2010!

Today is New Year’s Day 2010, a good time to write. I needed to come up with some stuff for a new bio, so I decided to write a blog and see what might be useful. Starting the year off pretty happily, already gone out to two films in the past 24 hours. So ready to have this album out! Realized after the fact that I made a date to do the cd release on the first day of Passover, booked it without looking at the calendar, but I’m not changing it again!

Perfect View was produced by my long-time collaborator, Daniel Wise, and myself, and took about two years to complete from inception. During the making of the album I ended up moving five times, from living at the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York (which was AWESOME), to moving to a rural mountain cottage by a lake in the mountains of Pennsylvania (which was EXTREME), and back to New York. Towards the end of the project, with most of the songs done and mixed, I ended up taking some time away from it to be with my dad in the months before he passed away. By the time the album was finally done, with the events surrounding it having been so dramatic, it really felt like a big achievement personally to me. Some of the songs we initially started out with bit the dust and new ones came in towards the end. I was happy in the end that I felt like there was a natural segue from my last album, “Annabella.” which had a more traditional Americana flavor in the chord structures and content, to songs that incorporated more complex progressions. The songs feel really personal to me, but there was a more topical approach with the themes on some of them, something I hadn’t done much before. “Blue Dress” was inspired by a conversation I had with an old friend who had discovered he had a daughter he had never met. This friend had also done some time, and I just put those images together to create a story of a prisoner who continues to hope that his daughter will show up on visiting day. The other topical song is “Rare and Beautiful,” which I wrote about my niece who is a cancer survivor at age 11. I wrote the song to my sister when my niece was first diagnosed. “Always, tell her it’s fine, you’re right behind, right behind” was my way of saying to my sister, tell her we’re all here for her. “You’ve Got Your Own Magic” is a story that is a tribute to my dad, and I wrote it before he passed. I was happy about that song because I felt like it captured the sentiments I had arrived at regarding my father, an interesting, funny, and difficult man, whom I had finally come to embrace and accept and love exactly as he was. My friend Lucy Wainwright-Roche sings a lovely and very poignant backup on the song that I really think added a lot. “Goodbye” is kind of the theme of this album, and there was a lot I said goodbye to, people, places, things, in the past couple of years. I guess that is what all of us are always doing in some way or another, and it’s how one proceeds that matters.
Happy New Year!
Libby