Most of this was recorded rapidly over three weeks in the summer of 2015 at my mother’s cabin on Laurel Lake, in upstate New York. The rest was recorded in spurts. Track 2 in Brooklyn in 2015. Track 3 in Interlochen, MI in 2016. Track 10 in Aspen, CO in 2017. Overdubs at a snail’s pace between 2016 and 2019 in Somerville, MA; a second time at Laurel Lake; and in Ypsilanti, MI. Track 9 received its last layer in June 2020. No click, no quantization, no midi, no copy&paste, no loops, no EQ. Keys first, everything else later.

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2015. I had to leave. I was absolutely miserable in New York. But no matter how bad it got, I never directed that energy towards the city. The city is, and will always be, my city. I was born there. My parents met there. I grew up right next to it. I lived there during formative years of my life. It’ll always be my city and I’ll always love that place. But it just… was weighing down on me. It kept letting me down. Or it was the setting in which I kept letting myself down.

It was all just variations on a theme. Walking in on the person I loved with someone else. In the home that I used to live in. I shouldn’t have been there. Getting in a fight with my best friend, one that I started. Having him change the locks on me. Rapidly moving into a room with no windows. For like, too much money. Moving six times in six years. Smoothly, subtly being iced out by the people in my life. Cause who wants to catch that energy? Breaking my arm. Getting hit by a car on my bike because I was riding like an aggro lunatic. Constantly in and out of work. I’ll never forget applying to sixty restaurants in three days. Handing out resumes in the snow and in the rain, knowing before I walked through the door I was not going to be hired. Because I didn’t have the uh, people skills. Watching my friends with people skills building lives in the city better than me. Checking coats overnight at a nightclub. For four years! Because it was the only place that would have me. Trying to support myself and failing. Slinking back to my uncle and begging him to cut me a check from my dead dad’s life insurance. People telling me, “you know, why don’t you date more?” Going on dates and dreading the question “what do you do?” My anxiety over that question. I would imagine on these dates, in real time, that I was projecting it to them. That I was so obsessed with this question that I didn’t have an answer to that they could read it all over my face. They probably could. What do you do? I just sit in a puddle of existential dread, that’s what I do. Finally finding myself in a roach infested apartment on Columbia Street, staring out a dusty window in the early morning. I’m not a morning person; I’d been up all night recording music. The only thing that got me through all this was my music. Busking at Canal Street. Feeding myself with money from busking. Putting that out into the city and the city giving back to me. Telling myself, over and over, that I have hooks for days. Hooks by the millions. And my light is brilliant.