May 22, 2026
The stories behind 11 new songs. Now available on Bandcamp (with a special bonus track).
1. Afternoons
I was nine or ten. She lived just down the street in Willowbrook. We both played trumpet, and every afternoon during Latchkey we’d play together in the schoolyard. There was no cost to any of it. No loss yet. No history. Just two kids and one star and all the time in the world.
When I moved back home in my thirties, deep in the fog of lockdown, those afternoons came flooding back. The street was the same. The schoolyard was the same. She was long gone. And I was sitting alone in the house I grew up in, holding all of it, the memory of someone who knew me before life happened.
2. Corner of My Home (Past Life)
My grandmother died that week. The same week, someone I really liked came to my home for the first time, she was just there in the doorway on a summer afternoon, like it was nothing. But she never came back. And I spent a long time before that building a corner of my life for someone who was already gone. Not gone like my grandmother was gone. Gone like she was never quite there to begin with. But a ghost of something that never fully existed is still a ghost. It still takes up a room.
3. Music for a Bicycle Ride
I wrote this for a VR therapy program at a hospital in Los Angeles. Patients would ride stationary bicycles through virtual landscapes and this was supposed to be the soundtrack. The program never happened. The music found its way here instead. Sometimes healing gets rerouted.
It was the first track I had recorded when I built out my home studio in Staten Island.
4. If I Was Blind
Written in my cousin’s guest room in Virginia Beach, in her teenage daughter’s space — surrounded by her library and her things. I wrote Jellyfish the same day, inspired by the jacket summary on one of her books.
A lot of these songs came out of Song Chall, a write-a-song-in-a-day challenge with a group of talented friends in Brooklyn. It always surprises me what comes up when the clock is running.
5. Let It Out Like Rain
I made the instrumental for Ari Lennox, and just sat on it for a long time. I guess it was really for me. I knew writing to it would be a puzzle. Then one day I cracked it, and the lyrics finally came out — like rain.
6. Jellyfish
Gail was an artist friend of the family. I wrote this in her honor. She graciously had me play a few songs at one of her gallery openings. That’s one of the things about writing in your hometown, you become embedded in so many people’s lives that it becomes part of the natural landscape.
Cover photo by Lindi Gordon.
7. Under the Velvet Moon
Life is short. And it’s also long. But sometimes it feels a bit spirally. Had to turn it up at this point on the album.
8. Moonlight on Silver Lake
No, not LA’s Silver Lake. But the one where my parents would take my sister and me when we were small. Now it’s just me and my dog, Django, 13 years old, legs tired, walking me home because it’s getting dark. Staten Island is beautiful and Silver Lake Park is as much of a postcard scene as green space in New York City.
9. All This Love Will Be Gone
My friend’s dad, Roger, referred to me as an adopted son. As with all sudden losses, I get to find him in unexpected places, like this song, which I realized afterwards was inspired by him. He loved to host a party. And we’ll definitely be keeping his spirit alive on the karaoke machine or the dance floor.
10. Honey, I’m Still Here
What if you carry it your whole life? I didn’t want to wait, so I wrote myself at 83, memory going, and finding out it’s okay.
11. Hang My Shadow
Where do you put it? Everything this album has carried, the girl with the trumpet, the ghost in the corners, the museum of a life lived and wished to have, the lake, the dog, the jealousy, the love that outlives itself, where does it go? There’s no answer. I’ve been known to run. And I’m tired of running. And the question itself, is its own kind of rest.
The answer, if there is one, is back at track one. Start again.
All the love - Joe
