The songs on Being Younger emerged in fits and starts, mostly sitting at the jangly piano in my living room, dreaming about collaboration from the vantage point of pandemic isolation. I heard drums and bass and horns and vocal harmonies, guitar and organ and lots of tambourine (my favorite weakness). I heard insistent grooves –– I was dreaming up music that people could dance to, a strange vision in that moment of time.

The songs on this album are personal reflections on the extended weird time we’ve been living in, and on the search for light around the edges. It’s an album about getting older, about making peace with past failures, about saying goodbye to various youthful fantasies about how things would turn out.

It’s also an album about finding solidarity and friendship amidst the wild weather of these times. One of the great things about getting older is the deepening of old friendships and many of these songs are written as love letters to dear friends, trying to help pull them through tough moments. A couple songs are trying out that level of compassion on myself. Generally they’re calls for togetherness in a time of isolation; they’re songs about pain with hope and light at their core.

We recorded all ten songs in a three-day marathon session in Portland, Maine in August 2022. It was a miracle of logistics; old bandmates had come in from New York and Louisiana and Massachusetts and Amsterdam; we all stayed focused, nobody got covid and we recorded everything that we intended to. At some point in the recording studio I looked around the room and realized that I’d been friends with everyone there for at least ten years, collaborating with many of them since high school band class. I think you can hear those old bonds come through in the music; there’s elation at getting to play together again, after spending two forever pandemic years apart.

“Kaira Ba” (pronounced “KAI rah bah”) is a Mandinka phrase meaning “the great peace” or “peace and love.” The Mandinka belong to West Africa's largest ethno­linguistic group, the Mande. The flagship instrument of Diali Cissokho & Kaira Ba is the kora, a 21­ or 22­stringed bridge­harp from West Africa. The strings of the kora are made of fishing line and they resonate through a large, halved gourd stretched with a cowhide. Traditionally, the kora is played by Mandinka Jalis and Mande Jelis (“griots” in French), members of a special caste of society that work as musicians and oral historians. They are walking libraries of information and history; artisans of speech and sound. Diali Keba Cissokho was born into a griot family who can trace their musical roots back over many generations. Diali can name for you nineteen grandfathers who played kora and sang. His own father began teaching him the family instrument at the tender age of five.