Notes on "Fish House Waltz"

NK: I came to the Rauschenberg Residency with no real plans for what I wanted to do there, and everyone else had disappeared into their studios. The first week, I just explored: I got up at dawn and swam on the gulf side of the island; at the end of the day, I kayaked on the bay side, looking out for herons, dolphin, and manatee. I biked around, visited tourist shops, and picked up free magazines full of fishing ads with pictures of grinning men holding the big fish they had caught. The men looked chuffed; the fish looked depressed and dead. I made collages out of them and thought about how the posture was like a pietà, or a seduction, or the way you’d cradle a child.

LL: My first goal at the residency was to finish recording my gypsy jazz guitar album, and I worked on almost nothing else for the first week and a half. My assigned workspace, Garage Studio, was a large, converted structure on the beach side of the island, with a Yamaha upright piano. Although professionally I’m a guitarist, my first instrument was piano. I sat down to play on the second night and this melody is what came out. I recorded it on my phone and stashed it away, not really knowing what I was going to do with it.

NK: At the start of the second week I got a friendly text from Lisa throwing out the loose idea to collaborate on something. At first, I imagined a music video based on the fish collages, but when her piano composition came my way, I wanted to respond musically, and the lyrics I wrote were much more sad and complicated than the lighthearted project I imagined we’d make. We named the song after the “Fish House,” the house built in 1942 that stands on stilts at the end of a long dock. The Fish House has become an icon for the Rauschenberg Foundation and it was a place where many of us spent time, all together and alone.

LL: Looking back at it, it’s funny that “Fish House Waltz” was the first song we worked on together, and the very last one we finished.