Blue Star is sparse and haunting, with his cello taking center stage. The album distant but warm and inviting. His songs combine organic elements like handclaps and crowd noise with slick, clean production.
“Blue Star was a long project, completed sometime in 2004 and finally distributed on the day that I left Portland, April 14, 2004. Recorded by Keith Feigin over the course of a year, while working with our band “The Key” as our main project, “BLUE STAR” is a mix of songs from about eight years of writing music, with “Architects” and “Upside Down” being old favorites from my song book.
“The Most Lost Of All” is one of my personal favorites, mainly for the lyrics, which are a sort of fugue, repeating themselves in the second go around, this time backwards. It has been featured on NPR.
This album was a departure for me in the sense that it was my first time “attempting” an album. In the past, I had always put things down as they came, and this time around, it was an experiment in polishing, reworking, and perfecting things with a specific “sound” for the album in mind. Perhaps this method of recording is the reason that I feverishly recorded “RAINMAKER” during the final stages of putting “BLUE STAR” together. RAINMAKER took two weeks to record and was free form to the core.
I like the results. Its very clean, and yet, if you turn it up loud, it gets into the atmosphere.
The title came from, among other things, still more variations on the theme of the cosmos and our inner life. “Blue Stars” are, (as I understand it), in astronomical terms very young, and burn with intensity. Also, I was referencing the visual Doppler Effect, where Blue Stars are those in the sky who appear to be moving towards us, here on earth (red stars are moving away from our spot in the universe), thus shortening the enormous gap that exists between us and them. As with the title ‘You Space Me’, I’m referencing the distance between people, between who we really are and who we are in relationship to other people.”
