Tent is about traveling, about moving on while sitting still, about packing up in place. Mix the rural folk setting of Montgomery, Alabama with the urban rhythms of New York City and you get a kind of electronic meditation that lets the mind rest and wander, creating space to let go and dance. Tent is not so much about camping as it is about journeys, about mobile movement. Mobile Wash Unit frontman Andy Snyder left the home of Hank Williams for Atlanta to study physics and philosophy at Emory, and then Chicago to study theology at University of Chicago.

His advisors were a priest writing on existentialism and a Buddhism and Bob Dylan expert immersed in the mystics. They both spoke at his ordination in rural south Chicago. He worked in a church there and bravely introduced hermeneutics and negative theology to the German immigrant community -- a return to their roots in a quest to understand the current interpretive context. This journey eventually led him to a church on Park Avenue in Brooklyn and a school across from the Empire State Building. It was a different path than Dylan but he liked to think of the courage he had and the insight expressed with it. Andy's Greenwich Village was Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

The name "Mobile Wash Unit" comes from the NYC subway cleaners. The task at hand for this Mobile Wash Unit, though, is to clean your head, going from just Me to a group of We to a collective Us. Their trucks parade through Greenpoint, where Andy wrote most of these songs, staring into the city from a house on the river, feeding off the energy of an indie rock overflow. He took them into nearby Headgear Studio on New Year's Eve and sat alone tracking with while Williamsburg was cheering for other reasons. What was a lonely start had plenty of help along the way from philosophers, neuroscientists, and artists. Sim Cain from the Rollins Band even helped out on drums. Mobile Wash Unit songs may be written by an eccentric individual -- a philosophy professor, a Christian minister, a physics student -- but they are as much a product of a community by the water in a city that never sleeps. They clean up after the crowd has gone to bed.

Some songs were written like an improvised dream; they were written in a state of rest and reflection before the light starts to make self-conscious. These insights from beyond were later arranged into patterns and given shape against the electronic noise of the city. They took on themes not seen until put together. When unpacked and unfolded, when set up right, these songs can be a shelter in the toughest storm. They are meant to keep you company on your journey, to keep you going. Tent is a vision and a direction as well as a place to rest and remember: to travel within.