After the release of Postcards From the Whirlwind in 2022, I spent the next couple of years working on the re-releases of New Heart and Machine Dream. But I was also writing songs, of course, and I began recording the first of these, “No Words,” in early 2023. I suffered a traumatic emotional upheaval soon after that, which put a damper on my creative energies for a time. But I got back into the saddle and carried on writing and recording sporadically. I planned fairly early on to call the next album Number 9, both because it would indeed be my ninth solo album, but also because I had an idea for a song with that title (more about that in a future post). It took me a while to write that song, though. Meanwhile, I had some songs long written but never recorded, and decided to pull those out of mothballs. By the summer of 2024 I had all the songs written, but it took another nine months to get everything recorded to my satisfaction; the process was complicated by some equipment upgrades and trying to book recording sessions for the guest musicians.
The cover photo was taken by Donnie Barnett during a long but enjoyable photo shoot. We started with Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album cover as an inspiration but the final result bears little resemblance to it. The dress I wore was purchased in Limerick, Ireland; I saw it in a shop window and was instantly captivated.
Number 9 was released on August 12, 2025. I put together a band, the Chaos Crew, and we did an album release show on September 13, which consisted of about half songs from the new album and half from previous albums.
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