Salem Town is a mainly acoustic album of songs I’ve written and recorded myself over these past couple of years. Most of these don’t easily fit with the more funk soul-styled original music repertoire I usually play when I perform with a live band. Just trying to make something beautiful and lean into acoustic guitar.
The eponymous song “Salem Town” has a bit of a ‘70s AM pop vibe, and features some NYC musicians I enjoy playing with — Jason Ewald on drum kit, with Stacy Werdin and Marcus Farrar on backing vocals. I built the track over Jason’s unused drum take from a live album we recently recorded with Stacy and Marcus — Fireplace Sessions Vols. 1 & 2.
The song itself emerged after a deep dive into the history of my hometown, Winston-Salem, NC. A blog post from Winston-Salem historian Fam Brownlee led me to an illuminating video, buried in the City of Winston-Salem YouTube channel, which tells the tale of exactly how the towns of Winston and Salem eventually merged.
I went deeper… it’s a fascinating, layered story. I also believe it to be a broad and accurate metaphor of how cultural entities get swallowed up and disappear due to forces of commerce and time, leaving only outlines of what used to be.
The lyrics of the song itself aren’t exactly linear; at its heart, I think of “Salem Town” as a ghost story.
The opening track on the LP, “Pulled the Pin”, is a lament, and a string of metaphors open to interpretation. A catastrophic decision? A personal story? A happening on the world stage? Pull the pin out of a grenade, you can’t go back. You’re waiting for the explosion.
A couple of these songs came to be as a result of working with Josh and Jonas Pate and their team, the creators of the Outer Banks and The Runarounds series. They’ve hired me for some songwriting over the last few years (“Salem Town” appears in the new 5th and final season of Outer Banks on Netflix, out August 20!)
It’s been an enjoyable exercise to write to script, and I’ll end up with good songs that I would not have written otherwise — especially “None O Mine”, which started as an emotional lyric by acclaimed writer John Jeremiah Sullivan. I put John’s lyrics to music, in an attempt to serve the story in a script for The Runarounds he was working on. He and I were happy with the result.
“What If We Can” is another one I wrote for The Runarounds. Working on this one brought me back to that feeling of being in a young band, and wondering if we had the stuff to “make it big,” to quote a lyric from my Dillon Fence bandmate, Kent Alphin. Interesting to unearth and examine an emotion like that — still there, dormant, underneath it all.
“Lucha Libre” is a result of an ongoing obsession with nylon strings and especially a guitar-playing style known as gipsy rhumba. More of these to come… just love this style. I’ve been working hard to try and master it. Have quite a ways to go.
“Bury You” is an older tune dating back to my electric trio era, a mafioso-style revenge sentiment rearranged on the looping rig for a solo electric guitar performance.
“Take It Like A Man” is a concise consideration of manhood and its realities… specifically, young men’s traditional role as cannon fodder.
“Just Time” is some kind of salve. An acknowledgement that time merely moves on, no matter what happens to us individually or collectively.
This version of “You Set Me Free,” a song I first recorded years ago with Hobex, was captured by phone one afternoon: old SG + brass slide > looping rig > my Ampeg Rocket. There’s a vibe there I don’t think I could recreate, so I included it — 12-minute jam and all.
I was inspired to pull this album together from various sessions after taking a world-making class with Adam Green this spring. Adam is a unique songwriter and artist, both solo and with his band, The Moldy Peaches. Walking through his process with him helped me rediscover my own.
It was a pleasure to commune with Adam and fellow creative Steiner School parents in the class, as we strive to make art in the midst of parenting and NYC life.
