I wrote Protagonist in three weeks, all in the tiny attic room I had to myself within the communal living home that fit ten of us. Kieran, my favorite of the ten, was the first to hear most of these songs.
Protagonist is a concept album. It’s about one thing, one iteration of a feeling, one experience. I trapped myself in that attic room for those three weeks, wanting to keep the intensity of what I was feeling to those small quarters. What came out are ironically the biggest hooks I’ve ever written. Perhaps there’s an irony there, as the things we keep in generally seek explosions.
When I moved out of that Brooklyn house, I wept. I thought of every song on Protagonist, and how those attic walls kept me safe, even as everything beyond them felt like a reminder of what I had lost.
Lighthouse, the first single from Protagonist, is out now, and I dream that it can lift you up in the same way it carried me.