The Golden Hour Album

In 2005, Firewater's Tod A embarked on what would become a three year
sabbatical through the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent and South
East Asia. He had recently split with his wife; George W. Bush had just
been re-elected; New York, his home for the last 20 years, had become a
cold and foreign place. He wasn't even sure he wanted to make music
anymore. "I was extremely depressed. The NYC skyline looked like bad
wallpaper to me. It was either kill myself or hit the road," he says.
He put everything he owned in storage and left NYC with a few clothes
and a laptop.The journey Tod undertook would challenge him
creatively in ways he couldn't have imagined in its planning stages. "I
traveled overland starting in Delhi, India, across the Thar Desert,
then through Rajasthan, onward through the Punjab, and into Pakistan,"
he recounts. "I had originally planned to continue overland through
Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, ending in Istanbul." But things didn't go
exactly as planned. Along the way he was drugged, robbed, detained, and
later struck down with severe intestinal problems. Travelers were
disappearing along the road to Kabul. As Tod puts it, "I was forced to
end my trip at the Khyber Pass on the Afghan border, due to general ill
health and the unnerving likelihood of kidnapping."Recording
with a single microphone and a laptop in his pack, he captured
performances with a vast array of musicians across India and
Pakistan--and eventually Turkey and Israel. Bhangra and sufi percussion
would form the basis for the songs he wrote along the way--songs about
the world he left behind ("This Is My Life", "Electric City"), politics
("Borneo", "Hey Clown"), and dislocation ("6:45", "Feels like the End
of the World"). Tod's acerbic wit shines on The Golden Hour, elucidating both the beauty and the absurdity of the world.Firewater drummer Tamir Muskat (now also of Balkan Beat Box)
produced, mixed and played on the album, along with a strange cast of
characters from 5 different countries. Tod tells the story of the trip
in a short video, which includes footage from his travels. He also
chronicled his experiences on his travel blog, Postcards from the Other Side of the World.(From Bloodshot Records)