On December 23rd, I found myself alone at my favorite hole-in-the-wall in Harlem — a solitary lunch in an eerily quiet city. The fortune cookie that arrived with the check wouldn’t have been remarkable on any other day. But in the particular sobriety of that late-2013 lull, it stopped me cold: The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.

The chord it struck was this: I was already deep in a process of slow, systematic archiving — analog work in a digital-speed world. Rewinding the tape and playing it from somewhere unexpected. Lifting the record tonearm and landing it again deliberately. Re-reading a chapter just to sit in it a third time. Organizing years of photos into something that reads like a sequence. This is partly nostalgia for these methods-as-metaphor, and partly a call for making something out of them.

If our lives are constructions of narrative — stories we build about ourselves — then archives are a slow reconstruction in service of the future. After years of consuming music almost exclusively, I find myself with dozens of new songs in the mix. The stories from the past that will appear on this blog are meant to give that present work some depth and breadth. Context before content. The backward look as a running start.