专辑简介

It Shapes Me As It Goes starts lyrically in Los Angeles, where I began writing these songs after making my last record, The Glass Is Half, over five years ago. Recorded in a tiny studio near my new home in Brooklyn, the record is more sparse and intimate than my others, though the sounds of New York trains that occasionally reached our microphones and made the tape open the recordings to the city, giving them a sense, i think, of openness. So that, if the music here is called country music, which it often is, then perhaps you could call it 'whole country' music, as the songs are about–and influenced by–the very different times I've spent in Nashville, Los Angeles, and now New York.

E.W. Harris produced and recorded this record, and I knew what the title should be as the record continued to evolve in its own ways under his watch. Some songs were finished in one take, and some were scrapped after twenty takes in order that a better version might emerge when we weren't being so expectant. The title also refers to a struggle I always seem to be writing about, which is the struggle to be here right now in an unfolding present instead of being held captive in old ideas or feelings. Such thoughts almost prevented me from agreeing to make this record in a way that differed from my previous records, and with a fellow I'd never worked with before. But when we were halfway in, recording the song from which the title comes, i realized that for the moment at least, I was not, in Jackson Browne's words, afraid to live the life I have made in songs. So while many of the songs are about people trying to let go of something that holds them back, the record itself became, in a meta sort of way, the story of my own letting go.