Every time I’ve released a record since 2011’s Anthems, I’ve sat down to write a small essay to accompany it. I don’t know where the idea came from – maybe those occasional cryptic ramblings found in Dylan LPs, maybe my own habits as a compulsive letter writer and diarist. In any case, it affords me a moment to step back and consider the artifact as a whole and offer any last statements on what it all means for me.
The fact is, if I’ve done my job as a lyricist, I shouldn’t have to write a thousand words to drive home the message of an album, literal or spiritual or emotional or otherwise. It’s there. It’s supposed to be, anyway. Sometimes, however, a little context helps. It can explain, for example, why a record released in 2017 sounds like it was made in 1995, or why an album by a “solo artist” is accompanied by a band photo. And now, I might explain very briefly why I, a man who has raised no children, has suddenly and without warning delivered an extraordinarily personal, emotional, and autobiographical record called Daughters and Sons.
I’ll tell you a story. In December of 2019, a woman living on the east coast reached out to me via 23 and Me. She wanted me to know that through a donor program I’d been a part of nearly two decades before, I was the father of her beautiful 13 year-old daughter and asked if I wanted to see pictures. Ever since my rather esoteric “job” in college, I’d wondered if one day such a conversation would happen. But there was so much I hadn’t counted on, even outside of all that happened in the intervening years and how those events intensified my feelings on the idea of fatherhood.
First: I never thought I would have a chance to learn about a biological child while they were still a child. I was warned back in 2001 that one day, when any given kid turned eighteen, they could - through a long and convoluted process - seek to learn their origins and be put in touch, but this was different. Second: I never imagined having the opportunity to actually be in any of my children’s lives – an opportunity that was now generously offered by my daughter’s mother. Finally: I was in no way prepared for what came over me, emotionally, just by seeing a picture of one of my children for the first time.
Writers, singer-songwriters, poets – this is a group with a higher-than-usual tolerance for a fantastical notion like love at first sight, but I’ve never believed in such nonsense. I still don’t – not in the traditional, romantic, Romeo-and-Juliet sense. But I learned that day in december 2019 that love at first sight is, in fact, real: it’s what happens when you look at your children for the first time. I’ve never experienced the traditional way - looking at a screaming infant in a hectic hospital room - so I can’t say whether the feeling was made more or less intense by the fact that I was looking instead at a fully-formed person. (Though it’s hard to imagine another experience being more intense that what I felt.) And so – as the line goes – it was just one look. I was never the same again.
Crazily enough, the story doesn’t end there. Many of these kids from my donations were in touch with one another (they’re all half-siblings, after all, and it turns out there are registries). Some already had strong sibling relationships with one another, despite living far apart. And so by the pandemic spring of 2020, I was in touch with four of them: three girls and a boy, all teenagers, all several states away, each one amazing and surprising in their own unique ways. thus – even though I’d just released Dead Messengers in March, and the pandemic had prevented me from promoting it (or even getting to play a show celebrating its release) I did what I do in times of emotional upheaval: I wrote a new record.
Between May and August, I cranked out eight new songs, almost entirely focused on this incredible series of events, including one dedicated to each of the kids I’d come to know. Then I booked two sets of sessions for the fall – one on the east coast and one on the west, for the purpose of recording the album and getting to meet the kids in person. At a week’s worth of sessions in October at Boston’s Revival House, I worked with old friend Patrick Hanlin to craft a group of songs I called Sons. Then a few weeks later in November, I traveled with my longtime collaborator J Siegel to Tiny Telephone studios in Oakland to record with Shawn Alpay and a talented group of Bay Area musicians. Those four songs I grouped together as Daughters. After a few remote contributions from Dead Messengers Steve McDonald and Frogs, as well as mixing from J.D. Andrew, my seventh LP, Daughters and Sons is here. (Surprise.)
It’s always very fulfilling to make a new record and share it with all of you. At this point in my life and career, it’s probably the single biggest motivation for continuing to do it year after year. I don’t think I’d be remiss – however – in expressing how much this particular project means to me. I am incredibly grateful for so much: the talented musicians and collaborators who helped bring the recordings to fruition, the generous mothers of these kids for allowing a awestruck misfit like me in their lives, and of course these incredible kids themselves (one of whom even indulged me by stepping into the booth and contributing background vocals on one song – a dream come true, and a moment I’ll never forget).
lastly: I’m grateful to all of you. Thanks, as always, for listening.
Marc M Cogman, Salt Lake City, 2021