I’m thrilled to announce that Work Songs is coming out on New Amster­dam Records.

You can preorder the digital album on Bandcamp for delivery May 24^th; you can also stream it there today, if you’re a NewAm subscriber. I’ll have physical copies for sale in May as well.

I’m grateful to many people for helping Work Songs along its winding journey, but most of all I’d like to thank the people who play on the album, and for whom the piece was written: Becca Stevens, Gabriel Kahane, Ted Hearne, Nathan Koci, and Taylor Levine. Alex Venguer mixed the album, and the cover was drawn by Pixar’s own Harley Jessup.

Here’s the liner note I wrote about the piece:

Artists’ working habits have always fasci­nated me—Matisse sculpt­ing in bed, Charles Ives’s Bach-ian eye-openers, Alice Munro’s strict quotas (very useful)—not so much for the insight they provide into the actual work, but more as an ideal­ized template for how to organize one’s life. 

The Work Songs project began to form eight years ago, in the spring of 2011. I had wanted to make some­thing having to do with American song tradi­tions. One of the first musical “scores” I encoun­tered in my child­hood was the Fireside Book of Folk Songs (a 1940’s edition, I think, with beau­ti­ful spot-color illus­tra­tions) which my parents owned. There are many work songs in the Fireside anthol­ogy, mostly about differ­ent kinds of manual labor. I grad­u­ally formed the idea to write a kind of artist-centric set of work songs, using simi­larly straight-backed, apho­ris­tic texts. Some are songs of hardship and complaint, while others are meant to provide comfort, empathy, or possible solu­tions to problems. But they all, in some way, attempt to address exis­ten­tial questions—what do “artists” do, exactly, and how should we exist in the world? 

Unlike a typical commis­sion, Work Songs is a piece I wanted to write, for a specific group of friends and collab­o­ra­tors: Becca Stevens, Gabriel Kahane, Ted Hearne, and Nathan Koci. Becca, Gabriel, and Ted sing, as well as help play whatever instru­ments are at hand—a hodge­podge of guitars and keyboards—with Nathan and me on accor­dion and piano. The indis­pens­able guitarist Taylor Levine joined the band further down the line. Since I wrote Work Songs for specific people, I was able to tailor each song to their partic­u­lar indi­vid­ual strengths. The piece feels like a team effort in this regard, which is appro­pri­ate, since these fellow artists not only inspire me with their work, but help me find answers to those exis­ten­tial questions.

By way of intro­duc­tion, “Art”: Melville lists the contra­dic­tions inherent in its creation (always comfort­ing to think, when frus­tra­tion arises, that Herman Melville felt it too). “Unem­ploy­ment” describes a musician so burnt-out—artistically, emotion­ally, financially—that he is unable to hear the music anymore. “To Whom it May Concern” gives playful voice to a familiar feeling: that the grass is greener on the other side of the Atlantic (ah, for that progres­sive, demo­c­ra­tic-social­ist, Scan­di­na­vian grass). “Poet’s Work” is about whit­tling some­thing down to its essence—a poem pared down to an aphorism, set over a slowly contract­ing musical process. And finally, Woody Guthrie’s list of new year’s reso­lu­tions— “Rulin’s”, he calls them—are as good and simple advice as anything I’ve read. Write a song a day. Learn people better. Change bedclothes often.