On a summer afternoon early in the pandemic, the songwriter Will Stratton was riding his bike near where he lives in the Hudson Valley when he had an experience that felt strange at the time but has become increasingly common. Wildfires were burning on the West Coast, and smoke that had traveled all the way across the country lent an otherworldly quality to the air, and to the light. It seemed unreal.
“The sunlight was filtering through these very high layers of smoke in a way that was completely changing the light here,” Stratton told me. “I was thinking about that visual effect and it made me think about my childhood in California and all of the connections that I still have to that place, and the way family memories have been passed down and have had all of the rough corners smoothed off of them.” Soon, he began to talk to his parents about their memories, particularly from their adolescent years in the East Bay and Central Valley, connecting the dots across stories and points on the map.
That bike ride, and the conversations that followed, formed the seed of what would become Points of Origin, a record that explores the looming threat and ongoing impact of wildfire in California. To call it a concept album is technically accurate, but it feels truer to call it a whittled-down, brilliantly crafted collection of linked short stories set to melodies.
The album, Stratton’s eighth, is a bit of a departure. A songwriter known for his skilled fingerpicking, he has chosen here to give the vocals—and therefore the stories being told—priority. Each song comes from a different point of view: a fire lookout, an aeronautical engineer, an incarcerated firefighter, a real estate agent, an arsonist, a lawyer. In “Temple Bar,” a barfly reminisces about an East Bay watering hole and the regulars he got to know, whom he describes as “a family like a lost and found.” Several of these regulars narrate other songs on the record, making “Temple Bar” a kind of hub, like the bar itself, around which the record turns.
The song was inspired in part by articles written by an incarcerated firefighter; the Jesusita Fire was among the ones he described.
Covering multiple decades from the 1970s onward, the songs alternate between cheery and mournful as they chronicle these individuals’ lives, where they begin and where they wind up, and how wildfires shape them along the way. And though Stratton’s touch is too light for the phrase “climate crisis” to appear in the songs, buried just beneath the interconnected stories they tell is a series of reminders that these people are all—that we are all—responsible for the state of the world we live in.
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Though I live in New York now, I once lived in California. Well, twice, several years apart. As 2024 turned into 2025, my husband and I spent a week there, seeing friends and hiking and revisiting old haunts. One afternoon, we drove from Big Sur to Santa Barbara, taking the long way through the Central Valley. (A stretch of Highway 1 remained closed following a landslide, one of the state’s regular reminders of how foolish we are to build anything along the coast that’s meant to last.)
I listened to Points of Origin for the first time on that drive. This felt appropriate—to be in California and in motion—since the songs on the record range across the state. To listen to them is to feel oneself roving over the map, peering into homes and lives along the way.
We were heading to Santa Barbara for a sort of nostalgia tour: We lived there for a couple of years, but I hadn’t been back in the five years since we left. When we first moved there in early 2018, only a few months had passed since the Thomas Fire, a 281,893-acre blaze, and the mudslides that followed. The city was still recovering. So was the staff of the magazine I’d moved there to work for. I didn’t fully grasp until much later the degree to which my colleagues were still braced, still reeling from the weeks of smoke and evacuations, of masks and office closures—a couple of years before the pandemic made the latter two suddenly common.
The only fire that’s mentioned by name on Points of Origin also took place in Santa Barbara, back in 2009. When I looked up the Jesusita Fire, I realized that it had burned through several places familiar to me, that many of the hiking trails I’d once enjoyed had taken me right through the burn scar. So had the final, mountainous stretch of the drive from Big Sur.
The song “Jesusita” is sung from the perspective of an incarcerated firefighter. California’s use of inmates to fight fires has often been criticized, but for the speaker of this song, the job is a relief, a way to feel alive. “The day that we came to the camp in the foothills / I found I could finally breathe,” the song begins. “The guards were unarmed, and the food that they served us / Was filling and warm in reprieve.”
The song was inspired in part by articles written by an incarcerated firefighter; the Jesusita Fire was among the ones he described. His job had been to separate fire from fuel, which typically involves clearing vegetation, digging trenches, and using natural barriers to keep active blazes from spreading. This is often what incarcerated firefighters are assigned to do, as opposed to working to extinguish the fire, which is generally the work of Cal Fire, the state agency. Separating fire from fuel: Stratton was drawn to the metaphorical power of that act.
