Spend enough time in London and a postcode acquires duties far beyond sorting the mail: it can hint at rent, commute, allegiance, memory and the side of the river someone will defend with suspicious intensity. For an American musician, calling an album Proud of My Postcode carries a touch of audacity alongside the affection. Longboat began in Seattle, yet its founder now spends enough of his life in Britain for those letters and numbers to represent a chosen place in the world.

By album 37, abundance has become a settled fact, which makes the choice of subject far more revealing: why Britain, why a postcode and why now, as the musician’s connection with the UK moves from recurring visits toward a permanent future. Recorded at Strongroom Studios in Shoreditch with engineer Will Davies, the electronic record is due at the end of September. We spoke with the musician behind Longboat while Proud of My Postcode approached release and Britain moved closer to becoming his permanent address.

Hi, it’s great to speak with you, and congratulations on Proud of My Postcode. A British postcode can carry class, region, football allegiance and a collection of assumptions before somebody opens their front door. When did it begin carrying identity alongside geography for you, and what exactly are you proud of in yours?

I singled this point of pride out because it seemed to be a particularly British practice. In the US, zip codes don’t really mean much. They’re just numerical locators and hardly ever carry any subtext. But yes, there is an entire raft of things that a postcode can imply. My London address is in Clerkenwell, which is a really fantastic neighborhood. It’s centrally located, vibrant and parts of it are quite old and beautiful. I don’t know if I’d say that the mention of EC1 fills me with pride. It’s more like a feeling of home and belonging.    

The album pays attention to Britain at street level. Give me one detail a tourism campaign would probably pass by, yet you found interesting enough to build into a song. What caught your eye?

The active past in the form of forlorn ghosts and vengeful spirits. Also the continued fallout of colonialism. In addition, there’s a tune called “Brixton Bill,” which argues that strange, eccentric and sometimes unpleasant people are responsible for a good deal of positive change throughout the UK. 

You can walk through London and pass several centuries in ten minutes; Seattle offers a very different sense of scale and distance. When you were programming this album, did London make the songs shorter, busier or more crowded with detail?

England and London shaped every song on the album. And because I find the UK fairly fascinating, there is another album to be released in early 2027 that explores other aspects of living here. Who knows, I might just keep making occasional albums about the UK whenever something strikes me as odd or interesting.

You entered music as a jazz tenor saxophonist, an instrument organised around breath, while Proud of My Postcode is entirely electronic. Which instinct from the saxophone followed you into the programming, and which electronic possibility changed the way you think about phrasing?

Well, you’ve only got so much breath. Whatever you’re playing or singing, you need to give yourself a beat or two to breathe. I try to carry that into electronic music. If there aren’t pauses at certain points in a melody or instrumental solo, the ear tends to turn off because the music is reduced to noodling.

Strongroom Studios sits in Shoreditch, one of London’s most argued-over neighbourhoods. What did you hear or see between sessions that followed you back into the studio and affected a track?

Although we were hard at work recording these two UK/London albums, I had a chance to explore Shoreditch in more detail. The street that Strongroom’s on hosts something like nine pubs and bars within a two-block radius. So yes, it’s a pretty lively area. And since it’s London, there are all kinds of hidden gems to discover. But I wouldn’t exactly say that my immediate surroundings in Shoreditch influenced me that much. My neighborhood of Clerkenwell is just a short distance away and I feel that I’m pretty familiar with Shoreditch’s contours. 

Around Clerkenwell, you have been performing piano-only versions from a catalogue of roughly one hundred songs. When electronically built material has to stand on a single instrument, what does that test reveal about the writing? Which song surprised you most in translation?

To be honest, it was the rock/metal tunes that transformed in the most interesting ways. Although this album is electronic, I make albums with live bands quite often. There’s always the desire to write proper rock music when the opportunity presents itself. Perhaps the most surprising is a tune called “Instant Superstar” from the 2016 album D(Plus). It’s a song about stupid internet fail culture that’s been defanged and slowed down, but still retains its drive. If you see me live, I’ll play it for you. 

A thirty-seventh album offers freedoms earned through years of releasing music. What idea on Proud of My Postcode would your younger self have overthought, polished away or considered too peculiar to share?

My younger self was too poor to spend much time in London or the UK. Whenever I was here, it was always returning from visiting family in Ukraine or recovering from those family visits in Turkey. Spending more time in the UK with my wife has only increased my appreciation and sharpened my observation. The craft of songwriting should always be evolving and morphing into something else that people can enjoy.

Writing affectionately about an adopted country also raises a question of permission. At what point does love give an outsider the right to criticise a place, and what responsibility comes with turning other people’s home into artistic material?

I’m much more of an observer than a critic. I try not to judge in general. I present a situation and a predicament and let the listener draw their own conclusions. But I would say that living in our little place in Clerkenwell fills me with a lot of happiness. It’s tough to harbor grudges in that kind of situation. 

Longboat has drawn a firm line around human authorship while AI enters music production. Which imperfection in a recording tells you that a person was truly present, and would you preserve it even when technology offers a cleaner version?

Well, I like to think that my voice has character. That also means that my voice isn’t perfect. But it’s not just the performance that matters; it’s the strength of the song and, in particular, the strength of the arrangement. In the past few decades, songwriting has been reduced to a process that appeals more to impulses than to any aesthetic aspirations. Songs are written without any vision or care by groups of people who have no particular goal other than making a buck or two from the process. This gives AI the perfect opportunity to imitate this wretched practice. I’m trying to do the opposite. I’m trying to relate to my audience in a real way, playing my own music live and singing with my own voice. Sometimes my playing isn’t perfect, sometimes I muddle my own lyrics, but it’s always genuine.  

Your plan to make the UK a permanent home may eventually change the perspective that created this album. If familiarity softens the outsider’s eye, what part of Britain might disappear from your songwriting first? Would belonging sharpen your observations or make you more protective of the place?

I’m actually hoping that longterm exposure to the UK will change my perspective. I depend on my views evolving into something else to find compelling subject matter. I can’t tell you what will surface or how I will view Britain because it hasn’t happened yet. That’s for Future-Igor. I will tell you that I’m in the midst of writing four albums and at least two of those will be for piano and voice.