Waterlines

I began recording Waterlines at the end of 2019 and finished it in the middle of the pandemic in 2020. Happily, most of the music was recorded during the “before times” when musicians came to the studio, played for a few hours, swapped jokes at lunch, and worked the rest of the afternoon. Oh, what a difference a year makes! Between Covid-19 and our mad king president, 2020 was a shitstorm. But releasing an album in 2021 feels like a nod to the future, the return of hope and sanity and the expectation that we will -- once again – be able to gather in noisy restaurants, drink mezcal with our friends and hug complete strangers.

The album straddles a range of musical styles. My musical roots are firmly planted in Americana and folk but I’ve come to love the complexity and texture of jazz and Latin music, some of which found its way onto the album (These Words, Saturday Man, Like A Drum). I even ventured into funk on I Wanna Be A Teenage Boy, co-written with San Diego keyboardist, Hindy Bare, during the Kavanaugh hearings. We were both going crazy but at least we got a cool bass line out of it.

When it came time to record the album, I found my dream collaborator in Jeffrey Wood, longtime producer at Fantasy Records. He “got” my songs, made me laugh, and brought his musical knowledge and creative spirit to the project in a million ways. He helped convene a gang of stellar Bay Area musicians, starting with Dawn Richardson (drums) and Paul Olguin (bass). We were joined by Julie Wolf (keys and accordion), Erik “Mr Tasty” Jekabson (trumpet), Michael Papenburg (guitar) and Pam Delgado (backup vocals). Several members of my beloved string band, Sugartown, (Brian Bloom, David Boyden, Dan Seamans) added their musical talents and support as well. And finally, sound engineer Alberto Hernandez recorded and mixed the album and was a paragon of patience and finesse throughout.

As someone who has worked as both a journalist and a memoirist, writing has always been a way for me to make sense of things. Wrestling with an event or emotion on the page, whether it’s something dramatic like a breakup or a death, or smaller and subtler like the timeless feeling of lying on a raft, can totally change my understanding of what happened. Add melody, rhythm and instrumentation and it can feel like a novella packed into four minutes. Waterlines refers to the act of writing itself, but also evokes the way we look for clues and remnants from the past. Like tracing waterlines on a river bank after a drought or flood.

I hope you enjoy these songs. Xo Zoe