communication and collaboration due to their immense intuitiveness and musicality. Jhair gave me his timbale sticks after he finished tracking and now I know what everything in my apartment sounds like when you hit it with a timbale stick.

//////Röhrl
Walter Röhrl is a German rally driver who I think is really cool and his name is fun to say. He didn’t directly inspire any of this music other than I needed a placeholder name for it and it stuck.

–I’d been listening to some old Peter Gabriel records and that inspired the band entrance in ‘Americannia’ (which originally used a Fairlight CMI sample a la ‘Red Rain’ but eventually that part became pedal steel as the tune got more acoustic) and also the Tony Levin funk fingers Justin Goldner plays here.
–The vibe of the solo section started with me telling John Hadfield, “It should sound like a weird organ trio playing in the background of a David Lynch movie.”
–I spent a long time trying to make a piano sound like a pitched drum. As Tom Waits said, everyone who has ever played a piano wonders what it sounds like when you drop it out a window. My favorite sound I got was when I stuck Blu Tack in the strings and so that’s the sound in the intro.
–The crowd voices under the solo were made by my neighbors. I help host a concert series in my building in uptown NYC and after one of the concerts I asked everyone to stay after for a few minutes. I thought it would be tricky to get really lovely people to talk over the music like rude audience members but maybe there’s something satisfying about being told it’s ok — just this once.

//////Long Time Away
In the months before getting married and combining all the stuff from our separate apartments in our new home, I ended up using my own place as a storage unit while staying at hers. This ended up dragging out for months longer than we’d anticipated (see: ‘The House That Ate Myself’) and I didn’t have access to the tools I usually use to make music stuff. For a while I was ok with just practicing mandolin in one room while my wife worked in the other but eventually I started getting really ornery and anxious over how long the process was taking. Once I finally got access to my laptop, microphones, interface, etc., this tune just exploded out like someone popped a cork. Thankfully, our marriage survived my moodiness and now I have my own room full of toys to play with. Maybe it’s not great that my creative process is so dependent on the tools?

–Fun fact: I accidentally copy-pasted a random section of the Finale file of this as I was writing it and it got displaced by something like a bar and five 16ths, and by the time I realized I’d done it, I couldn’t remember what I’d originally written. But it still sounded ok so I just left it where it was. See if you can figure out where.
–This music is cinematic in more ways than one — for example at 5:21, there’s a break where two sections of Sara’s performance were stitched together so that she could retune the entire hardanger down a half step. It’s like the difference between a play which is written to be performed repeatably, while a movie is free to edit between scenes too remote to be performed on stage. I don’t know how a lot of this music will ever get performed live, but with a little Pro Tools magic, on a recording it works ok.
–Jason Treuting is one of the most creative musicians I know and we had a blast one day in Princeton, NJ making sounds. The opening metallic clamor is a combination of a chain from an antique surrey, a tam-tam, assorted tin cans, and a musical saw played with felt mallets then reamped through a Space Echo. The chimes are a combination of mandolin artificial harmonics and a toy glockenspiel. He also sight-read that drum part. We did three takes for safety but mostly we used the first.
–I’ve been a fan of Blair McMillan’s playing for years, especially his work with the amazing Miranda Cuckson. Just before tracking began I discovered he was now my neighbor too. Wasn’t long before I was begging him to be a part of this album.

//////Jenny Pop Nettle-Eater
While I was writing the music for this album I was getting really into Turkish music and bağlama in particular. There are some incredible virtuosos on YouTube and I would just watch and listen for hours. When I got my own bağlama I started playing the opening figure right away, and the rest of the tune developed from there. Sometimes working with an unfamiliar instrument can kickstart your creativity. While we were messing around with the tune, Justin Goldner convinced me it would be better on the cümbüş, and as usual he was right. Bağlama pops up in a bunch of other places on this record.

–Kate Steinberg did the gorgeous vocal arrangement behind Sara’s solo based on my prompt: “Make it sound like Jerry Goldsmith’s Secret of Nimh score.” There are several little nods to my love of film music in here: the celesta runs are ripped from John Williams, and the strings at the end are supposed to sound like a 70’s melodrama, the Mancini stuff with fireplaces and bearskin rugs.
–Another gorgeous Hardanger solo from Sara. On our previous records I’ve made the mistake of writing tunes (‘Snow Musik’, ‘a new machine’) with one half on Hardanger and the rest on violin; more and more I’m thinking of the two instruments as different languages Sara’s fluent in, and just letting the songs be in one or the other.
–The junk you hear on this track and others is the result of an awakened memory of hearing Billy Martin play a rusty pencil sharpener at a Medeski, Martin, and Wood concert in the early 2000’s. Twenty years later, it popped into my head and I started combing through antique shops for the best sounding old gears and whisks.
–What can you even say about John Hadfield’s drumming on this track? I sent him a demo with a sampled drum pattern from a Flaming Lips tune and told him to disregard it and come up with something new and thankfully he followed my instructions to the letter.

//////Just Don’t Call It That
One of the things I love about Sara’s hardanger (other than the spectacular way she plays it) is that when she stops playing, the sympathetic strings just keep going like a sprinter taking 20 meters to slow down past the finish line. I wondered what it would sound like in reverse, and it turns out Sara’s playing sounds great in either direction. I had her track most of the melodic stuff backwards and reversed it but then had separate reverb prints going forward and backward, which is why sometimes it sounds like an echo from the future. I was also thinking of an effect they used on Jodie Foster’s voice in the movie Contact. There’s backwards hardanger stuff on ‘Americannia’ too.

–I’m in awe of Anna Urrey’s performance of the difficult flute/picc stuff on this track. I love classical musicians who aren’t afraid to step outside their comfort zone. I’m also annoyed by the ones whose first reaction is always, “It can’t be done.” Fewer of those these days, I think.
–This is my favorite Glenn track because I threw a chart in front of him, told him, “It’s like Art Blakey’s Jazz Waltz,” and in two minutes he’d done his first and only — perfect — take. Amazing.

//////The House That Ate Myself
I told John the groove should be reminiscent of Phil Collins’ drums on ‘That’s All’ and I love how he took that and made it his own. He’s such a deep and creative musician. I’d also been listening to a lot of Thundercat so when I was looking for ways to thread the angular chord progression under the solo back into the groove from ‘Strum’ – as if the re-introduction of Sam wasn’t a big enough clue of where we were heading – I tried it with some elements of his soundworld and it worked well. John and Andrew’s incredible double-time playing threads the sections together.

–Sam’s soprano sax is the first clue that the album is headed toward a bookend of the ‘Strum’ material but the reappearance of the “dulcimer” makes it explicit; I created that effect by playing each note one at a time on mandolin very slowly on eight separate stems, then piecing it together and bouncing to a mono stem. I certainly can’t play that fast.