In 2016 Hannah Read asked me to sing harmonies and play guitar on a record she was making with bassist Jeff Picker, which later became her album Way Out I’ll Wander. Jeff introduced me to drummer John Fatum, and we started doing electric trio shows around Brooklyn. We had a Thursday night residency at Sunny’s Bar in Red Hook, just down the street from my apartment, which became a testing ground for our new material. Hannah would often join us on fiddle and harmonies, and Alec Spiegelman would stop by with a bass clarinet or tenor sax.

When it came time to make the album, I was already deeply in debt from buying recording equiptment of my own. We were going to have to engineer the session ourselves, which I suppose was always the point. I'd done a bit of engineering work on the side, but never a full production with drums on this scale. We moved a studio's worth of gear into an apartment near Columbia University called The Lethe Lounge. Lethe was a recording and performance space built by musician and impresario Mark Ettinger. It boasted double high ceilings, a control room, windows, a bathroom, and functional heating and air conditioning. Mark let us use the space in exchange for free reign of my equiptment. He also helped out with the engineering and general encouragement. Getting back home to Red Hook was a two hour endeavor on the late night subway, and many nights he generously lent us a place to sleep.

The first sessions took place in March 2017 during a blizzard. For all the congestion and narrow staircases and other hassles, New York City is a fine place to weather a snowstorm. Food and libations are just a short trip away, perhaps even a little too convenient. Early in the session, I made some engineering mistakes on the drum tracks which I didn't catch until mixdown. The specifics are a bit tedious to talk about, but they gave me headaches on the first version of this record which I mixed myself. For this "Special Edition" reissue and remix, Jeff Oehler performed some sonic acrobatics (which I'm presently oblivious to) to make the drums sound great, proving the old adage "Fix it in the Mix" still applies. I'm sure we'll read about it one day in his bestselling memoirs.

We had some friends over for a studio party on the last night of the session, complete with candles and incense and a selection of inebriates, and recorded the song Moving Day. I’d written it back in 2008, at five in the morning, scribbling it down bleary-eyed before falling asleep on the sofa at my brother Patrick's Stuyvesant Town apartment. The song (like all of them, really) was semi-autobiographical. I had just moved to New York City from Colorado, and anything and nothing seemed equally possible. All seemed well at the Lethe session, but when we listened back the next day, I realized Ettinger's accordion was situated next to Jeff Picker's upright bass, giving us two accordion tracks, one of which also had some bass in it. Later that spring we recorded Moving Day again, this time with Jim Fitting on harmonica, overdubbed, infinitely distant from the upright bass mic. Both versions grace the reissue of the recording.

Around this time my Grandma, Joyce Hamer, passed away. Our family went down to her memorial in Mt. Dora, Florida, where she lived with my Grandpa. We combed through boxes of old photographs and made a collage to be displayed at the service. I was drawn to a solo portrait of her riding up the single chairlift in Jackson, Wyoming in the summer of 1954. As a teenager growing up in Massachusetts, I was enthralled with mountains and alpine scenery, skiing and hiking. Here was Grandma in her early twenties, looking very much like someone I had descended from. With the family’s permission, this became the cover image for Alameda.

Jefferson Hamer, Brooklyn, October 2018 (revised December 2023)