And The War Came _{(10 Year Anniversary Edition)}

The phrase “And the war came” is lifted directly from Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address—one of the two speeches carved into giant hieroglyphics on the walls of his marble memorial. It was 2013, and I was on tour with my first “big” record in the can. I wound up in the nation's capital with my best friend and two hits of LSD in my pocket. Doing LSD in DC is a feat of logistics unto itself due to the fact that the National Mall is not a public park as it seems, but a large grass-covered military base. Snipers on the roofs, tunnels underfoot—it's as brutal a metaphor as one can ingest, especially on psychedelics. My tour manager and oldest friend in the world, Wesley, navigated Bessie (my trusty 1999 E-250 conversion van) into the bowels of a nearby nightclub we had played the night before, we hastily ate a small breakfast, drank a little water, ate the paper, and proceeded on foot to the most logical of mazes, the National Museum of Natural History. The building itself is a chronological spiral that guides the brain from the oozing explosions of nebulae, through boiling oceans, to gems and jewelry, finally dumping us at the small bashed skulls of our closest, distant biological relatives. It all made sense now, and the museum was closing. All the museums in DC dump into the National Mall like tributaries of information into the mighty Mississippi. All the histories and fables, achievements and questions funnel into the reflecting pool and gather against the base of the black walls of the Vietnam Memorial, and there we found ourselves at a crossroad. On one side sat the Capitol with its pale dome and faint trumpets dramatically juxtaposed against the backdrop of an approaching thunderstorm. On the other side, patiently waiting, Lincoln. Wind blew and rain began to plop around us, and Wesley and I looked at the gathering thunderhead and decided to go see Abe and wait for the weather to pass. As we began our quest across the mighty mall, we couldn't help but be in awe of the scale of its design and the weight of its intended effect. People did this. People demand and forcibly recall. People die and give birth to all of this. Our scars and achievements are symbolized in stone, under God, behind plate glass, for others to marvel and pick their noses at. Had we really left the museum?

As Lincoln got closer, the rain fell quicker until, at last, as we were running up the four score and seven steps, the sky opened. But there he was, putting a roof over our heads, just about to hop out of his chair and offer up a towel. The massive walls surrounding him inscribed with his words. I wondered and marveled at it all. It's common knowledge that Abe was a little taller than his statue, sure, but did he think he'd get a grand marble Parthenon? Did he know at the time? Did he feel significant? I was familiar with the Gettysburg Address, but his second inaugural address was a mystery and soon it took the wind out of me. It speaks of the Civil War and the winds that blew about it—

“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered ~ that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.”

While I read it aloud to myself, I instinctually took a knee like a clumsy squire, and I realized that I was extraordinarily overwhelmed. Not by the memorial, but by my own life and the fact that some of the wishes I had made long ago seemingly were coming true, and there was no real turning back. A year earlier, during my hometown's annual hunger games (south by southwest), I was recording a live session at a fancy house, and I struck up a conversation with the guy running sound. He instantly understood how to make my ragtag luggage instrument sound like gold, and I felt like I was in good hands. His name was Chris “Boo” Boosahda, and he told me he worked out of a studio in New York City. I said, “what a coincidence, my dream right now is to record some new songs in a studio for the first time.” He said, “let's do it,” and within a couple months I had hopped a flight to the Big Apple. The studio Boo worked at was called The End, and that is where it all began. As I sat on a bench looking out at the East River and scribbling out a sloppy metaphor that became Only Son (our first recording and eventually the first song on the album), I could feel that I was becoming part of a larger world and that my lonely heartbroken stranger shtick was not worth defending. I wanted to collaborate, I was tired of doing it alone, and I wanted to let people in. Little did I know that Boo and I would spend nearly the next decade of our lives working together, touring and toiling over sonic details, cackling late into the night. Around the same time, I met Esmé Patterson. In her, I found a musical collaborator and friend like I had never known. Together, music felt easy and exciting, singing was like a magical sport that we were born to play. She is one of the coolest humans I have ever known, and we had more fun than should be legal. Boo would eventually move to Austin, and the two of us turned my living room into a recording studio. We dubbed the place “MUSIC HOUSE” and played the doors off their hinges. Boo is not only a fabulous engineer and producer, but also a multi-instrumentalist, so he would help me flesh out the things I couldn't wrangle alone; most notably teaching himself to play the drums in the process. In this way, friends and collaborators appeared magically and we would capture songs out in the wild and add the missing elements when we could. Aaron Robinson played slide like a man possessed and held my hair while I shouted the vocals to “Perfect Parts” in a Seattle AirBnB. Macon Terry bowed the bass to “Pansy Waltz” in a loft in Brookyln, Will Van Horn drove in from Houston and added some dreamy pedal steel, Kelsey Wilson added strings and Patrick O'Connor backed me up on “House of Winston.” Finally Esmé flew in from Colorado and added the heart and soul of the record by co-writing and recording 3 of my favorite songs on the record. We threw everything at the wall to see if it stuck. We sang for hours, running miles of cable to record in the spider-filled shed in my backyard or around my fire pit with the sound of the highway—our hillbilly ocean—roaring in the background. Eventually, we became a sort of dysfunctional family band, hollering at the top of our lungs into each other's faces, bowling, playing dice, and sleeping very little, until one day...Finally and unbelievably, the album was done. All it needed was a title.

So there I found myself, in DC, wet from rain with wide eyes and wider pupils, no real scrutiny or success knocking at my door yet. At that point it felt like my music was a footnote, a parlor trick—something to be believed in or not, but I felt something besides the weather blowing in: some future, some choice. As I rose from my knee under Abe's watchful eye, I wondered, would this yet unnamed record take me to the moon one day? Would it be my marble tower? My reflecting pool? What the fuck would I call it? And that's when I saw it. “And the war came” —the writing was on the wall. That brief snippet of the speech written almost exactly as it is on the cover of this album. A phrase that sounds ominous, yet its past tense conveying a sense of survival. It really came to symbolize and encapsulate these strange and formative times for me, and I ran headlong into what was to come. In many ways the release of ATWC, along with the first swath of shows and promotions, drove me to the edge of my sanity. I lost sleep, broke out in spots, fought with friends, ruined relationships, missed deadlines, built bonds, saw the light, impressed and bored countless people. Yet here, ten years later, looking back, I know that this record is a source of unparalleled joy and pride. Its creation introduced me to some of the greatest people I will ever know and in many ways has allowed me to explore the world beyond my own city gates.

It is not war; but it's not just music. It's some of the sweetest times trapped in wax, exceeding and defying my expectations at every turn. I'm profoundly grateful to all the many wonderful people who were involved in this effort. To the times spent singing around fires and recording in my kitchen, to all the business-y folks who said “why not” to all these silly ideas. For this Ten Year Anniversary edition, I wanted to showcase some of the odds and ends literally left on the kitchen floor during the recording process. I'd like to invite you through the doors of the long-since abandoned MUSIC HOUSE and show you some of the steps that it took to get there. And now that it's in your hands, you too are a part of this story forever...dramaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaatic pause...

And the war came.