My sister had passed away the year before and something fundamental in me had changed, or perhaps broken. I was left with a lot of questions that I have never found satisfying answers for. So, as always, I turned to art to explore them.

In terms of subject matter, the album grew out of a question: what do we leave behind when we move on?

I thought of this while visiting a friend in Gainesville, Florida. I was sitting on his front stoop when the neighbor, who was renovating a hundred year old home next door, asked if I wanted to explore the building. So I grabbed a flashlight and gave myself an unaccompanied tour. It was a strange house, once home to a traveling circus. It was full of odd passageways and hidden compartments, and it all felt very mysterious. While searching the attic I found a dusty jewelry box full of letters. They dated back to the 1920s, detailing a love affair between the woman who lived there and a man who occasionally visited. Seeing this glimpse into a long-gone stranger's life left me wondering just how we change the places we inhabit – if small parts of us remain there, even if it’s nothing as literal as letters.

From that notion sprang Ghost.

The album centers around a house, somewhere in the American south, and all the songs are stories about what happened there, or nearby. I hid some of my own stories throughout the record, but always buried in half-truths and sentence fragments instead of complete thoughts. At the time, I was dealing with a lot of grief, but I had no good outlet for that other than my music. When I listen to the album now, the grief is even clearer to me now than it was then.

I had very little equipment when recording this album, and I made all of it in a tool shed behind my family's house. Because the shed was close to a busy road and the traffic did not quiet until late night, I recorded everything during graveyard hours, between 11pm and 6am.

“Ghost” made little impact when it was released. The reviews were not favorable, and people generally felt it was too slow and murky, which I felt was fair. But about three years after its release, when I had already moved on and recorded two more albums, Welcome Home suddenly took on a life of its own. It was used in two films and a Nikon commercial and, to my surprise as much as anyone's, people suddenly started listening.

And like that this odd little concept record I made with cheap gear and discarded instruments (a free piano from a craigslist ad, a banjo found in the garbage, an accordion abandoned in a high-school music room’s closet), is still chugging along. I guess you never really know how these things will go.

Thinking back on the subject now, I think we really do haunt each other. We live in each other’s heads, especially when we make an impact of some kind. I no longer think it’s such a bad thing.

My mental image for this was of a nameless character returning to his childhood home after a long time away, dozing intermittently, the scenery outside the window notably different each time he opened his eyes. To represent this, I wanted something warm and nostalgic (accordion, humming) alongside something incidental (the layered, random piano notes). 

I also have a personal fondness for trains. It’s my favorite form of travel and I can be a bit sentimental about it.

I was trying to capture the feeling of returning to where you're from after you've moved away. There's a deep comfort in being somewhere so familiar, but it's paired with the realization that things have moved on without you. You were once a fixture in this home, or this landscape, and now you are a visitor. It's simulataneously cathartic and alienating, and I wanted the song to be joyous and bittersweet at the same time. The wordless chorus was written with the idea of letting out a big feeling that you don't have proper language for. 

The song was recorded over three days, with most of the time spent on the layered vocals in the chorus. I recorded them about 30 times each, at different distances. The percussion on the song came from stomping on a piece of plywood and handclaps, and was chosen because I didn't have any drums at the time.

Whenever working on music or art, I like the principal of "use whatever you have on hand instead of waiting for the perfect arrangement." I think the limitations I was dealing with made the song more interesting in the long run.

I found it on a website called freesound. I have always loved field recordings, but I specifically wanted to weave them in and out of this album. In part to give sections a sense of space, but also to behave like audio fragments of memories. 

I wrote the original keyboard line while listening to that introductory sound of the children playing, and the song unfolded from there.

For the subject, it revolves around a girl and her “imaginary friend” – the ghost of a child who lived in the house long before. The lyrics go back and forth between them, with the ghost eventually sharing its story, and its urgency to truly see if blood is thicker than water, as the old saying goes.

It begins with "The Deserter’s Song" found on the Touch The Sky EP which follows a young man, drafted into war, that could not fire when the time for battle arrived. Glory follows him through the aftermath. 

After defecting, the young man returns home and hides in the attic of the girl he’d hoped to marry. Their arrangement worked for a few months, where she would sneak him his food and water and necessities, until the tension of their secret got the best of them. In a mindless comment she would later regret, she let slip where he was hiding.

This leads to the final section of the song, where the young man is sitting on the roof, watching a bird with its foot stuck in some wiring. He’s too far away to help, but certainly identifies with the poor creature. Meanwhile, villagers are throwing stones at him from the street, screaming for him to come down and face the law. But before any form of justice can be served, an errant stone finds his temple, and he falls from the roof and dies upon impact.

The subject is an elderly man with dementia, and the first few sections detail how he now perceives the world. The switch to a major key at the end comes while watching his wife breathe in her sleep, and how it brings him such comfort.

I originally planned on leaving the synth strings on this song as a placeholder. But after multiple attempts to recreate the mood with live strings, I gave up and left it the way it sounded in the demo. I remember noting during this song that live isn’t always more effective.

I began with the percussion, just layering toms and shakers and sticks until it had a nice combination of rhythm and texture. The guitar riff came next, and the rest just kind of fell into place.

As for the story – it begins with a man who, after suffering a mental break, kills himself. But he reawakens back in the house, now a ghost, and he can longer leave. He then must watch his wife slowly let him go and move on with her life, forgetting him more and more. He tries to comfort himself with the hope that maybe one day she will join him again, when her time finally comes.

In the dream, I was walking past a house that looked a lot like the one I grew up in. I later wound up on the shore, and I got to speak to some people who had passed away. It was sad and lovely at the same time.

I did my best to record the song with the gauziness that dreams can have, where it’s more texture than clarity, and where time moves differently.

So I recomposed it for piano and it fit a lot better.

The song is a combination of a few particular childhood memories and fears, with some surreal imagery thrown into the mix. I was chasing how, at a young age, our worries have an almost magical bent to them, like they could consume everything around us. How it’s difficult to separate reality and imagination at that point in life. 

It follows a man who discovers that the seasons are not just parts of the year, but physical beings. Having recently moved his family to a cottage on the outskirts of society, he quickly realized his folly. He was not prepared to survive the harsh winter, and his family would suffer. In an act of desperation, he kidnaps Summer and chains him in their basement to keep the area surrounding their cottage from changing. But he hadn’t counted on the seasons being a family.

The song begins as Winter is marching up to the house to free her little brother.

This was the most difficult arrangement I’d ever attempted up to this point, and I remember having to rerecord certain sections multiple times before I found the form. But having a narrative as a guide helped keep it all on track, as well as a lot of post-it notes.

It's about the ghost from “Wrapped in Piano Strings”. The song follows how he’s losing track of time now that his former wife has moved away and the house is empty. But he’s slowly realizing that he hasn’t been trapped by the house; he’s been trapped by his own feelings of guilt.

The song ends with him finally letting go and dissolving back into the ether.