This summer I went to Portugal to write. But in many ways, these songs began in New York.

Over the previous year, I had filled four Moleskine notebooks while living and working in New York City — fragments of lyrics, observations, bits of poems, questions, and thoughts about love and relationships. Alongside them were the books and other readings I had deliberately been using to feed and challenge my writing.

New York gave me an enormous amount of material. What I hadn't found was enough distance from it to see what it might become.

This summer I spent several weeks in Portugal, around Praia da Luz and Lagos, and brought those four notebooks and that year of reading with me. In the quiet, I began going back through everything I had accumulated.

Lines that had seemed unrelated began speaking to one another. Ideas about intimacy, solitude, desire, attachment and the ways people move toward and away from one another began finding characters, melodies and stories.

Portugal didn't give me the ideas so much as give me the space to hear what was already there.

And out of that came Songs from Portugal.

Songs from Portugal goes into the studio October 30–November 1 with producer David “Goody” Goodrich. The $8,000 goal will help cover production, studio and engineering costs, mastering, CD manufacturing, additional musicians where needed, and the other costs involved in completing and releasing the record.

If you'd like to help bring Songs from Portugal to life, please consider contributing to the recording. Every contribution, at any level, helps move the record toward completion.

And if contributing isn't possible, sharing this campaign with someone who might connect with the music is another great way to help.