i cd drink all nite*
dropping roses*
it's late*
sumthin wrong*
shades are drawn

“The shaman sits. He drinks a little, eats a little, smokes a little. He lights a fire and stares into the flame. He taps a beat on his drum as his eyelids sink down and his gaze turns inward. He mouths a melody with his tongue. He sings a story. Chunks of earth, flashes of light, tissues of sound.  Listen—the singer guides you to the deep woods, to that  secret place just below the surface, and then back  again. This is the birth of religion, the birth of performance, the birth of art.

“Monsters of the Deep Woods is a record of one singer’s shamanizing.  In studios, in bars, under the stars, alone at home, I sang my way to the other side with the tape rolling. I had my friend Patrick, a natural musician and intuitive drummer, to keep me company. We set up our Den of Iniquity in the big back room of an 1890s brick townhouse; the walls were sky blue and we looked out on a hidden garden in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Black pines, creeping thyme, crabapple. We could smoke out there when it got too hot inside; we had plenty of good red wine—it was wintertime, mostly. 

“Night after night we traveled, and we found our  way to a sound that was ragged and heavy, dark with light eating away at the edges. We began to discern strange forms, only to have them slip away. There were pathways, open doors, hands reaching out:  signs of the monsters we had heard so much about. Everyone who travels gets a glimpse of them eventually. The Monsters of the Deep Woods. A 17th century writer made the drawing on the cover of my album and it was originally published in a mysterious travelogue of some sort: shadefoot, cyclops, twin-born child, animal head…Scholars nowadays think his travelogue is a symbolic narrative of entheogenic, hallucinogenic, psychedelic experience. Maybe. To my mind, the author did his best to describe the Monsters of the Deep Woods, and we tried to do the same.

“You  don’t need to eat, drink, or smoke anything to dig this album. That might help you along the way, show you some shortcuts, but no matter. You do need to leave yourself open to the revelations of music and performance. We recorded these songs many times, never doing them the same way twice. We had to hit wrong notes, scream, whisper, drop a beat, change the words. The monsters respond to that. The monsters we met don’t care about  the perfect  take or the definitive version. They want  to hear the song as it is transmitted from singer to singer, never static, different from night to night. You can only find the monsters when you let yourself go, when self-consciousness melts away.

“I’m done with the record now. It’s finding its way out into the wide world. This is as much writing as I’ll ever do about my trip to the deep woods. Singing is the only true way to describe those travels.”