What You Are Carrying

What You Are Carrying

Present Day, July 25, 2026I am interested in what Sanctified Hunger means when it meets someone else’s experience. Not what I intended. What it does.I wrote the album from a position that is specific to me: five hundred and sixty eight years of direct...
What Violence Looks Like When It Has a Master

What Violence Looks Like When It Has a Master

Rome, autumn 1605Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio is in serious trouble with the law again, which means he is also, at this particular moment, producing some of the most extraordinary paintings Rome has seen in fifty years. These two things are not unrelated. The...
A Different Kind of Faith

A Different Kind of Faith

Damascus, May 1497I have been sitting with scholars at the Umayyad Mosque for two weeks now. The conversations are conducted in a mixture of Arabic, which I have been learning since Constantinople, and a Latin that several of the scholars know as a courtesy to their...
Dear God: Why I Covered This Song

Dear God: Why I Covered This Song

Present Day, July 22, 2026In 1986 Andy Partridge of XTC wrote a song called Dear God. It is structured as a letter: the writer addresses God directly, describing the suffering of the world, asking how this suffering is compatible with either God’s existence or...
From the Outside: Observed Devotion

From the Outside: Observed Devotion

Present Day, July 20, 2026Observed Devotion is the track I have been carrying the longest. It predates the specific urgency of the present moment by decades. It comes from something I have been noticing since Rinaldo’s household: what religious ritual looks and...