For ABIDING ISLAND I invited contributions from some of my oldest friends and favorite musical collaborators, who graciously tolerated a deluge of text messages and Google Drive uploads to lend their efforts to this project.

This album's theme, abiding, means sitting with the things in our world we’re powerless to change. More specifically it is about global catastrophe, climate change, intractable discord between corrupted interests, systemic injustice, and the ever-tightening stranglehold capitalism exerts on the weakest among us. So, you know, lighter fare.

At the outset of this album’s creation last spring, I was speaking with a colleague who told me about her volunteer work with prisoners serving life sentences—people who have no choice but to develop some means of abiding with both their past deeds and present circumstances. I spent a lot of time after that trying to imagine what kind of strength one would have to possess in order to do that without going insane.

Around that same time, I was growing increasingly depressed about climate change. A visit to Iceland over the summer reminded me how fragile and tiny a species we are, and how our best hopes of undoing our own extinction are probably behind us. The sea will rise, many or most of us will be displaced, the cruel will profit while millions die, cities and states will fall, resources will dwindle. Things will get worse before they get better, IF they get better, and who will be left to see it?

But my feelings weren’t limited to despair and surrender; there was also acceptance. This acceptance is different from the rapturous fatalism, despondent resignation, or cynical accelerationism I also occasionally indulge. Abiding is something apart from all that. It's not surrender. Because at some point we must move from abiding to fighting. We can and should fight as hard as we possibly can, whenever we can. But in the liminal moments before, throughout, and beyond the fight, the skill of abiding becomes crucial.

So, the title’s abiding island might be Iceland: a tiny, resilient place whose history of struggle has presently yielded to something of a renaissance, which itself is fragile and probably temporary. It could also describe, obviously, an island where one abides. Or it might be the metaphorical human island that perseveres, often in isolation, sometimes in solidarity with neighbors in an archipelago.

To seek hope and happiness in today’s world resembles lunacy, but we persist in being lunatics. What’s happening now in our homes, our country, our world, is neither wholly good nor bad; it defies categorization, induces cognitive dissonance, sustains irresolution. Hence the tension, which I hoped to communicate in these songs, between rage and equanimity, between apocalypse and respite, between playfulness and solemnity. The oceanic imagery in this music also expresses that duality; the rising sea is an agent of beauty and, someday, our destruction.