Highly recommended.

After working with a backing band, I decided to return to writing and recording alone in the studio, the way I made A Sudden Shift, and the way I did for nearly 20 years before that. I started tracking at the tail end of '19 with my engineer, Gregg, at a beautifully appointed studio in Connecticut. That proved a slow and expensive process, and it ground to a halt when the pandemic struck in March 2020. I thought I’d make the best of it, start over and try fleshing out the songs at home on the Mac, so that when the world opened up again I would have a detailed blueprint for the album, and I could go back to the studio and track all of it quickly and methodically. Instead, I wound up making the entire record at home. Gregg’s mix and mastering job made these homemade tracks go bang, and thanks to his finesse, it is the best-sounding record I’ve made so far.

Last night when we listened to the TP of the album a friend remarked that 'Anita, Sing' is an adult contemporary track. I winced, reflexively, but of course, she was right: the song is based on the changes in Anita Baker’s 'Real Love,' a perennial on AC radio, and the song is partly about Anita Baker.

Sam Cooke was on my mind when I made this record. So were Prince, Al Green, Luther Vandross and Rick James. Not to mention all the wonderful, shameless Brits, beginning with Bowie, who fashioned improbably slick art music from strands of Motown, Stax, Philly Int’l, etc.—people like Mark Hollis, George Michael, Annie Lennox, Peter Gabriel.

Of course I was also thinking about the tumult that enveloped us in mid-2020. 'Judgment' turned out like a song that Killing Joke might have made for a car commercial; 'Night Beats Night' is a groove built from pieces of 'Footsteps in the Dark,' 'Careless Whisper,' and maybe 'You Scared the Love Right Out of Me.' If they seem opaque—and they do even to me, at times—it’s because I couldn’t find the words to adequately express the rage and sorrow of those summer months.