maybe we're all living in a flood zone.

Today I shared a bonus track, "Flood Zone," to the folks that have pre-ordered the new album. We plan to release it in the future, maybe as part of an EP, maybe stand-alone, but until then it will only be available as a thank-you to folks that are helping us fund the release of the new record.

I often write songs by just sort of free-associating or journaling without an end goal in mind. This one began years ago, in one of my physical notebooks, as a brainstorm session. Part of it was inspired by the song "Pacific Street," by HEM, which I covered on the record I made with The Sentimentals. I always loved the line "there are oceans in our neighborhood," and I've always been kind of obsessed with water in my songwriting... lots of songs about sirens, about crossing the Atlantic, songs about sinking ships... rarely has water been a benevolent force in my songs, but it has always been present, lapping at the shores of my mind.

This song began as an imagining of folks down at their local neighborhood bar, deciding to ride out an incoming hurricane while drinking and playing darts. It's not that they don't think the threat is real; it's that they find more value in sticking together, in weathering the storm as a community, rather than abandoning their homes. The characters in this song don't trust the government or FEMA to save them; they have seen news coverage of previous storms, of people left stranded on their rooftops, of emergency relief funds that never seem to materialize.

Today, quite by chance, I found myself reading a WaPo article about a motel in Florida called El Rancho where several survivors of Hurricane Ian have been living for a year now. The article was heartbreaking and served to illustrate this exact scenario. These people lost their homes in the storm and have yet to be able to get back on their feet, as is so often the case after disasters like this. The article rightly pointed out that this problem will only grow as climate change drives more and more extreme weather patterns, and as the wealth gap widens ever further. With no savings cushion to fall back on, so many people are one storm away from losing it all.

When we started making cuts to the track list for the new album, "Flood Zone" was an obvious song to cut. Clocking in at just under 7 minutes, it's not really a song for the modern age and certainly not for putting on a vinyl record, but I love the guitar outro especially, so trimming it just wasn't an option. In many ways it lives in a similar headspace as "The Village," which we also decided to set aside for later release. "The Village" is also a song about community -- or rather, the lack thereof. "Flood Zone" is about a group of people who trust only in each other and know full well that they are at the mercy of bankers and levees; "The Village" is about the pervasive sense of loneliness in a world that is increasingly tied to a screen, a world in which we choose to cut ourselves off from one another. 

Many thanks to NOAA for putting this photo in the creative commons sphere so that we could use it for the artwork.