Tongues / Hope Language — Album Notes

Tongues / Hope Language is a concept double album, and like all concept albums it asks something of the listener that a single record doesn’t. It asks you to hear two things at once: the individual song, and the larger arc it is part of. The X in EHX stands for the unknown — the undefined, the unbounded. The repertoire on this album is the soundtrack of my life so far, filtered through the musical language I have spent thirty years developing. These are the notes behind the music.

The Concept

The two discs are two sides of the same question. Tongues is the act of communication — how we speak to power, to each other, to ourselves. Hope Language is its content and outcome — what we are actually saying, and where we hope it leads. If Tongues is the means, Hope Language is the end. Together they form a complete statement about storytelling, which I believe is one of the most fundamentally human things we do.

The title also carries a double meaning that matters to me. Our native tongue is the language we are born into — inherited, shaped by family and culture, the medium through which we first understand the world. But tongue is also the language of the spirit — speaking in tongues, the ecstatic utterance that bypasses the rational mind entirely. Both are present in this music. The arrangements are deeply studied and carefully constructed. They are also, in performance, acts of collective improvisation that go somewhere none of us could have predicted alone.

Disc One — Tongues

1974 Blues — Eddie Harris

We open with the blues in 7/4 (a fun play on 1974, coincidentally my birth year.) If you are going to tell a story; start at the beginning, and in this case that is a beginning that is both rooted and ready to take flight. Eddie Harris was a musician who defied categories — a jazz saxophonist who played electric saxophone, who crossed into soul and R&B, who was never quite claimed by any single community because he belonged to all of them. That feels right as an opening statement for an album flush through with fluidity of musical identity. Deep blues feeling, with a healthy dose of jazz language. The foundation on which everything that follows rests.

Us — Regina Spektor

Regina Spektor’s ‘Us’ is one of the most quietly devastating songs about the human tendency toward self-destruction I know. Arranged as a driving string trio of rhythmic hockets — a kind of polyrhythmic engine under a flowing lyric that shifts from soaring declaration to sardonic whisper. World-weary wisdom delivered with a wink. Hayley Thompson-King’s voice finds something in this song that I don’t think Spektor herself fully unlocked — a rawness that comes from singing it in a different time, a different life.

I Want You (She’s So Heavy) — Lennon/McCartney

The Beatles are everywhere on this album because the Beatles are everywhere in my life. This one is pure obsessive desire — one of Lennon’s most primal compositions, that grinding riff, that relentless repetition. EHX snuggles the jazz inside the rock without domesticating it. The heaviness stays but teeter totters with a slightly off-kilter hard bop groove (think Wes Montgomery mostly) in a way that signals the many facades we use when trying to communicate what we want.

Sæglópur — Sigur Rós

Sigur Rós occupies a unique place in the post-rock landscape — music that has the emotional weight of classical music and the atmospheric sprawl of ambient, but the energy of a band playing in a room together. ‘Sæglópur’ means ‘lost at sea’ in Icelandic/Hopelandic. The arrangement holds that feeling of being adrift while still moving — disorientation without panic (clean guitar, hamonics mixed with bit crushed delay and chorus.) Jónsi’s falsetto world translated into the tenor saxophone and cello. Noah Preminger's solo particularly soars, goose-bump worthy.

Klactoveedsedstene — Charlie Parker

Bebop is always in my heart, and it usually bubbles up in everything I play and even the way I talk (just ask any student in my lecture classes how fast I can talk when excited about a subject.) Charlie Parker’s title is pure speaking in toungues — the sound of the music itself rendered as a nonsense word. Our arrangement pays full respect to the bebop tradition but with a focus on the elements of the style, not the codified cliche bop vocabulary. Syncopated hits, reharmonizing the already re-harmonized "Rhythm Changes" patterns, and putting a premium on dialogue between instruments (a duo starts the piece and then new duos emerge along the way) are the key structural elements that keep the Bebop spirit and sound fresh and surprising.

Up from the Skies — Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix’s most underrated song, or so I have always thought. The lyric is a meditation on arriving from elsewhere and finding the earth changed — an alien’s-eye view of environmental catastrophe, decades before we had the language for it. I gave it a poly-tonal harmonic frame and delivered it with the cool restraint of swinging brushes, warm electric bass, wah guitar, airy tenor and an almost cavalier lyric delivery. The calm inside the storm of climate catastrophe. Not rage — observation. Sometimes that’s more frightening.

How to Disappear Completely — Radiohead

Thom Yorke wrote this song after a panic attack at a Radiohead show in Dublin, using a mantra Michael Stipe had given him: ‘I am not here, this is not happening.’ It is one of the great dissociation songs. This arrangement blends hints of Argentinian chacarera — a folk rhythm from the north of Argentina with a particular floating, off-kilter quality — with 2 over 3 polyrhythms, eerie electronics and haunted cello melodies. Memory and nostalgia as coping tools, this was one my 'survival kit playlist' songs during the pandemic, I had to arrange it for EHX.

Army of Me — Björk

Björk wrote ‘Army of Me’ as a message to her brother: stop being a victim, take responsibility, stand up. It is fierce, uncompromising, and completely without sentimentality. We stripped it to percussive string (guitar, cello and later bass) patterns and modal jazz that simmers for a long time before erupting with distorted force. The text — ‘you’ll face an army of me’ — never gets far from the surface. Disc one closes here, at the edge of eruption.

