One of the best things about music as a passion / hobby / artform is that it has many modes. There’s live performance, there’s the craft of songwriting, and there’s the process of recording and mixing songs. When one grows stale, or becomes unavailable, you can retreat to one of the other aspects of music. It keeps the feeling fresh.

Just before the pandemic hit, John, Ben and I moved out into different apartments in Boston. We had big plans to play many shows, along with Clio, to support TEA, which we released in late 2019. When lockdown set in, we were separated, unable to play live shows or record together. I retreated to songwriting.

During the pre-vaccination phase of the pandemic, I also had a relationship of notable significance come to a (peaceful, amicable) close. Songwriting had been an illuminating and cathartic mode of processing this relationship from the beginning, and it continued to be a helpful way of codifying my internal thoughts and feelings into an external form. Often, I discovered the way I felt through the songs. I ended up with 5:

1. A 30,000 foot view of the relationship, written with the full picture of its start and end in mind
2. A song I had written as the relationship was blooming, depicting the at once surprising and inevitable feeling it evoked
3. A confident declaration of the relationship’s strength, written, in fact, as a Valentine’s Day gift
4. A song written partly as I began to recognize the cracks in the relationship, and partly as I reckoned with the immediate aftermath of its ending
5. A song processing the new normal of life in the after all, appreciating what had been, and looking forward to a future tinted by the good fortune of the past

As the band emerged from its lockdown-induced hibernation, I asked if we could record these 5 tracks as an EP. Another one of my favorite aspects of writing music is that it captures moments of your life in amber; not just as a picture or description, but with all the intermingled objectivity and subjectivity that comes with it. These were moments I wanted to capture.

So Ben, John, and I set out to record these in the home-studio John set up. It’s funny how the process of recording shifts the focus from the emotion and inspiration behind a song to the matter-of-fact craft of representing it sonically. It also adds color and depth to the music by including the perspectives and ideas of multiple people. We had a lot of fun playing music and creating together again, and are quite pleased with how it all came out.

My favorite kinds of songs have a quality of being quite specific, yet still relatable. I hope for the same from these songs; that you can listen and project onto them your own world and recognize in them things you have experienced in your own way. I also hope that you tap your toes and think, “wow what a bop!” In short: I hope you enjoy. Thanks for taking a listen.