The Mailman Single Available now

What inspired the song? 

Mailboxes and John Prine.  

I was listening to an interview with John Prine. He was a Mailman for about six years before he became famous. He used to write lyrics in his head on his route. In the interview, he was asked  if he ever read mail that wasn’t in an envelope. He replied, “Oh I read everything.” I held onto  that line in my head. Not long after that I was on my morning walk looking at the mailboxes  thinking about how the mailbox is a portal into people’s lives and futures. That’s where  wedding invitations and birth notices and bills and college acceptance and rejection letters  come, and the mailman is the messenger for all of that. I took John Prine’s statement for part of  the first verse and then the song wrote itself, pretty much all on one 3-mile walk. 

Was there a specific feeling that you were trying to elicit in listeners?

Empathy for the human condition—the joys and the sorrows that mark each of our lives. 

Do you have an interesting story about the songwriting or recording process?  I knew I wanted to keep the recording simple, to let the story have the spotlight. Originally it  was just me and guitar, but I wanted to add some more feeling to it. We tried brushes on a  snare, but because I did not record to a click track it kept feeling out of synch. I like the vocal  take and didn’t want to re-do it. So we just added Rob Allen playing some pedal steel sounds  on electric guitar and Dan Lutz playing upright bass and that was all it needed. 

What are three descriptors/adjectives that best describe the emotion or melody in this song?

Tender, reflective, soulful. 

Can you provide further context around the visuals associated with this song, including any artwork or video?

Matt Mahurin shot the video. He’s done something like forty Time Magazine covers and has been Tom Waits’ principle photographer. He is an amazing video story-teller. I shot the performance in his studio in California, synched to the track. He then got a close friend of his who is an actor to play the mailman. They went out for a day and found all of these great locations for shooting, and treated themselves to a couple of fine meals in between. The guy who plays the mailman is so perfect for the part. He said he was in tears when he first listened to the song, and he brings that sense of feeling to his performance. Dan then added magical animation which includes Mrs’ Edwards’ mailbox being uprooted and flying into a dark sky, the paper airplane flying through the country onto a table with a cup of tea, lemonade on the porch, the mailman enveloped by metropolis, and all of the other great visuals in the video. It’s a magical video that fits the emotion of the song perfectly.

Is there a specific still from the video you’d like to include? Notable photographer, director or cast?

Probably the paper airplane next to the tea, or the mailman about to send the paper airplane into flight over the cliff.

Do you have a favorite lyric from this track that you’d like to highlight? Why is that significant to you?

There’s a verse in which the mailman has to deliver a notice of foreclosure to an elderly woman on his route. At first I made him angry at, “The man,” — you know, banks, mortgage companies, capitalism, all that. He was saying basically that he’d like them all to go screw themselves. But then I thought, that’s not really him. This guy is not vitriolic. I didn’t want him to be cliché. He’s a thinking man. He’s gentle, tender. So I spent some time going deep into his character and asked, what is it that is within his power to do to help her? He could give her a few days, right? So I had him ask himself, “What’s the worst could happen, if I wait ’til Saturday?” I love that line because of what it says about him, and I love developing characters in this way.

How do you feel that you’ve grown as an artist since your last release?

My story-telling ability has gotten better, characters have gotten more real, there’s more internal rhyming, and my playing is better.

What has the song taught you or what do you take away from it? 

I think it taught me a lot about character development.

Anything else noteworthy? Perhaps about the song title?

When I made the demo I posted it on the John Prine fan website and people went nuts over it — over 450 comments. I was so moved.