Behind the Music

Re: "The Evening" from A Man Alive

The synth you hear in the beginning of “The Evening” was built by my friend Jackie Jones. She called it “the robot" because she had fashioned it to look like one.

I met Jackie at the farmer’s market in San Francisco somewhere around 2009. She was 83. I first noticed her dancing cat. It was made of thin wood, with bouncing arms and legs on moving joints…