Our second poetry x music album, “Here to Stay,” is now available

Liane Halton and I have published our second poetry x music album, “Here to Stay.” You can download it here.

It’s eight tracks, with a bonus track featuring David Moser on the piano. (You’ll be hearing more from him down the line.)

Like our first album, this one comes with a PDF of a 50-page booklet. If you’d like to own a hardcopy of that (which includes a download code for the music), let me know.

We’re thankful to those who contributed their time/work to this project, in the form of photos, advice, music videos (!), support, etc: Andrew Braun, who got pictures and footage from Wuhan; Nina Dillenz for the cover photo and doing a photo shoot with us at Ritan Park and for making an MV for “In the Air”; Zuhui Ghang for making an MV for “In the Bedroom” (in progress); Sven von Wildenrath for his photo from Cape Town; Wil Turner for his photo from New York; Simona Murrone for her photo from Rome; Dennis Sazonov for booklet design elements; Kevin Carafa for mixing the tracks; Mads Vesterager Nielsen for telling me the story that turned into the track “In the Bedroom”; and as always, Matthew Byrne and everyone part of Spittoon Collective.

The album opens in January, after the lockdown of Wuhan:

The viruses had first and last names
until there were too many to count.
We grafted masks onto their faces

 

and by that point, what did names
matter?

And ends in a hypothetical near-future when the virus is “gone.”

We leaned away from bodies, stopped
holding doors.
We dragged our feet on office carpets,

 

burdened by familiar debts.
We looked mockingly on those still masked,
forgetting the ways we are infectious.

In between, we tried to squeeze in everything we could — love, fear, grief, magic, suspicion, desire, truth…

Let us know how we did. The poetry is adapted from my poem “Coronavirus in China,” published in Rattle in February. The album is available via Bandcamp.