\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/unnamed-5-300x300.jpg\")
\nYou describe Widowmaker Express as \u201ca wrestling match with God, a breakup letter to the universe.\u201d What specifically about the false-alarm medical emergency shifted the way you approached writing these songs?<\/p>\n
\n
\nYou describe Widowmaker Express as \u201ca wrestling match with God, a breakup letter to the universe.\u201d What specifically about the false-alarm medical emergency shifted the way you approached writing these songs?<\/p>\n
Well, I thought I was going to die. My symptoms seemed to suggest such, which tends to either wipe off or add layers of grime to one\u2019s world view. Afterwards I had this flavor in my mouth like- in life, why do we have to swim in such shark infested waters? So the records a lot of waving a fist at the universe because of that.<\/p>\n
The album carries a quiet Pacific Northwest heaviness\u2014rusted waterfronts, distant trains, dark afternoons. How much does Tacoma itself shape the emotional weather of this record?<\/p>\n
A ton. I\u2019d say that Tacoma is a place of struggle in many ways. One must only throw open the curtains to see pain in real time. It\u2019s a city that\u2019s both deeply troubled and deeply beautiful. The new record could be described similarly. Also, I live here, so it\u2019s woven into my work so tightly that one would struggle to pull the two apart.<\/p>\n
Daniel G. Harmann has been a longtime collaborator. You said he builds \u201cbig beautiful rooms for the songs to live in.\u201d What did that collaboration look like on this album compared to past work together?<\/p>\n
Dan worked with me before on my album The Buddhist, but he gave that one a far lighter touch in that he didn\u2019t do a ton of production on it. We recorded that in one day, mixed it the next, and that was that. On Widowmaker Express he came with a full cinematic pallet. With his production style the songs feel like they live in a big room with strange, often haunting, sounds passing through and adding color and emotion all the while. It was far more hands on from his end this time.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, Magic\u201d opens the record with a devastating sense of absence. Why did you choose that song to set the tone for everything that follows?<\/p>\n
That track lets the listener know what they’re in for. We\u2019re here to beat you up. It\u2019s flagging that we\u2019re taking the slow road this time \u2018round and taking dead aim at your vitals.<\/p>\n
Several tracks wrestle with faith, spiritual disillusionment, and the silence between prayers. Did writing these songs change your relationship to belief, or did it simply clarify questions you\u2019d already been carrying?<\/p>\n
I think life challenged my relationship to belief. This album is just the byproduct of living, processing what happened to me. The subject matter of the time was, as mentioned, that we\u2019re frequently being put into a sort of spiritual headlock, and this music is a response to that feeling, asking the question: Why are we being subjected to such darkness? I think it at very least helped me to get a hold on my own feelings and thoughts. I often don\u2019t know how I feel about something until I write a song about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIndryd James\u201d feels particularly devastating\u2014a meditation on loss, memory, and the impossible work of letting go. Can you talk about the story or emotional center behind that song without giving too much away?<\/p>\n
That song is about Indryd, my greyhound who passed away from a stroke in 2010. I am an animal person. I get closer with pets than I do to most people. So when I lost Indryd it left a sucking chest wound in my life that I still struggle with to this day. For me, animals are a true source of love, and the absence of them\u2026well, it\u2019s the opposite.<\/p>\n
Despite the weight of grief and mortality running through the album, you close with \u201cOn Small Wings,\u201d a song about patience, vulnerability, and love arriving on its own schedule. Was that sense of hard-won hope something you found during the writing process, or something you had to fight your way toward?<\/p>\n
At the end of the day it was the only way to punctuate this particular sentence. We have to hold onto to something resembling hope or we drift further and further from good possibilities in our lives. It\u2019s important to be honest with a listener that things are hard, but you also need to have something to say about it that\u2019s helpful. Negativity and pessimism are foolish, ultimately. It\u2019s acting like you know what\u2019s coming through the door in the future. This song is just asking folks to consider that love and grace may still enter their lives even in the darkest times.<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve been a principal songwriter in bands like Destruction Island and Pistol For A Paycheck before going fully solo. How has your approach to songwriting shifted across ten solo albums, and where does Widowmaker Express sit in that continuum?<\/p>\n
All I\u2019ve ever wanted in any of my musical projects is freedom. In both those bands I pushed to go as far out into space as we could muster. Widowmaker Express is pretty far out artistically. It\u2019s a creatively free album, so in that way it\u2019s a true manifestation of that sensibility.<\/p>\n
The production surrounds your voice with ghostly textures, strings, lap steel, and piano. Were there any particular sonic references or atmospheres you and Harmann were chasing while tracking the album?<\/p>\n
I believe the way I described what I was after to Harmann before we began was \u201c a ghosty, country-tinged, album from space\u201d. It actually came out exactly as I had imagined it in my mind. What you hear is precisely how it was conceived to be.<\/p>\n
Tracks like \u201cDisease of the Heart\u201d and \u201cCoyote Skins\u201d move between grief and the search for transformation. Do you see these songs as sequential stages of processing loss, or more like different rooms in the same house?<\/p>\n
Different rooms in the same house. The flow of this album has more to do with how the songs feel moving one into the next as a series than as how they related for the most part content-wise. They correlate to each other in that they were from the same family of songs, the time and place where they generated. So in that I think they naturally connect.<\/p>\n
The album title Widowmaker Express feels loaded\u2014evoking both a medical emergency and the image of a train barreling forward. How did that title land, and what does it mean to you now that the record is finished?<\/p>\n
The title did come from the medical emergency and the feeling that we might soon be speaking of me in the past tense. On the other side of it I\u2019m just glad to be through. There have been some pretty major challenges in my life over the last couple years and I am eager for a new chapter. While I appreciate the universe investing its grand energies in ensuring my hide is magnificently tanned, a little break in the clouds would be beneficial. After all, I have laundry to do.<\/p>\n
After spending an entire album confronting fate, heartbreak, and the cosmic joke of being alive, what does it feel like to send these songs out into the world? Is there anything you hope listeners take with them after the final notes of \u201cOn Small Wings\u201d?<\/p>\n
It feels liberating. This is a challenging batch of songs. It asks a lot of a listener in some ways. Typically I take the approach of the carnival worker manning the swing ride, \u201cWe took you up, we spun you \u2018round, and now it’s time to bring you back down\u201d, but on this one it\u2019s more just a spiritual beating made for headphones. For some of my fans I think it\u2019ll be a favorite and for others they\u2019ll wish to get back to my typical theme parks and circuses. It\u2019s like a peaty scotch, those that love it will love it deeply. At the end of \u2018On Small Wings\u2019 I hope folks feel less alone. This album is for those who struggle deeply. I want them to know and in a real way experience that I know life hurts, but as vomit-inducing as it sounds, tomorrow the sun is going to rise.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You describe Widowmaker Express as \u201ca wrestling match with God, a breakup letter to the universe.\u201d What specifically about the false-alarm medical emergency shifted the way you approached writing these songs? Well, I thought I was going to die. My symptoms seemed to suggest such, which tends to either wipe off or add layers of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":41359,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"video","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[482],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-video","has-post-thumbnail","category-written","post_format-post-format-video"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41358"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41361,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41358\/revisions\/41361"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kjagradio.com\/themic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}