When I was a child, there were 27 grandchildren, and I barely had any one-on-one time with anybody. The concept of one-on-one was not really a thing when there are nine sets of uncles and grandparents and kids. It does sound strange to some people that we would all be together every summer, but we really would. We would get several houses on the beach — these sort of beach cabins — all the kids would sleep in one room, in bunk beds. It was wild and so magical. 

In the song, "Magpie," to have that line — "To feel you in the passenger seat" — is a much more recent thing. In the last several years, as I've become an adult and spent a lot of time in Ireland playing music and visiting family, it's only been then, in those last years in my grandfather's life, that I had any one-on-one time with him at all. Especially where I would be driving him around, but that did happen. 



A couple years before he died, my friend and I were in Ireland with the hopes of making some sort of audio documentary about him. We interviewed him and went on all these drives with him, and he would be sitting in the passenger seat. Of course my granny didn't want him to come with us. She's like, "No, no! Jim, stay home, stay home!" 



But we would take him and just ask him these questions, and one moment that really stuck out in my mind was [when] we were driving back from his old home place — the house that he grew up in — and my friend, Stephanie, asked my granddad, "What are your greatest accomplishments in life? What are you most proud of?" And he just said, "My family." I just thought that was so beautiful. 

"Donal Óg" is a very old song. I first heard my dad singing it, and the words really jumped out at me. I just think they're heartbreaking. It's sort of a love song sung from the perspective of a woman. There aren't too many of those in the folk tradition, so when they pop up, they always sort of grab me. 



Initially, I thought that I would start the album with just an A capella version of this song to set the tone, but it ended up taking on a life of its own. We recorded it live in a church in Portland with an organ, and me singing into a microphone into the very back of the room. It created this huge soundscape for what ended up being the centerpiece of the record in a lot of ways. 



As the track fades out, you hear my grandfather come in and start singing an old ballad that he sang every chance he got, called "The West's Awake." That was an iPhone recording that my dad took at a cousin's wedding and [in] the last moments of mixing, I had this idea: "What if we could [put] that in?" I emailed it to Tucker Martin, my producer, and he snuck it in there. 



I think it's a chilling moment, especially when other moments in the record, I'd make these very explicit references to my granddad. In [the song] "Magic Hour," I even say, "If you listen hard, you might hear my grandaddy singing far away." I wasn't trying to be clever or anything. I'm just really happy it worked out and that we were able to [include] it because I think it's nice that he got his moment.