Written and recorded between November 2020 and June 2021, this collection of songs represents an effort to come to terms with personal loss and trauma amid historical and collective experience of the same. The songs express my own labor of remembering so that I might recover, articulate, and integrate shards of feeling and complicated memories.

Grappling earnestly with the past is unhinging and disorienting. And it can set us on an uncertain, open road—but one we need not travel alone. In the end, this labor—and so, too, this album—is a wager that the promise of healing and renewal tomorrow merits the sacrifice of today’s familiar injury. It is wager of hope and the commitment to continue.

Words and sounds are equals in this work. Musically, I draw inspiration from the lyricism, harmonies, and compositional range of artists like John Cale, Joni Mitchell, Brian Eno, Joy Division, Julia Holter, Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Belle & Sebastian, Weyes Blood,  and Sufjan Stevens. The resources of minimalism, noise, and jazz are important parts of my tool box as well. Lyrically, the album is also in conversation with poets H.D., Marianne Moore, Ai, Wallace Stevens, Audre Lorde,  Elizabeth Bishop, and Dante. 

All words and sounds were composed, performed, produced, recorded, and mixed by me in the Sonoran Desert on the ancestral lands of the O’Odham (known as the Pima), Piipaash (known as the Maricopa), and their ancestors. The album was brilliantly mastered at The Vault Mastering Studios. 

-tc, September 2021