Kingdom (session, song notes & bedside table version)

            For now anyway, the story behind Kingdom, which lives here, is that haunts can call long-distance, implying you never left, though you may have proof in the form of guesses like doors left unlocked that lead away with a string of images on a one-way to a vanishing point — from a straight line of sight that narrows to a sketchy triangular vision before exhausted headlights in a dark spring downpour as if outlining the bottom of your hourglass while you press the pedal & keep driving, riding a black tongue of lost faith licking into the distance for release from where you can't see what you're passing as everything closes in, somehow still, while your senses wonder if there may be something worth living towards, somewhere ahead.

& maybe, you think, destinations are just imagined — at least until shown a way to believe in a far-off hallucination of existence that may actually be — a place of altogether peace at last, where, at least, we can all disappear together. That's the story, anyway.

            In 2005, I'd just moved my possessions a few flights up a Bed-Stuy brownstone after a yearlong batshit afterparty burnout. So, now just a fugitive bridge across from a tried & true mentor, I asked JD Foster to oversee a stable of songs that had also arrived from the fever & placed them as a bet/experiment with myself to see how much lost control I could turn over to a more stable soul — his particularly:

The two of us had shared a history of diverse recording environments. We'd tracked anywhere between the boiler room basement of a bar to fancy-pants studios that served analog espressos — a tightrope span we'd enjoyed traversing together.

My home recordings were sketched out with my usual angles, but, from previous experiences, I knew JD could refine my scrawl with his refreshing approaches to sound. We salvaged some of the rough drafts at my place, took other bones to rebuild at an industrious art room in a former pencil factory & finished mixing at an actual recording studio.

JD transformed Kingdom from the heavy-handed snarl of my nature to a loose, free-falling rebirth I was longing for sonically & privately otherwise. Both the song & I resettled as better selves. The album was named Meadow because I felt I'd been generously delivered by kindness to a serene clearing.

             So, welcome back! Since summer has made it too hot to sit at my attic desk, I recorded this acoustic version of Kingdom at the edgy ledge of where I'm routinely unable to sleep due to the usual ongoing finalities. For this bedside table phone recording, I swept a Kalamazoo that came back to life before I did:

the flattop that I didn't buy when I was too lucid, then went back & told the store owner what I'd had a dream about (the guitar) & he bought it (the story) so he gave me a better price because that's what happened in the dream & also because who knows which is real, really, & I bought it (the guitar) & used it until the last song on the last night of a tour that lasted too long when it fell from its guitar stand (or maybe leaped because it had also had enough of me) & the neck broke just below the head, but my buddy Heywood knew a guy who could do me a solid & fix the guitar (but do nothing of the like for other problems concerning things in life that'll impartially take your head off) & when I got the guitar back it sounded as formidable as before & looked even better with the battle scar because it was like a tattoo of survival (which some of mine are too, but some also remind me of failures that will remain failures although, like the Kalamazoo, I'm still here to see them — except the one on my back which I never see but which is also okay because it's unfinished — only outlined, but not filled-in — unlike the story it's about of which the details remain conveniently elusive so I can loosely go on too, for now) outliving myself to sing by a bedside table, grateful that any of us made it back from where some don't, to offer this recent rendition of Kingdom (bedside table version)!: