Tree Indeed
words on my first EP.
7.1.24
Today my first EP, Tree Indeed, puts its roots down - a collection of five songs meant to enliven and inspire on this hard ground called earth.
As a chronic perfectionist, it's come as a welcome surprise that this whole process has been organic - from the album title to the cover to the song selection. When I got the idea for Tree Indeed, four of the five songs had come out as singles, with the fifth on deck. I’d gotten positive feedback from my community and a few streams, but I wanted more bites at the apple - more bang for my buck on the effort me and my collaborators had put in to these labors of love.
As a musician who just started releasing singles last October, it didn’t take long for me to realize how tough it is to get people to listen amongst all the noise - there are over 100,000 songs uploaded to streaming platforms a day! So I started thinking about my songs more collectively, pondering themes which bound certain tracks together. I’d released or completed seven songs at that point, but I found among the five selects an excitement, a playfulness, a searching.
I’ve been writing lyrics and poetry, playing guitar, and singing for years - at open mics, Lower East Side community gardens, a few Brooklyn venues and subway platforms. But the more public-facing work I’ve done in music has been as the founder and label director of FREER Records, formerly Die Jim Crow - an album project I started in 2013 which became the first record label in America for formerly and currently incarcerated musicians. With FREER I’ve run the gamut from album producer to cover artist to video director to admin - but having never been incarcerated, I’ve never released any of my own music.
Come 2023, I’d spent a decade helping get other people’s songs into the world; some of the hardest to get recordings you can imagine - from prisons. I’d finally secured a full-time salary from FREER and was able to start hiring people to help me finish my music. Over all those years, dozens of songs had been bottled up.
When I look at it from that angle, it feels natural that these five tunes are bursting with life, a sense of wonder, a hunger on a hundred. A lot of my unreleased tracks are dark or heavy, but these - with the exception of “Route 99” - are on the lighter side. Sure, they’re grounded in some hard luck - I’m “wishin’ you make parole,” I’m homaging lost ones on “X Ray” - but Tree Indeed is hopeful, it’s a glass half full record. It’s a tree planted with the joy of wanting to see how it grows.
Today my first EP, Tree Indeed, puts its roots down - a collection of five songs meant to enliven and inspire on this hard ground called earth.
As a chronic perfectionist, it's come as a welcome surprise that this whole process has been organic - from the album title to the cover to the song selection. When I got the idea for Tree Indeed, four of the five songs had come out as singles, with the fifth on deck. I’d gotten positive feedback from my community and a few streams, but I wanted more bites at the apple - more bang for my buck on the effort me and my collaborators had put in to these labors of love.
As a musician who just started releasing singles last October, it didn’t take long for me to realize how tough it is to get people to listen amongst all the noise - there are over 100,000 songs uploaded to streaming platforms a day! So I started thinking about my songs more collectively, pondering themes which bound certain tracks together. I’d released or completed seven songs at that point, but I found among the five selects an excitement, a playfulness, a searching.
I’ve been writing lyrics and poetry, playing guitar, and singing for years - at open mics, Lower East Side community gardens, a few Brooklyn venues and subway platforms. But the more public-facing work I’ve done in music has been as the founder and label director of FREER Records, formerly Die Jim Crow - an album project I started in 2013 which became the first record label in America for formerly and currently incarcerated musicians. With FREER I’ve run the gamut from album producer to cover artist to video director to admin - but having never been incarcerated, I’ve never released any of my own music.
Come 2023, I’d spent a decade helping get other people’s songs into the world; some of the hardest to get recordings you can imagine - from prisons. I’d finally secured a full-time salary from FREER and was able to start hiring people to help me finish my music. Over all those years, dozens of songs had been bottled up.
When I look at it from that angle, it feels natural that these five tunes are bursting with life, a sense of wonder, a hunger on a hundred. A lot of my unreleased tracks are dark or heavy, but these - with the exception of “Route 99” - are on the lighter side. Sure, they’re grounded in some hard luck - I’m “wishin’ you make parole,” I’m homaging lost ones on “X Ray” - but Tree Indeed is hopeful, it’s a glass half full record. It’s a tree planted with the joy of wanting to see how it grows.
Most of these songs were born long before putting them out. “X Ray” was an early pandemic song, as covid numbers were skyrocketing and I was back living with my parents while Die Jim Crow was getting off the ground as a newly formed record label. “Route 99” birthed in late 2019, as I was gearing up for a long drive to two prisons down south to record The Masses and B. Alexis. The middle track, “Hunger On 100,” I started working on around that same time, but it morphed last year when BL Shirelle got on it. “Wishin’ You” feels like another lifetime. That song was recorded in 2017 while rehearsing at home for a gig at a now-shuttered bar in Williamsburg called Legion. I’d played it a few times busking on the subway, and that one home recording just stuck with me over the years. We recut on top of the original for the version you hear today.
And then there’s “Freer,” the song whose title inspired Die Jim Crow’s new name. I started working on “Freer” in the Fall of 2022 while preparing a speech around the theme of “Tradition Interrupted” for the Katonah Museum of Art. I was going deep into taking stock of my life, a rare happening for me as someone who’s always trying to finish the next thing. The speech ended up focusing on the origin story of Die Jim Crow - but it ended up helping birth my first epic song, one which explores lives past, present, and future - with a sound I hope to build off of in songs to come.
They say the best time to plant a tree is ten years ago, but the second best time is now. Though it’s only been eight months since my first single “X Ray” came out, I already can’t imagine my life without releasing music. On a darker note, it also feels oddly fateful that my first song dropped four days before the Hamas attack on October 7th.
Though I’ve been studying history on and off for years, and been involved with activism for as long - the two go hand in hand for me - I never really took a deep dive into looking at the Palestine-Israel conflict. Maybe it was from reading The Shock Doctrine (see Chapter 21) back in my early activist days, but I felt like Israel was a rabbit hole I did not want to go down. A feeling lingered in me of a tainted and ugly side to the “Holy Land” - and perhaps as a Jew who already had enough questions about being Jewish - I didn’t go Alice-mode down the hole. If birthright was suggested, I’d quickly naysay the idea.
But I never lost pride in being Jewish. When people ask my background, I’ll often say “New York Jew” as if it’s its own ethnicity. I’ve never been religious, but I believe in certain values of Judaism like education and the art of questioning. Recently, I've been grappling with the fact that the moment I started putting out music under my name, this horrible attack occurred and an ensuing war and genocide has followed. It has forced me to slowly begin learning more about the conflict in an effort to be responsible as my generation of Jew and as a public-facing artist.
I want to continue to be a proud Jew, and I cannot do that by supporting Israel and its ongoing slaughter of Palestinian people. I can only do that by questioning, by learning more, by experiencing more, and by speaking out.
This is a lifelong journey. Though I’ve always been more of a rebellious Jew, taking after my father in that sense, it’s always been a huge part of me. On my mom’s side, her dad was a rabbi who came from a long line of rabbis and cantors. My grandfather, who I called Zayde, was a reform rabbi, and also a lawyer for a time; a true lover of questioning, of ethics, of justice. I still have his Rikers Island attorney visiting pass.
Though I’ve been studying history on and off for years, and been involved with activism for as long - the two go hand in hand for me - I never really took a deep dive into looking at the Palestine-Israel conflict. Maybe it was from reading The Shock Doctrine (see Chapter 21) back in my early activist days, but I felt like Israel was a rabbit hole I did not want to go down. A feeling lingered in me of a tainted and ugly side to the “Holy Land” - and perhaps as a Jew who already had enough questions about being Jewish - I didn’t go Alice-mode down the hole. If birthright was suggested, I’d quickly naysay the idea.
But I never lost pride in being Jewish. When people ask my background, I’ll often say “New York Jew” as if it’s its own ethnicity. I’ve never been religious, but I believe in certain values of Judaism like education and the art of questioning. Recently, I've been grappling with the fact that the moment I started putting out music under my name, this horrible attack occurred and an ensuing war and genocide has followed. It has forced me to slowly begin learning more about the conflict in an effort to be responsible as my generation of Jew and as a public-facing artist.
I want to continue to be a proud Jew, and I cannot do that by supporting Israel and its ongoing slaughter of Palestinian people. I can only do that by questioning, by learning more, by experiencing more, and by speaking out.
This is a lifelong journey. Though I’ve always been more of a rebellious Jew, taking after my father in that sense, it’s always been a huge part of me. On my mom’s side, her dad was a rabbi who came from a long line of rabbis and cantors. My grandfather, who I called Zayde, was a reform rabbi, and also a lawyer for a time; a true lover of questioning, of ethics, of justice. I still have his Rikers Island attorney visiting pass.
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Being Jewish ties into one of my earliest memories of discovering music. The first CD I bought when I was 7 or 8 was the Adam Sandler album with “The Chanukah Song” on it. I really was the “only kid in town without a Christmas tree” as Sandler sings - it certainly felt that way at school. I was the token whose teachers would call on me to explain what certain Jewish holidays meant to the class. My mom would come in to make latkes with us around Hanukah, the holiday I loved the most because of the presents.
When I was bar mitzvahed, I told my rabbi that I didn’t believe in God or Judaism, and that’s what I wanted to write my sermon about. She told me, “Great, go for it.” I got shade from Zayde, who followed my speech with his own - but in retrospect, I imagine there was some begrudging respect underneath it all. The most important part of my sermon, I’m sure he recognized, is that I was questioning - like any good Jew should. I know this journey as a solo artist will come with a lot more questioning.
For now, to quote “X Ray,” I have “more questions than answers.” But one small way I’ve decided to speak out is by donating half of digital download proceeds from Tree Indeed to the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) Plant-a-Tree-in-Palestine initiative.
Last week, I emailed MECA about the status of this effort and heard back:
When I was bar mitzvahed, I told my rabbi that I didn’t believe in God or Judaism, and that’s what I wanted to write my sermon about. She told me, “Great, go for it.” I got shade from Zayde, who followed my speech with his own - but in retrospect, I imagine there was some begrudging respect underneath it all. The most important part of my sermon, I’m sure he recognized, is that I was questioning - like any good Jew should. I know this journey as a solo artist will come with a lot more questioning.
For now, to quote “X Ray,” I have “more questions than answers.” But one small way I’ve decided to speak out is by donating half of digital download proceeds from Tree Indeed to the Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA) Plant-a-Tree-in-Palestine initiative.
Last week, I emailed MECA about the status of this effort and heard back:
“Though there are more challenges from Israeli settler violence, land confiscation, and restrictions on movement that make the work more difficult each year, this project is still ongoing. The planting season in Palestine runs from November - March and we would welcome support from your album to help us to purchase more trees for Palestinian farmers for the upcoming season. This year, thanks to the efforts of our local partners, we were able to successfully plant 2,850 trees in different villages in the occupied West Bank.”
I’m proud to support this initiative, as I believe it reflects the true values of Judaism. I was also pleased to read on MECA’s website that $30 plants five trees. For all the darkness and lives lost, may there be trees planted.
I hope this EP is the first of many releases, more questioning, and more attempts at answering. There is a Proverb recited when the Torah is returned to the ark: “It is a tree of life for those who grasp it, and all who uphold it are blessed.” Still rebellious on the religious side, I could take it or leave it on the “blessed” part. But I’m going to keep on grasping.
Tree Indeed - here it is. Please listen, please enjoy.