Zack and I started gently kicking the idea around in 2018, going back and forth about song selections, potential studios, visual presentation, waiting for a window. One of the unintended byproducts of a forced two-year hard stop to touring was more of those windows materializing. Planning picked up steam through the second half of 2020.

We threw our hat over the wall and booked some time at Dreamland for February 2021, where we d done drums for Bubblegum in 2013 – truly the perfect room for this project in this moment, a big converted church with massive, unbeatable natural acoustic ambience, plenty of sonic isolation and space to spread out to facilitate live recording.

I reached out to Damon, Strand & Chris, shared the tracklist, had some – maybe three – rehearsals in Brooklyn.

The Covid of it all was very much (obviously) at the forefront – those rehearsals and tracking were pre-vaccination and very much masked and distanced and angling myself towards a wall while singing so as to not accidentally spray anyone across the room.

Meals in as open spaces as possible, mindful of facial direction and sorta wolfing things down and then remasking.

It s bizarre, it s reality, it s suboptimal, and still, given all the precautions, it felt so good to be working on music with people in the same room, a clear contrast to a very fruitful, very specific passage working essentially totally remotely on the No One s Waiting Up For Me Tonight EP, my monthly Patreon recordings, and the tenth studio record.