A well-rehearsed whim or a flight of fancy? The heart, the soul, the bones find an almost alchemical magnetized tug that draws you somewhere new, somewhere previously unforeseen and a migration occurs like a kind of calling.

I wrote my new record, Land Like a Bird, in a new life that fit and fell on me like new skin, not yet stretched out and worn in. I wrote this record in love and for love and broken by love and moved to the highest heights and the lowest lows, but, always with my eyes and heart trained toward the gleam of light on the topside of the shadow. I wrote these songs as love letters. To someone specific, to nobody in particular, to the girl looking back at me in the morning mirror, who has a few more lines than the last time I looked her way.

I spent the entire last eclipse of my adult life in the Manhattan area, whether on the island or in the outskirts of Brooklyn or Jersey. Surrounded by concrete and asphalt, taxi horns and rushing trains. I got used to it, though I wasn't native to it, and I fell madly in love with it. I acted and I wrote and directed plays and lived theater, onstage and backstage. After teaching myself guitar, songs fell out in a late-blooming burst and I found home in the clubs of the Lower East Side and found family with my band, the Tearjerks. It was the right place at the right time, and once it seeped deep into my skin it stayed like ink and I was changed.

I played colleges, cafes, clubs, sidewalks, subways and one lucky day, Judy Collins' manager, on a scouting mission for the singer's new label, Wildflower Records, heard me singing only because she'd come to the show to see someone else. Within weeks, Collins was signing me to her label, taking me under her wing, calling me “one of the best young songwriters,” recording my songs and inviting me to share her stage. Songs for Bright Street (2006) earned me national notice and a nomination for Emerging Artist of the Year from the North American Folk Alliance. My album The Killer In Me (2009) did even better, with the title track being named by NPR as “Song of the Day.” The record got widespread critical acclaim and I toured the US and Europe, sharing stages with Judy and Nanci Griffith and Shawn Colvin. My song “Weight of the World” from Killer was named by NYC's top AAA radio station, WFUV, as the #4 Folk song of the Decade in their 2010 year-end Top 10 list.

But life takes its twists and turns and as much as I loved Manhattan, I felt the ending of one chapter and the beginning of another. Relief and anticipation went hand in hand with the grieving.

Then, out of the blue, a rush of wind and I was drawn. I flew south during the harvest season, like the geese, as the days grew shorter. I was following a path well worn by songwriters and dreamers, reason enough for me to pack my leftover and borrowed belongings and my dog and drive to Nashville in 2009, cradling an aching hope that I was following something I couldn't see clearly but would illuminate soon as long as I leapt. I trusted the net would appear.

So this record — Land Like a Bird. I wrote a few of the songs as I said goodbye to my little studio apartment in Jersey City, in an old neighborhood with views of both the Statue of Liberty and the remaining towers of lower Manhattan (“Manila Street”). There are goodbyes to people and places from a distant memory, whether imagined or real (“Had To Lose,” “Ghost,” Ron Sexsmith's beautiful “Galbraith Street”). I brought these songs and unpacked them on the shelves with the books that line the walls of my new East Nashville home.

And the fall became winter and the winter became spring and Neilson Hubbard and I would meet and write or record and snippets became songs became demos became a sound we both were chasing, something full of emotion and air and by early fall 2010 we were inside the record we both knew we wanted to make together, a full turn of the seasons from my arrival. From the opening scene of “Drive All Night” — a groove of the chase, a single minded mission of directional desire — to “Real Love Song” and the bow of the epilogue: “these are our fireworks, our hands in the dirt, this is a real love song.”

To push the boundaries of this extended metaphor — the whole thing flew by.

And finally, the title track “Land Like a Bird,” the unapologetic love letter, the hand held out as a promise, a beacon in the shallows as the weather moves in:

Fly in circles in a dark sky

Trying to soar when your wings are broken

Right here can't you find it? There's a new world:

Land like a bird.