Dante

I wrote this about a producer I worked with several years ago. Looking back it is a #MeToo song, written years before the movement. He was a veteran in the industry, married to a woman who was practically folk music royalty. I was a young musician in New York City, playing everywhere I could, constantly in the red, making sure my band was paid. I went to his place, played my songs, and he gave notes. It didn’t take long before he began to show his true colors—doing a lot of drugs, unable to stay present. Then insisting that sleeping together would give more artistic integrity to the music. After turning down his advances one too many times, he got mean. The praise once heaped upon me was replaced by a variety of humiliation tactics. I got out with my dignity intact, but it took awhile for my optimism regarding my career potential to return. It was a major test of my resilience. My favorite line is “Oh the fury of you lumberjacks who can’t take down the tree / It would take a bigger man than you to make firewood of me.” It’s really a song of forgiveness. He reminded me of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, and the journey of Dante through hell in order to find heaven. At the end of the day, we are all just trying to feel good. The most miserable among us are often the most desperate. I’m telling him in the song that there’s a different path to contentment, one that doesn’t involve obliterating anyone.

I tracked piano, bass, and drums with engineer Fran Cathcart at Eastside Sound Studios in New York. I’d worked the front desk there for years before I moved to Los Angeles, so I was very much at home in that live room. I’d even slept there a few times! We brought in a big concert bass drum, and the bass parts were bowed upright by Ian Hutchison. Kiel Feher wound up overdubbing orchestral drums after I brought on Paul Redel to help in post-production. Stevie Blacke’s strings take the whole song into epic territory. From start to finish, I hope the listener feels they’ve been on a journey.