i'm not made for the low tide, but here we are

liner notes, drop 1 of 8.

may 3, 2026

there’s a word, i think it’s german, for a specific flavor of sadness you get on a sunday afternoon when nothing is wrong. the kind that arrives with the second cup of coffee and stays through whatever you put on next. i don’t know the word. i looked once. there are some things you only get to feel exactly once if you let them keep their anonymity, and i wanted this one anonymous.

i’m in queens. ground floor. the kind of apartment where you can hear the building think. the radiator has opinions. there’s a warm-tone bulb in the desk lamp that, on certain afternoons, makes the room look like a joan didion essay about california, which is impressive work for a bulb in a queens townhouse where the nearest ocean is a forty-minute train ride and a small act of will. the upstairs neighbor, whose name i don’t know but whose footfall i could pick out of a lineup, walks across his living room at 11:26 every night, and i have, on more than one occasion, set my watch by him. tonight i’ll hear him again. tonight i’ll be at the desk again. between us there will be a ceiling, a song, and the faint clarinet hum of the laptop fan, working harder than i am.

because the song, as of this sunday, is written. that’s the news. the lyrics are done, the chords are done, the shape of the thing is done, and on a good day i can play the whole arc of it from a cold start without flinching. what isn’t done is the recording. there’s a verse i’ve tracked and believe, a chorus i’ve tracked and mostly believe, and a bridge that has been sitting on my laptop in some half-formed mix for three weeks like a houseguest who keeps saying he’s leaving tomorrow. some afternoons i think the take is honest. some afternoons i think it’s clever. those are not the same thing, though they wear the same coat to dinner. and the difference between the two, in the end, is going to be a question of microphones, and patience, and which one of us, me or the song, blinks first.

i used to think writing a song was the hard part. i was wrong about that the way you can be wrong about a country you’ve only seen from a plane, or on a map. the hard part is the long middle, the part that has no name, the part where the song is alive enough to keep you up but not alive enough to leave the room. you live with it. it eats your food. you start describing your weekends to other people in the third person, because a small, embarrassing part of you suspects the song is listening, and you’d like it to know you’re not just sitting around.

a tuesday last week, around 4:47, i had a negroni in my hand and the bridge in my ear and i thought, very clearly: i would be a better person if i finished this. and then i thought, less clearly: or i would just be a person who finishes this, which is, as you may have noticed, not the same thing.

here is what i can tell you about the era this song belongs to, without telling you about it: i have been low for a while. low like a tide. low like you don’t notice the boats are sitting on the mud until someone points it out. there is a name for this season, in english, but i don’t want to use the english one because the english one comes with a prescription pad and a fluorescent light. so i’ve been calling it, privately, low tide, which is also, conveniently, the name of the song, which is also, less conveniently, the name of the season i’m trying to write my way out of.

(you see what i’m doing. i see what i’m doing. i’m doing it anyway.)

something my therapist said last month and i wrote down on the back of a receipt: grief doesn’t get smaller. you get bigger around it. she may have been quoting someone. i didn’t ask. i don't wanna know. it was the kind of sentence that, once you hear it, you don’t really want a footnote for, you just want the room it walked into to stay quiet for a minute.

my dad has been gone thirty four years. which means the loss is older than most of the songs i love, and almost as old as i am, and neither of those facts has gotten less strange with time. i’m not going to write about him here, today. i’m going to write around him, the way you write around any large thing, by describing the chairs.

the chair in the kitchen is an oak chair with a knot in the wood that, in a certain light, looks like a face turned sideways. i call the chair adorno. this is a bad joke that has, over time, stopped being a joke and become the chair’s actual name, which is, i suspect, how most things in a life acquire their names. you say something once. you don’t take it back. eventually the universe shrugs and lets you have it.

i almost took a photo, earlier. of the desk, the laptop, the gibson catching the window. i drafted the caption in my head before i’d finished framing the shot. the long afternoon. the bridge that won’t sit down. queens, half-empty. and i put the phone face-down, because there is a version of this whole career where i become a man who writes captions for a living and the songs become the thing the captions are about, and i would like, if at all possible, to not be that man.

so the photo isn’t taken and the bridge isn’t sat down and the negroni, by the time i get back to it, has become a slightly bitter glass of room temperature, which is, i’ll grant you, the most accurate description of being thirty six i’ve come up with this year.

a thing i keep meaning to say and not saying: i think the reason i love writing songs in this particular apartment, with this particular radiator, with adorno in the next room and the upstairs neighbor pacing on his eleven o’clock circuit, is that nothing here is performing. the building isn’t performing being a building. the chair isn’t performing being a chair. when i sit at the desk and the song doesn’t come, the room doesn’t punish me for it. it just continues, indifferent, generous, indifferent.

i wish i could be more like the room.

*
the bridge, just so you know, has a line in it that goes near i forgot how to leave but i remembered the door. that’s not the line. the line is better than that. the line is also worse than that, depending on the afternoon. but it lives in that neighborhood. it pays rent there. some nights i sit with it and i think, if i can get this one bridge right, the rest of my thirties will be tolerable, which is, of course, an enormous amount of pressure to put on eight bars of music, and yet.

so that’s where we are. half negroni. half a song. a chair named after a frankfurt school philosopher. a tide that won’t quite come back in. a man at a desk, in queens, on a sunday, telling you about it not because he has finished the work but because the work is, finally, finally, in the room with him.

if there’s a word in any language for this, i don’t want to know it.

i want to be the one who names it.