Hey, I hope the end of this summer’s been treating you well!

Today marks the release of the 15th anniversary reissue of my album Wooden Room, which was originally released as a limited edition CD in 2010.

Wooden Room is one of the early home-recorded albums that I made as a teenager, in my parents’ apartment in Brooklyn, NYC. I had completely forgotten about it until last year, 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.

This album is really unusual for me because it was almost entirely recorded with a nylon string guitar, which I stopped playing a couple years later after becoming more active in NYC’s antifolk movement, which had a general rule against nylon string guitars that only a few musicians were able to get away with bypassing. I only played steel string guitars from then on, and my sound changed a lot in that time. I might pick up the nylon string again one day if I ever get really good at guitar.

A lot of the songs on the album are about growing up in NYC at the turn of the century and the general alienation and combined sense of melancholy and absurdity in that time and place, though it has some upbeat moments and ultimately bends toward something more hopeful. It also has some bits you might recognize from later Cannonball Statman albums – “Garden” is a very early version of a song that was later released on 2017’s Playing Dead, and “Breakfast with Cannonball” is the poem “Ace’s Last Night on Earth” set to music, which formed the whole basis for the story of 2022’s Miracle on Neon Clown Avenue.

A download of Wooden Room also comes with a never-before-heard Cannonball Statman track called “2015 Afterall” that I wrote and recorded in the mid-2010s.