Hey, I hope your weekend is going well! The 15th anniversary reissue of my album Space Travel is out today.

Yesterday, my friend Tasneem wrote me to say that the area her family had recently been displaced to was bombed, and glass fell on her youngest daughter Alma’s head while she was sleeping.

Tasneem and her family had already been through a lot – they’ve been homeless for over a year now as their home was also bombed. Yesterday’s news is worrying because it’s the first time Alma has been this badly injured.

If you’re a citizen of the US or another country that’s funding the onslaught on Gaza, remember that our tax dollars also helped deliver the bomb that injured Alma, and the weapons that killed many of Tasneem’s friends and neighbors.

So if you’d like to do something nice on the occasion of the reissue of Space Travel, please consider donating to Tasneem and her family – they rely on these donations to survive: https://gofundme.com/f/help-tasneem-and-her-kids

Space Travel is one of the early home-recorded albums that I made as a teenager, in my parents’ apartment in Brooklyn, NYC. It was originally released as a limited edition CD in 2010, and I had completely forgotten about it until 2024, when my friend Kléo and I were working on an intensive, months-long project to do with my earlier work and I discovered the CD in the archives my parents had been kindly storing in their home.

As with Wooden Room, which was recorded in the same year, a lot of the songs on Space Travel are about the absurdity and alienation of being a teenager in NYC in the early 21st century, and they carry a lot of melancholy and misery while ultimately bending towards something hopeful. Unlike the songs on Wooden Room, though, these have more of an experimental rock and roll vibe, and you can probably tell I had a lot of fun with my electric guitar throughout.

I think “Fur Coat” is my favorite song on the album, but most people who’ve heard it told me they like “The Man in the Vampire Suit” more. I got a lot of requests to play that one in the early 2010s, and I think there was even an acoustic recording of it in the now out of print 2nd episode of Cannonball’s Party that my friend and I made in 2010, where I gave an impromptu performance in a souvenir shop near Times Square.

A few of the songs on this album were also later rearranged and revamped for later albums, including the almost unrecognizable versions of “Snow Globe” and “Stranger Dreams” (also known as “Beautiful, Terrifying”) that are on 2019’s Rhinoceros Crossing.