This recording’s origins go back further in time than the others in development for the new album: I laid down most of the stem tracks and first started mixing it while I was still stranded at Westgate, a for-profit transitional housing center.
When I first arrived at Westgate, I could only just barely manage to pay for a spot in what they called “the bunkhouse,” a small mobile home unit filled with cots and bunk beds. I brought nothing with me but some old clothes, a few sentimental keepsakes, and my old acoustic guitar. I had nothing else left to my name at this point.
For just shy of $300 a month, you could buy a spot to sleep, legally, at the bunkhouse, along with access to a communal TV, wifi, a roach infested microwave, a bathroom with a shower, and a washer and dryer.
An old college friend from out of town had arranged my entry into the transitional housing program and paid for my first month at Westgate. I’d been stuck on the streets in part because the local shelters were not open to new clients after a devastating hurricane.
When you’re homeless and the shelter is full, it’s not legal for you to sleep or sit still anymore in most cases, especially at night.
You have to keep walking twenty-four hours a day to respect the law, because it’s also not legal to just stand or sit anywhere for long.
So you do what you have to do, but that’s a different song.
In practice, the bunkhouse was like a modern workhouse or a privately funded homeless shelter for men recently released from prison and indigent elderly men with chronic health issues.
Some old timers once told me the original management at Westgate required the bunkhouse residents to earn their stay by working as part of a high-end residential moving service the owners also ran under another name.
That was no longer true, if it ever was, by the time I arrived, but all the OGs claimed the same.
There were three bathrooms at the bunkhouse, but only the largest one (which also housed a filthy, old washer and dryer for communal use) was usually kept in working condition: The toilets and bathtubs in the smaller bathrooms were typically clogged and smeared with traces of feces, a result of one of the elderly residents’ binge drinking or digestive health problems or deliberate sabotage by residents with mental health issues or acute personality disorders.
But the bunkhouse was still a little better than having nowhere to sleep, legally.
And there was now and then a weird spirit of camaraderie and sense of shared struggle among us bunkhouse residents that could be beautiful.
When we weren’t threatening to kill each other over the pettiest ego trips, we were proudly and defiantly united in our role as the lowest of the low, as far as society was concerned.
That fact sometimes created real feelings of fraternity so much that I almost missed it after finally getting my “come up.”
But not that much. That sort of fraternity only goes so far, we all knew. One of your “brothers” might still steal from you or kill you one day.
By this point, I had managed to work my way up from my bed in the bunkhouse to one of the private efficiency apartment units also available to residents at a higher monthly price.
These units weren’t much, either. About the size of a large shoe closet. But you got a bed and a shower and a hot burner, microwave and even a TV of your own with wifi included.
And most importantly: you got the right to come and go as you pleased, without sharing your space with anybody else. And these spaces, in stark contrast to the bunkhouse, were as clean and orderly as you kept them. So I finally had moments of privacy at home again for the first time in over a year.
You need that to write songs.
I also managed to cobble together a few relatively inexpensive pieces of studio gear and a digital multi-tracker after a couple of months in the new private spot at Westgate, so I started working on new recordings, including this one, as soon as possible.
But it wasn’t really until I had the chance to mix and edit the song further in my new private home, after leaving Westgate behind, that it all finally came together.
I edited and remixed this one on my desktop to finish up the production.
Lyrically, “Calm Seas Ahead” is a deliberate attempt to rework particular ideas and themes I’ve worked with before.
Specifically, back when I released the album “Faust” with Tangemeenie, one of the songs featured a lyric I’d written on an emergency flight back from my honeymoon in Germany with my ex wife and former bandmate, Lori, after my adoptive American grandmother died unexpectedly.
That older song was called “Seam,” and it was inspired by seeing the horizon line of the sea and sky from an overlooking view through the window of our plane.
This one similarly concerns the horizon, but this time, as seen from a boat listing adrift on the ocean: “That perfect seam where the two meet.”
INSTRUMENTATION
Drum machine
Electric guitars
Bass
Keyboard
Voice
LYRICS
Drifting along the calm sea
Stars high above and down beneath
That perfect seam where the two meet
Drifting along the calm sea
Stars high above and stars down beneath
That perfect scene where the two meet
Both sky and sea, calm and complete