I made most of Saints and Strangers at night, in a basement in Virginia, after long days working at a hardware store. The basement was the one place I could be loud without bothering anyone, and somewhere in those late hours the album took shape – eight songs that swing between the loudest and the quietest parts of me. Some nights that meant a fuzzed-out guitar and a drum kit going full volume. Other nights it meant turning everything off and sitting alonesong one melody until it felt true.
“I Want You” came from one of those quiet nights, and it is the song I almost left off the record. It felt too exposed – just voice, acoustic guitar, and a cello and organ I could not get out of my head. There is nowhere to hide in a song like that. No distortion to stand behind, no big chorus to carry it. For a long time that scared me. Eventually I realized that was exactly why it belonged on the album. The record is called Saints and Strangers because it is about the distance between who we hope to be and who we actually are on an ordinary day, and “I Want You” is the most honest I got at closing that gap.
I have since moved to New York, to Roosevelt Island – a thin strip of land in the East River where you can see the whole city lit up across the water and still feel a little apart from it. That in-between feeling, close to everything and slightly outside of it, is the same one that runs through these songs. I own every note of the album outright, and I made it far from the industry, which means the people who find it really did just find it. A few months ago a magazine called Foxfire featured “I Want You” on its own, and that meant more to me than any of the louder wins, because it was the quiet song reaching someone after all.
If you ever make it to New York, the coffee is on me.
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