This album is quite different than my first one ('Portland'). First of all I have Barra playing on drums with me. Playing with him really changed my style--it brought the volume up significantly, and it sounds a lot more like jazz or rock and less like Ani, whose spell I was deeply under when I made Portland. Barra also brought a tightness to the songs, whereas I used to keep it very loose and even lovingly sloppy.

A lyrical theme I can see in retrospect is looking at the lives of the people I admire most and finding comfort both in their flaws and their strengths. Both Georgia O'Keeffe and Miles Davis had such a strong sense of who they were and they learned to trust themselves as they got older, and to trust their art and their own process of making it. This helps me remember that you can't know now where you're going and what you'll do and that's a good good thing. And also that we constantly create ourselves and so we won't ever actually arrive, and that's also a good good thing.

Barra and I recorded these songs in two days. We had a big fight the day before we were supposed to start about whether we were going to record in the same room or two different rooms. We were both adamant about our sides and got really frustrated with each other and so I decided that it wasn't the right time to record. Barra was leaving for London the day after we were going to be done, so we didn't know when we would be recording again. I was really sad and frustrated but I didn't see how we could go ahead with the whole deal with our tempers and nerves so high, so I went to the studio and packed up all our stuff and brought it home. Then we cried a lot because it was all such mess and I decided it was a mistake to not do it so I packed up all the stuff and brought it back and set it up again. And the next day we recorded. I'm so happy we did do it because we wouldn't have sounded the way we did in several months, so it's nice to have that memory saved of what we sounded like. I was also happy that we ended up recording it live in the same room. Ha!