Lockdown was a period of constant music-making. I asked a farmer friend to send his crops, from which I hoped to backflip into some new song-structures. I partook of the crop, the songs began. I called the endeavor High and High and Mighty (abbreviated as HAHAM) and invited a brilliant pedal steel player to collaborate. It took us months of back-and-forthing, during which time my friend and colleague Emmett Kelly told me about his new Ha Ha Institute cassette label. It felt like absolutely the right place for HAHAM to begin its public existence. The pedal steel player began to express concerns about the lyrical content and requested that he appear on the recordings pseudonymically, hence “Bird Man”. He felt his life and the life of his family could be in danger. This was all while Bill Callahan and I were working on Blind Date Party, and where that was an exploration of home-bound extroversion, High and High and Mighty was all introversion, intended to sound like it could never exist in the physical world, only in a myriad mindscapes. We tried to master it, working with the demigod Helge Sten, but the pieces resisted such further person-handling; Emmett expressed a perverse fondness for unmastered recordings and in this case I had to agree that it can sometimes work out. Look for the Broadway live enactment of High and High and Mighty in your dreams and mine.