Disc Two — Hope Language

Mother Nature’s Son — Paul McCartney

Hope Language opens with this, performed on tenor banjo — my recorded debut on the instrument. McCartney wrote it at an Indian meditation retreat in 1968, a simple pastoral song about belonging to the natural world. I wanted to start the second disc with something that felt like arriving somewhere after a long journey — stripped down, grounded, acoustic in an ancient and sacred sense. The arrangement travels from blues Americana to the outer edges of post-bop harmony. The journey concludes at the intersection of modern jazz and dixieland gumbo-yaya – intense, playful, honest.

Here Comes the Flood — Peter Gabriel

Gabriel wrote this in 1977 as a vision of catastrophe — a world inundated, the survivors clinging to what remains. It is the darker counterpart to ‘Mother Nature’s Son’ — pastoral warmth against something menacing, building from whisper to full growl. We are still in the climate emergency when we get here, but the emotional register has shifted from cool observation to full confrontation. It starts as a whisper, almost sweetly singing into the void of a repeated loop. It soon builds to full bass acro growls, sputtering overdrive guitar and full tilt belt from Hayley that puts everyone on notice!

Ida Lupino — Carla Bley

A still, luminous center. Carla Bley’s composition named for the actress and director is one of the most quietly beautiful pieces in the jazz repertoire — a song that seems to hold more space than its notes occupy. Coming after the intensity of the Gabriel, it provides exactly the breath the album needs. You can even hear the inhales and the exhales as some guitar melodies play forward, some backwards. This is where Hope Language finds its stillness and balance before the final push.

Russians — Sting

Sting wrote this in 1985 during the height of Cold War nuclear anxiety, sampling Prokofiev and pleading for the shared humanity of ‘the Russians’ and Americans alike. We made it a Cold War 2.0 revamp — a sonic dreamscape mixing rich cello and bass melodies with warbly tape-filtered guitar, my intention was to create the effect of listening to live strings while listening to an old Walkman you just found in the attic with a tape of the same song on it. Time travel. The lyric’s plea — ‘I hope the Russians love their children too’ (the band literally whispers these lyrics, like the past talking to now)— lands differently in 2026 than it did in 1985, but it lands no less urgently.

Amelia — Joni Mitchell

Joni Mitchell’s meditation on Amelia Earhart, on failed love affairs, on the romance and loneliness of flight. This is the song on the album I feel most personally. Mitchell’s guitar language has always been a reference point for me, as it is with so many jazz musicians — the open tunings, the willingness to let harmony be ambiguous and unresolved. My arrangement honors that ambiguity – the time pulls and surges like clouds across the sky, phrases stretch, linger, and float like birds in updrafts yet everything interlocks and lands just when we need it. The band is dialed in, listening deeply and responding as one.

Bachelorette — Björk

Björk again, now in a completely different zone. Where ‘Army of Me’ was aggression, ‘Bachelorette’ is myth — a woman emerging from the earth carrying a book that writes itself, a story that contains the story of the story. It is one of Björk’s most literary songs. The arrangement carries the album toward its close with this sense of things spiraling outward and then inward again — the book being written, read, consumed, returned. The reverse pedal makes another appears here, fleshing that concept of the return, we lean into the modal jazz / tango energy to punch up a 'mysterious dance with nature' space.

Everybody Is a Star / Long as You’re Living — Sly Stone / Abbey Lincoln

The final track weaves two songs together: Sly Stone’s declaration of universal dignity and Abbey Lincoln’s fierce, blues-soaked affirmation of life. In my ear, they belong together. Both are songs about the worth of every human being, arrived at from completely different musical traditions — funk and jazz, euphoria and elegy. Together they form a soulful blues elegy that is, finally, an act of hope. It begins with solo guitar, that singular recognition that we all have something to contribute to humanity, that we all matter. Hayley's notes on the project sum up what the project as a whole is going for but also what is exeplified in this closing track mash up. Hayley writes. "I think what makes this music so powerful is that it is at once collective and deeply individual. Early on when I was starting to understand that this is what Eric was drawing from, I wrote to him that it felt like falling through time – it sounded to me like he was searching on a reel to reel for a particular moment to cut tape - scratching a record back and forth - he loops a fragment, and just as I start to hum the melody, the guitar zooms off to create another far-reaching experimentation. All of this rooted in a profound intimacy with the music."

“Both my own experience and my mentors taught me to only play songs you love, that really mean something to you. EHX plays a book of repertoire that is truly autobiographical. These songs are the soundtrack or mixtape of my life so far.” — Eric Hofbauer

The Ensemble

EHX would not exist without these musicians – all with open ears and open hearts, which in my experience makes for the deepest connections as improvisers and as humans . Noah Preminger and Temidayo Balogun on tenors — two completely distinct voices with a penchant for melody and who put a premium on tone and timbre. Hayley Thompson-King’s voice, with an amazing ability to transform lyric narrative and emotional space through the turn of a melodic phrase and a sustained pitch. Ana Ospina’s cello, which gives the ensemble its string trio dimension and its deepest lyrical voice that underpins the abundant counterpoint throughout. Tony Leva on bass, a musical partner of twenty years who commits with me to the unknown, everytime we play. Miki Matsuki and Kyle Aronson on drums, bringing different rhythmic sensibilities and personality to the tracks they are featured on. Miki and I go back 20 years as well, she and I both believe in the intersection of freedom and groove. Kyle is new to the scene and brings energy and a creative potential that inspires. All of this was recorded by Dan Cardinal at Dimension Sound — a wizard of sound and trusted collaborator who knows exactly how to get the sounds out of my head, to the band on the track, and out to the world.

Availability

Tongues / Hope Language is available on all streaming platforms and on Bandcamp . The double vinyl edition (Creative Nation Music CNM045) is available now. WBUR (Boston NPR station) named it Album of the Month on its digital release.