B-SIDE “PRIVATE LIVES” 

…On how Private Lives Came to Be

There are songs on this album where I just turned my brain off to write out of the headlines. I don’t do too much editing. I reached a point of performing and writing where I’m willing to take that risk. 

I compiled this record out of this mess of about 40 to 50 songs recorded over a 3 year period. There was no plan. Life decided for me that’s how it’s going to go. I started working on it back in 2017 before the last album came out. When I wrote the song “Private Lives,” a couple of years after “Look What They Did,” I knew I had a record. I knew what the thread to the whole thing was. I was able to take the thread and pull it through these 17 tracks.

The last year of the process was a matter of weeding through the mess and building out this album that came to be Private Lives. 

…On Visualizing Private Lives 

One thing I try to do with my songs is make people feel like they’re in a place. After “Rio” on the first album, “Boozophilia” was the next song that got us some attention. “Rio” painted a picture and made people feel a certain energy. With “Boozophilia” I wanted to get 3-dimensional, for people to feel like they were in these divey bars with me. With this record, I wanted to do that with every song. 

I enjoy making videos, I direct a lot of them myself. I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted these videos to be like. “Look What They Did” was the most simple and direct connection between a song and video I’ve ever had. I knew the second the song was done what I wanted to do for the video. I thought this should be the way I introduce the Private Lives ideas to the world. It’s not a party song. It’s a deeper look under the hood of somebody’s life and how people live in America. It’s really like a documentary. 

My friend Alex Wroblewski is a very curious photojournalist who shoots in Washington D.C. for the Associated Press. He reached to collaborate, and I said, “I know exactly what I want to do, but I think you’ll imperil your White House credentials by doing this.” We talked about how I would give him a tour of Atlantic City, and take him to the abandoned Trump Plaza. I wanted to show him the city and how people live. From a point of view of a documentary we put this piece out and I proceeded there with the “Private Lives” video which we shot in Philly.

The “Stay As Long As You Like” video was compiled during quarantine from a lot of documentary footage of me out on the road in the last three years. I had big plans for this dance video for “Help Me” but quarantine got in the way, so we created this video with cellphones all from remote sources. 

It’s been such a joy working on these videos because the songs have such a vivid sense of place and you just try to amplify that with the video. 

Stream Private Lives here

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