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Arguably the opposite of separating fire from fuel is committing arson—the crime committed by the inmate who recommends to the speaker of “Jesusita” that he go after the firefighting job.
The arsonist, whom Stratton calls John Leonard, also gets his own song later in the record, “Centinela.” The way Will sings the word, with stretched-out notes of longing, you could be forgiven for assuming it’s a love song. But Centinela isn’t anyone’s beloved. It’s the name of a prison. “Centinela, three whole lifetimes that they gave me to you,” Stratton sings. “Centinela, every night dreaming in the flames running through.”
Like the incarcerated firefighter, this character was inspired by a real person: John Leonard Orr, a serial arsonist, one of California’s most prolific. He’s now in his mid-70s and still incarcerated at Centinela, a California State Prison in the desert near the Mexican border.
There’s much that happens in the spaces between the songs on Points of Origin, and it’s clear that Stratton knows more about these characters and their worlds than the listener ever will.
The John Leonard in the song is only loosely based on Orr—Stratton’s character has two estranged sons; the real Orr has a daughter. In writing “Centinela,” Stratton didn’t feel the need to dig too deep on Orr because the basic facts of his case provided more than enough fuel: Orr is believed to have started over 2,000 fires over the course of 30 years. After he was finally arrested, the number of brush fires in the LA foothills near where he lived reported decreased by more than 90 percent.
And here’s the kicker: Orr was a fire investigator. He was eventually arrested based on a fingerprint after fires broke out near not one but two fire investigators’ conferences he’d attended in the late 1980s.
“Something about that, the idea that one of the most prolific arsonists in American history was employed to investigate his own fires—it just floored me,” Stratton said.
“I think, politically, that’s kind of where we are as a country now: We’re the arsonists and the fire department.”
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In wildfire terminology, “point of origin” refers to the exact location where a blaze ignited. This can be difficult to determine. In the case of large and intense wildfires, investigators seeking the where and the why trace fire patterns and behavior, taking into account weather, topography, eyewitness reports.
Of course, Points of Origin also has a more colloquial meaning. As Stratton put it, “I love that Points of Origin so easily takes on a double meaning for the places that people come from, and how that informs where those people end up, which is maybe more of an actual preoccupation of these songs than fire itself.” The record also gave Stratton a way to tap into his own points of origin: Because his family left California when he was just seven years old, what he retains from that time is “mostly sense memories,” he said, “emotional, core memories that don’t always make a lot of sense.”
Points of Origin as a title has another layer of resonance that I wasn’t aware of until I went down a rabbit hole about the real John Leonard Orr. Orr wrote a novel fictionalizing his own crimes, though he claimed in court that the novel had “no relation to actual events” and that the main character was a composite of arsonists he’d arrested.
But a 1992 memorandum, reviewing a district court’s order to exclude the novel manuscript from evidence in the case against Orr, describes myriad similarities between the events of the novel and the arsons of which Orr was accused. Their specificity is eerie, almost funny: Both Orr and the protagonist of the novel “start fires in the drapery section of a Los Angeles fabric store” and “start fires in a display of styrofoam products.”
The title of Orr’s novel was Points of Origin.
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The album rewards repeat listens. Like a book you’re compelled to start over as soon as you finish, the songs connect in unexpected ways that only become clear with careful attention to the lyrics. A listener might not realize right away that the arsonist is in fact the father of both the incarcerated firefighter of “Jesusita” and his estranged brother, the speaker of “I Found You,” the album’s opening track. Or that the speaker of “Slab City,” the album’s closing track, is a public defender addressing the narrator of “Jesusita,” telling him stories about his father involving LSD and the CIA. “I heard you met him when you did your bid,” he sings. “He was too far gone for you to have known.”
A person grieves the species and landscapes and people both dear and unknown to them that the Anthropocene has fundamentally altered or destroyed.
