INTRODUCTION

No one is more surprised that this album happened than me. But I’m happy it exists. Its writing helped me weather some big changes in my life, and make sense of a deeply troubling period in my country’s history.

In late 2015, I said goodbye (again) to Los Angeles, and set up shop in a brick ranch house on the edge of Little Hollywood, a Spanish-speckled neighborhood in East Nashville, Tennessee. I call this place “Hackberry Hill.” All but one of these songs were written here.

Nashville had grown a lot since I left in the summer of 2009, and it took a while for me to get my bearings again. Once I did, I wrote “Starting All Over Again” and a handful of songs that seemed to have no connection to each other. So I left them alone for a bit, returning to them around the time of the solar eclipse of August 2017, which left Music City completely darkened. I began writing “Shadowland” that week, and I finally started seeing the growing batch of new songs connecting to each other.

They touch on subjects like love, destiny, mortality, drought, disappointment, cons, spirituality, fear, connection and regret.

I’d planned to record these songs in a bare-bones manner. But then my friend, the great producer/guitarist/songwriter Thomm Jutz, called and asked if I was interested in making a record with him and his production partner, Lincoln Grounds. I, being not the biggest fool on earth, said yes. My admiration for who Thomm is and what he does is inestimable. 

Recording happened quickly, in two short sessions beginning on St. Patrick’s Day 2019 — one with just Thomm, guitarist Wes L’Anglois and me, and a second a few days later with a rhythm section joining in. We added some touches of piano/organ, pedal steel guitar, Dobro and some supporting voices, and that was it. Lincoln mixed it at his home outside of London the following week.

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I named the album Afterlight for the moment of time between lightness and darkness, when the sun has set, but the darkness hasn't fully taken hold. The word can also mean a moment of reflection, and this is mine.

I’m sitting here listening to the master, and what I hear is a pretty accurate picture of where my head’s been the past five years. The world outside has been a sometimes confusing and dark place, but I’ve chosen to see the overwhelming beauty and goodness that’s always there, just waiting to be noticed.

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