Last Known Address
No Weeknotes this week. My heart wears the black armband of mourning, yet it’s for a tragedy shared by less than half of my country. I don’t really know how to process that, so that’s all I’m going to say for now. Instead, please allow me to direct you to something that brings me a great sense of pride.
Last Known Address is a project I’ve been working on for about ten months, a period concurrent to the launching and maintaining of this blog. In November 2023, my friend Donald Harrison hipped me to an upcoming project the Ann Arbor District Library was hosting called Ann Arbor 200. The idea was to commission 200 different works in celebration of the city’s 200th year. They would range from documentary films and interviews to essays, photography, physical works of art, and in the case of my submission, music.
I’ve been connected to Ann Arbor my whole life and have a wide range of emotions about the city. I was born there on Ingalls Street in old St. Joe’s just before it was relocated outside city limits. I grew up in Brighton, but spent a lot of time in Ann Arbor and finally moved there when I was 20. It’s been a long time since I lived in town, but I remain in its constant orbit. I am still employed there, visit many times per week, actively participate in its music and arts scenes, and maintain strong social and cultural ties. I presently live in the bordering city of Ypsilanti.
The archivists in charge of Ann Arbor 200 have been releasing incredible content all year and now the bicentennial year is coming to a close. I finished my project a couple months ago and it was released this weekend. Number 159 out of 200. It consists of six short songs, photographs, and personal essays relating to my life and history in Ann Arbor. It really caused me to reflect on my relationship to this place within and around which so much of my life has happened.
On the EP’s cover is a snapshot I took of my first rental house, 216 West Ann Street. My brother and I moved there in August 1997 and lived there for five years. They were the messy years of my early-20s, full of fun, folly, friends, romance, booze, and so much music. Inside that house my brother and I wrote all the songs that would become our first three albums (two by the Original Brothers and Sisters of Love and the debut of Great Lakes Myth Society which was actually supposed to be the third album by the previous band). During my final winter in there, I climbed to the top of the Ann Street parking garage during a snowstorm and took a few aerial photos of my neighborhood. I came across them a few months ago and chose this one for the cover.
I lived in a couple other houses after that, one in the neighborhood that is now called Water Hill and another closer to downdown on Washington. As you will read in my essay about the title track, I still keep a mailbox downtown at Liberty Station. This was a rewarding project to make and with the songs being so short, there was less pressure to go into great lyrical detail. They are like postcards from different points in my life. That’s why the accompanying essays and photos are so important. It’s all one interconnected piece which will now live in perpetuity among the library’s archives. That makes me feel very proud. To have officially logged one’s small mark in the greater fabric of a place is no small thing.
Although I consider the final project to be the one contained within the library’s bounds, the musical portion of Last Known Address is available for streaming and download. If you’d like to support me and my endeavor by buying the digital audio version or ordering the handsome bookmark I designed, you can head over to my Bandcamp page. Thank you for your support this week and always. Love and kindness to all, even when it’s hard.