When I asked Stratton what he was reading as he worked on the record, or what sorts of literary influences he saw making their way into the writing, he mentioned George Saunders’ playfulness with language, John McPhee’s environmental writing, the depiction of California in Thomas Pynchon’s “less impenetrable” novels, and Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks. And as he worked on the album’s final songs, he read Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, a novella in which, as Stratton puts it, “there’s a wildfire that’s an inflection point in the narrative in a really devastating way.” Train Dreams, like Stratton’s record, ranges over several decades. It’s epic in scope despite its brevity.
There’s much that happens in the spaces between the songs on Points of Origin, and it’s clear that Stratton knows more about these characters and their worlds than the listener ever will. But sensing this undercurrent is part of what makes the record and the world it evokes feel so rich.
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When the fires broke out in LA, it had been exactly a week since my husband and I drove from Santa Barbara to LAX and flew home. For days I compulsively refreshed maps and updates. When we watch fires burn from a distance, it’s easy to get caught up in the numbers. Acres burned, structures lost, deaths, percent contained. This is a way to feel informed, but like all statistics, these numbers have a way of abstracting reality, of turning individual lives into parts of an overwhelming whole.
The Palisades Fire ignited on January 7, exactly two months before Stratton’s record was scheduled to be released. I thought of him and Points of Origin often as I tracked the Palisades and then the Eaton Fire, wondering how it felt to him to watch from a distance, just as far as he was when he rode his bike in the Hudson Valley on that summer day years ago, but now with Points of Origin poised and ready to go.
In particular, I found myself thinking about “Higher and Drier,” a song from the perspective of a painter turned real estate broker who sells homes in precarious places. She tells an ingenuous family from Michigan what they’re up against: “This place might still be standing here in 20 years or more / Or it could be ashes full of pieces of your lives.” These lines flashed through my mind when I scrolled through images of blackened blocks, or when acquaintances shared photos of the remnants of their own homes.
When he first learned about the fires, “I felt really distraught and also ambivalent about what I’d made,” Will told me in late January. “Now I’ve kind of come to terms with that ambivalence, recognizing that this is just what life is going to be like now. For anybody who writes anything or makes art, if they attempt to engage with the present in any way, it’s going to outpace us so quickly and it’s going to just kind of blow apart any boundaries that we try to set up. And that’s humbling but it’s also just kind of the way that it is.”
Part of how Stratton handled this was by putting up five of the six US test pressings of the record for sale on Bandcamp. “For anyone who sees this and doesn’t know the backstory of my album, well, all the songs concern California wildfires in one way or another,” he wrote. “The timing of the record is what it is.” The test pressings sold out in an hour, raising $700 for fire relief.
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As I thought about the record and what it meant to release it so soon after the LA fires, I happened to read Lauren Markham’s Memorial, the latest release in Transit Books’ Undelivered Lectures series. In it, Markham explores what it means to memorialize and how to find language for loss amid climate catastrophe. “Part of the trouble with metabolizing climate grief is that to do so requires grieving many abstractions at once,” she writes. She goes on:
A person grieves the species and landscapes and people both dear and unknown to them that the Anthropocene has fundamentally altered or destroyed. There’s also the painful truth to grieve that humans are the ones to blame, and the powerlessness one may feel in the face of the machinery causing climate catastrophe is also freighted with grief.
And then there is that particularly unsteady, ghostly form of anticipatory grief for losses that are at once certain—we know the glaciers will melt and the sea will rise and the forests will burn—and not yet fully known in terms of their timeline or precise manifestation. The nature and scope of future devastation is contingent upon what action is taken, which brings a person back to the confounding, grief-stricken collision course between one’s sense of personal responsibility for the future and powerlessness over it.
That “confounding, grief-stricken collision” is, I think, the secret heart of Points of Origin. We are the arsonists and the fire department.
Still, Stratton’s record and Markham’s book both strike me as works of hope much more than despair. During the time span that Markham’s book covers, she is pregnant, and when she shares this news with her friend, the writer Rebecca Solnit, Solnit says, “You’re choosing the future.”
Choosing the future: Maybe that’s what it is to make art amid the climate crisis, art that grapples with the climate crisis. One could argue that Points of Origin is itself a kind of memorial, unfurling the ways that the choices and lifestyles of the latter half of the 20th century brought us to the world we now live in. It’s a collection of stories about the past that could, if we listen closely, teach us something about how to live with what lies ahead.
