Being as Art of Élan is an intrepid chamber music series based in San Diego, California, and I a New York-based composer, I wanted to bridge the 3,000 mile distance between the two cities by discovering why people move to California — and with that, I turned to an anthology of California Poetry assembled to Dana Gioia.  Hoping to find triumphant drinking songs from the Gold Rush era, I was most captivated by two poems of Bert Meyers, and focused on his work entirely, choosing liberally from a volume of his collected poems,  “In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat“. Meyers’s poems were destined to be sung – they are haunting, minimal, direct, and tell a California story from a perspective similar to my own — that of a young Jewish-American father, raising two kids in a time of unrest.

I am so grateful to Bert Meyers’s son, Daniel Meyers, for permitting me to use these texts, to Art of Élan for their gracious commission and beautiful recording, and of course to you, for listening. Enjoy!

For the complete lyrics, please see here.

March 13, 2026 at National Sawdust, Brooklyn NY, with Refugee Orchestra Project, vocalist Inna Barmash, conducted by Lidiya Yankovskaya (see video above)