Ninth Street Mission started somewhere around 2004, but didn’t have a name for a year or two. Namrata Tripathi and I met in college. She borrowed my acoustic guitar, and played me a couple songs. If I remember correctly, she played a Dire Straits song and an Indigo Girls song. I remember covering “Candy Says” by the Velvet Underground and “I Fall to Pieces” by Patsy Cline at shows on campus. After college we collaborated here and there, and eventually started hosting informal “salons” where we got our talented friends to perform.

Right around that time, Namrata and Quinn Raymond started dating. I believe Quinn was at the second-ever salon—we might have held that one at his apartment on E. 10th St. Quinn introduced us to Adam Chimera, who was a friend of Quinn’s since preschool. Between the four of us, we had way too many songs. Informal collaborations became more structured, and soon we were playing coffee shops, block parties, rock clubs, poetry clubs (well—one, the only one, Bowery Poetry Club), rooftops, we even played a show at the Communist Party headquarters. We did some big fundraisers, in particular one for the tenants of an East Village tenement that were being pushed out of their rent controlled apartments by some millionaires. All the while we were recording and reworking our songs, obsessing over the details. At one point, three of us were living on the same block on E. 9th St, and that’s how we got the band name. Everywhere I lived turned into a recording studio during this time, and a lot of the record was recorded on Grand St. in the studio I dubbed “Little Pink.”

The group started winding down in late 2007, just as our record was nearing completion. We released the record in late 2008 without any fanfare, no final show, no announcement. We had all moved on to different projects. But the record still holds up, if you ask me.