Passerine began in the fall of 2024 when my older son left home for college and friends began to ask if I were experiencing empty nest syndrome, or half-empty nest syndrome, as was the case. Each time, my reply was a simple, “nah, I’m good…everybody’s good.” And that was true. My wife, the boys, and I were all doing relatively well after many difficult, often harrowing years of helping our first-born navigate deep and dangerous mental health struggles — struggles so severe that we’d already had to navigate his being away for prolonged periods. No, this was a triumph — to have all made it this far, together, and now to see him off toward this next phase. We were good. But of course beneath that truth flowed a more complex emotional reality.
Sitting early in our snug Brooklyn backyard, I reflected on our home as emptying nest while watching birds swoop and sing. Just below, squirrels scampered acrobatics along power lines, pitched roofs, and the top of our wooden fence against which burgeons a modest jungle of wildflowers, cultivated for ourselves and its countless hovering attendants. I relish this morning reminder that we are simply one part of nature. And I thought…nests! My next stop was the library, from which I returned with a stack of books about birds, with a particular focus on their various approaches to building nests. Some of these are subtractive, such as the simple scrape nest made by the killdeer on a pebbly beach. Others involve additive methods, from the piling up of branches eagles perform for their massive aeries, to the far more delicate pendulous nests woven with grasses by weaverbirds. I’ve written plenty of songs sitting, walking, even dancing with an emotion.
In this case, though, I wanted the discoveries from my research to guide decisions around the project, from concept to detail, instrumentation, composing for and guiding the band. The recent experience of my Slow Water project taught me that this route might well lead to growth, not just personally, but in my music-making. And I trusted that, without leaning into it, the emotion would find its own way through the process.
All of it is in here — the fascination with birds and their varied approaches to nest-building, along with a deep sense of unity and shared existence with all of our planet, in the bond I keep with my sons and wife (not just in the song I wrote as our twenty-fifth anniversary approached), and the sort of family forged within the band as we went about this work. And there’s the family I share with you, creative spirits and humans of good intent, those of us who care to open ourselves to one another through this particular plane of communication — of communion.
Most of all, this is for Maceo. Fly.
