THE UNIVERSAL FIRE is out today and streaming anywhere music is available, and I hope you’ll stream the hell out of it, buy it, and share it. I hope the songs will be company, and make you wonder, like I wonder, what we’re all doing and what any of it’s for, if not love. 

This record took a long time. I remember standing in the parking lot behind a club in Nashville six years ago, laughing with the boys, having just toured the Blood Brothers album in Europe for three weeks. We played a midnight show on the wrong side of town, flew home the next day, and a week later Billy called to say he had cancer. I didn’t want to make an album without him, and first he wasn’t ready, and then he couldn’t. Then he was gone.

I wrote these songs about what it means to have things, and what it means to lose them. Not answers, but questions. Being alive means being given the whole world, and giving it back, piece by piece, until we disappear. It’s like tending a driftwood fire on a sandbar in a wide river, and how we curate the geometry of loss, how we make the fire beautiful as it burns away, is the work of living.

So thanks for sticking around, and for waiting all this time for the next thing. Hopefully it won’t take so long next time. And thanks for everything else, every gesture of good will that kept the wheels rolling all these years. It means everything. 

Tally ho Bill. Alles klar.