Spiritual America is my album of eight electro-acoustic orchestral art songs exploring nostalgia, longing, and issues of secular spirituality in American culture through a hyper-personal lense. The project serves as a vessel through which I attempt to reconcile my youth in a conservative Christian North Carolina household with my adult life as an “agnostic Buddhist” living in Brooklyn. The project began seven years ago when I endured a family crisis and instinctively found myself praying to God. Its narrative centers around an imagined alternate past in which I remained under the dome of my youth pursuing a relationship with a damaged former crush.
For this journey, I invited collaborators I deeply admired and knew would meet the demands of this ambitious music: Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack, Metropolis Ensemble, and Brooklyn Youth Chorus, with mixing by Zach Hanson (Bon Iver’s 22, A Million, S. Carey, The Staves) at April Base, the famed Wisconsin studio founded by Justin Vernon. The album was tracked in Durham, Los Angeles, and New York City.
