Smoke & Steel came out of my walking by Ground Zero on the first anniversary of 9/11. Hundreds of hopeful notes and prayers and angel drawings had been scrawled on plywood fences adjacent to the site, and even after workmen drowned it all out with successive layers of black paint, the notes gradually returned, more sparsely this time, in silver ink. This entire album was written inside my New York apartment, which overlooks the World Trade Center site.