A Rooftop in Manhattan

I’ve been thinking lately about how Rain Plans was really born between these two worlds.

These two worlds that I was in between from leaving New York City, moving down to the Texas Hill Country and searching for something quieter, slower, more connected to the land, to the life, to the solitude, to a place to create art and build a studio.

I wanted to kind of disappear into the hills really and write from a deeper place.

And those songs became a document of that chapter of my life. The Rain Plans album and the Rain Plans writing sessions.

And then when the album was coming out there in April of 2014, we found ourselves back in New York carrying those Texas songs into the middle of Manhattan.

And we were invited to play on the rooftop of Electric Lady Studios, the legendary facility there with so much musical history just moving through its walls — Hendrix and Bowie, Patti Smith, just so many spirits and sounds that still echo around that place.

And we hauled amps and boards up to the roof and started setting up our gear against the skyline on the rooftop.

And as we started to play, people across the street, I remember, started opening windows and leaning out to listen and cheering us on. So there was this beautiful spirit of camaraderie there in the sky. And you can actually see some of them in the footage that I’m sharing here today.

And then this incredibly sharp, beautifully dressed man kind of walks out onto the rooftop with a camera around his neck, and it was Nile Rodgers.

And what struck me about Nile wasn’t really his celebrity or mythology. It was his artistic curiosity that still persisted. He was just genuinely excited by music still unfolding in front of him and art. And he stayed and he listened and he took photographs and he talked with us about art and movement and staying open creatively there on that rooftop.

And I just kind of remember realizing there that songs really travel and take you to places and take you back to places and take you to new spots and old places that seemed familiar and well known.

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They leave the place that they were written and begin a new life and take new meanings and a new journey to new people and everything around them.

So that rooftop felt like the exact intersection of where I had once been and where the music was about to go next.

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