hey y’all - i brought all my fancy recording equipment with me on the road so i could do a nice professional episode of Fax for you… and forgot one, crucial, very specific cable. so you get what you get - which is the sound of carl sleeping, neighbors coming and going, and the street outside.
today’s audio is a live version of my song “float”. it was recorded on air for the venerable los angeles radio institution KCRW’s “morning becomes eclectic”. it was august 15, 2005, and i was on tour promoting my third album, we will become like birds.
here in 2026, i have been meeting lots of new friends and colleagues recently. and it turned out one of them, a wonderful actor-director-professor had used a song of mine in a play she was directing, long ago. by her description, i assumed it was something more popular from one of my first albums. but it actually turned out to be “float”, a deep cut and a song i hadn’t thought about for a long, long time.
back in 2005, my live band was a beautiful thing: drummer neil cleary and keyboardist julie wolf. everybody sang. we were lucky to have dear friend kris delmhorst on tour opening, and she joined us in the studio, taking the second verse.
visiting radio stations is a necessary part of being on tour, you are promoting an album and your concert tour, after all. and i love radio! it still seems magic to me, even in the age of the internet, that you can speak into a microphone in a small room, and people can hear you, anywhere, in real time. it is also a truth that doing radio while on tour can suck. as in the case of KCRW, we had played a show late the night before and were required to be up and at ‘em loaded in, sound checked and coherent by 9am the next morning. and we’d been doing this for about 6 weeks at this point. no wonder, to my ears, decades later, i sound weary.
i was also heartbroken. and nightly fingering that wound with the songs from we will become like birds. in the summer of 2003, i had had my first real break-up. the one where the person was supposed to be “the one” and you were “forever”. it was the first time i learned that those concepts weren’t inviolate. but i had also yet to learn that you can have many “ones” in your life and many “forevers”. i was only 26.
at that time in my life, i processed everything through songs. i had also yet to learn about therapy and friends and keeping some parts of your self, just for your self. in trying to understand my own grief, i searched for images. again and again i came back to birds and flight, hence the title and lots of bird images in other songs. but for “float” i was drawn to something more complicated.
cannonballs were artifacts, objects, concepts that were familiar to me growing up in a historic town in virginia. we had them everywhere: in little pyramids outside the gift shops, stacked next to cannons at out door exhibits, even ostentatiously lodged in our buildings, left there for 150 years as reminders.
it was a cannonball that made the most sense to me to describe my relationship and what happened to it. launched with force, then traveling fast. the marvel of flight, the aerodynamics of love, how does something so heavy stay in the air? but a cannonball is only beautiful for a moment in the air, absent of context. we know what happens will happen when it lands: destruction.
at some point i knew my relationship was over, i knew it was a cannonball, but i wasn’t ready for it to land. i willed it to stay in the air, long past its natural arc. which i think it made the landing worse. so when i repeat “don’t land, don’t land”, i am praying, begging, trying to forestall the inevitable. and what else could a cannonball do but explode? as the saying goes, cannonball gonna cannonball. cue the heartbreak crater and flying debris.
it’s striking that i spoke about none of that when DJ nic harcourt broke into the set for a short interview. listening 21 years later, i am struck about how when given the opportunity to talk about the album, i talk about the how, not the why, referring only, elliptically, to a great sadness.
what’s also striking is that this interview took place just a few weeks before hurricane katrina destroyed new orleans. new orleans is inextricable from we will become like birds. i had gone there for the first time in early 2003, then returned to convalesce and write after my breakup. so it made perfect sense to return again to record the album, which we did in december 2004.
after the break, you’ll hear me explain all this, and none of this, to nic.
hey yall! hello from my temporary digs in roanoke VA, where i have been enjoying writing shitty student plays, watching world cup with new friends, and introducing carl to the nightmare known as a heat dome.
stay tuned later this summer for some late 2026 show announcements, and meantime if you’re a songwriter, consider joining me in hillsdale NY sept 18 & 19 for a songwriting retreat led by the beacon music factory.
i am always grateful for the creative practice of the Fax of Life. for almost 5 years now, it has helped me learn to write quickly, organize my thoughts and memories coherently, and stick to a production routine. i have felt the strength of all these muscles as i settle in to my MFA program. so this month i give an extra special thanks to the listeners and readers who have supported the Fax. if you aren’t a subscriber, please consider joining us. you don’t get anything special, just a sense of moral superiority, which for us americans is in short supply right now.
NOTE: this is a great episode to listen to, just saying!
ps - not a cannonball, just me and carl doing our thing in virginia
ME GUSTA! : SOME OF MY FAVORITE THINGS!
best non-obit i have seen for the entity known as lindsay graham.
i love data, especially about the states we live in and how we self-identify.
i live in the northeast, where ticks are A Thing we have lived with for many years. the rest of the US needs to get ready. i know ticks are gross, but we have to talk about them to stay safe.
i have been LOVING the world cup, especially the efforts and coverage of personal hero roger bennett. his 2014 podcast american fiasco is a masterpiece.
world cup also means we get lots of another personal hero, rebecca lowe.
UPCOMING SHOWS
2026
Sep 18-19, 2026 - Hillsdale NY
Beacon Music Factory Song Camp
TICKETS & INFO
stay tuned for more winter 2026-spring 2027 show announcements soon!
