Echoes of the City's Edge.

I am sitting here thinking about music. I am remembering the first time I really listened to "Help Me, I'm On Fire." I was living in Manhattan at the time, in the strange unnamed region between Peter Cooper Village and Bellevue Hospital, an area that is only a gray blob on the maps seen in the back of Taxis. I had to walk five Avenue blocks from FDR to Madison Avenue to get to the one train that stopped near there, the six, and so I would make these long mixes to cover the length of my commute. I started putting some of David Martin's songs in with the other Pitchfork darlings and vintage gems I would stack the lists with. And I remember being struck, and struck hard, by how well "For the Learned" and "February" stood up in comparison to the Mountain Goats and the Boy Least Likely To and the other weird almost-folk I was listening to back then. It was the fall of 2005 and I still thought I would be in New York forever; Michigan was this strange dream of origin that I couldn't escape and couldn't forget, my own sort of colony after the fall of the American empire. So what began as a gesture toward how much I missed my musician friends in Michigan became a dance in celebration of them. I knew then that in my home there were people who were making real, beautiful art and that what was happening in the three boroughs where the indie kids are willing to live was no better and in most cases far, far worse than what my colleagues were doing in a part of the country some of the capital C City snobs couldn't even locate with their right palm facing them. So when I went broke and cashed out of the New York gambling table, I looked forward to reuniting with the artistic communities clinging to life, but living still, and living vibrantly, in the corners where the music we have made may yet echo still. - Dylan