American Ambulance's debut album was recorded in an old abandoned pierogi factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn over the long winter and early spring of 2001. It is a record of real intimacy and immediacy, as the group captured its transition from all-acoustic kitchen-table troubadours to hard-driving roots-rock band. Key tracks included the lilting ode to NYC "Debris" and the honky-tonk lost-love duet "Bitter Wine."

The lyrics to "Debris" proved sadly prescient -- the song was written one night in 1999 looking out a Brooklyn window at the lights of the Twin Towers, and the words offer a plaintive meditation on love and loss in the big bustling city of dreams. "The towers of the city so fair, they shine like diamonds up in the air," began the tune. Eerily, the album was released on September 12, 2001. And so American Ambulance's trajectory as accidental rock n' roll chroniclers of the Bush era began.