I've written about the work of
Joshua
King a few times before. I reviewed his first
solo album as The Everest Ruin,
Operationalization
(2011). I reviewed
an
early solo show even before that. Most
recently, I reviewed his collaborative project The Man and the
Scientist's
The
Invisible Hand Is a Hoof (2016). Now Josh has released a new album as Joshua and the Ruins,
The
Dreaming Season, and it's his best work
yet. It's a meticulously crafted album with strong lyrics, solid
performances, and a series of guest performers. As soon as I heard
it, I knew I wanted to wanted to write about it. Instead of a review,
though, I decided to do something a little different: I called up
Josh and talked at length about the album. What follows is from that
conversation.
Patti:
There was a long interval between All the King's Men and this
album, The Dreaming Season. Did this album just require some
more time to write, were you busy with other projects, or just busy
with life?
Joshua:
It was all three. Each album has had its own very intentional source.
Kind of a blueprint for how I was going to approach an album. Each of
those blueprints was about something specific. For Operationalization
it was about the concept of value and including production as part of
the experience of the art. All the King's Men was sort of
about this fast process, a more live feel. In the long period off, I
was playing in some other bands between 2012 and 2019, like The Last
Glacier. Saturday Morning Cartoons was a band I was in in Portland,
Oregon. I was also in a band with my friend Joe Graham called Gingham
Ark, a jazz duo. For The Dreaming Season, the blueprint was a
more polished album that people could put on in the background and
kind of ignore as they go about their day, but also something they
could really dive into and find new things on each listen.
P: Can you tell
me a little bit about the timeline of the composition?
J: The oldest
song is "Arms". I think I wrote that in 2005. The newest
song is "Hot Air Balloons", and I started writing that in
2017 or 2016, but it didn't really come to fruition until last year.
I think that's a more mature song than some of the stuff that appears
earlier. The album doesn't go in order from oldest to newest, but it
does kind of follow this trend toward a more mature perspective. I
knew that I wanted to record the album when we moved to Kansas City
in 2013. I worked on these other projects for a while, and when all
those other projects came to their own end, or at least dormancy, it
was like, alright, well I guess I'm gonna do this. So we started
pre-production in 2016. That's when I recruited Evan, my bassist, and
he knew Frank. We found a good mix of people, and then in the summer
of 2016 we started developing some of it, and we recorded the brunt
of it in late 2016. Then we retracked, added stuff, took stuff away,
did vocals, and did all our own mixing and editing between the
beginning of 2017 and the end of 2018.
P: How did the
presence of your bandmates change what could have otherwise been just
a solo album? Was it different than working with some of your past
collaborators?
J: In the past,
being in other bands, I've approached it as: we're all a band and
we're all writing this music together. But when Evan and Frank came
into the fold, Evan used to always say, it's your gig, so you just
tell us what you want us to do. That really gave me the creative
control to decide exactly what I wanted in certain places. But I'm
not a drummer, and Frank would come up with this stuff that I would
have never even conceived of. He brought some stuff to the percussion
section that I really think makes the album a lot more interesting.
And of course I can't play bass the way Evan plays. I still had the
creative control, and I could edit whatever I wanted, 'cause we were
engineering it all ourselves. Their contributions are ultimately
their own and they made it a little wider in scope. The album is
definitely mine, but it has contributions from other people that I'm
really happy are there. And of course, they're not the only people on
there.
P: That's
exactly what I was going to ask about next, some of the other guests
on the album.
J: A big piece
of that blueprint was also making this a community album. I invited
members of my family, my parents, my brother, my wife, to contribute
to the record. I wanted to do that because I felt like all of those
people had something they could contribute, and then also there would
be this kind of community sense to it. I love that. I don't think
very often you hear a love song where the backup vocals are being
provided by the person for whom the song was written. Maybe Fleetwood
Mac. [Laughs.]
P: Were the
parts of the other contributors also very intentional in what they
played and which song they performed on?
J: Yeah. But
I'll say broadly, I guess I like faking people out. There's what the
song means to me, and then what I'm pretty sure it sounds like to
everybody else, which has a very different meaning. For example, in
the song "Arms", the chorus is "Don't go like this /
don't go like this / don't go like this / just go like this".
The verses are about a person that I had been dating, and we had
recently parted ways. I had come home to visit my family. I was
talking with my mom, and I was feeling like I was going to write off
love or something. You get that feeling every once in a while after a
breakup. She said, "Don't go like this", and she put up her
fists. And said, "Don't go like this", and she crossed her
arms and made a pouting face. The third one was like flipping people
off or something. But then the fourth one was, "Just go like
this", and she opened her arms, like being open to a hug. She
did these four motions with her arms, and that's where the chorus and
the name of the song came from. It was very intentional to have my
mom be the backup vocals in that part of the song, and so she sings
that part with me. Then my dad plays harmonica on the song.
Originally I just thought, I think this section needs a harmonica
solo, it's gonna be really cool. But I could see how somebody could
read into my mom saying don't go – and then my dad responding with
a harmonica solo – as being kind of on the nose, but that was not
intentional at all.
P: It's obvious
where the voicemail is and I think
Brad's
noise is fairly easy to identify. But I can't actually identify your
brother's vocals or Asher and Kevin's guitars. Did you intentionally
obscure who played on what?
J: Kevin played
on "Life of Plenty". His guitar part is just the brief,
very minor key blues kind of vibe in the middle of the song. It's
very short. It's after the second chorus. And Asher plays at the end
of "Hot Air Balloons", and kind of in the middle, too. It's
just a very, very light soundscape. There are three or four guitar
parts going on there at the end. The one that doesn't sound like a
guitar, it kind of sounds like a synth pad rising up out of nowhere,
that's Asher. On that subject of the intentionality of what people do
on the album and where those things occur, I think you don't know
anybody in just one context. You have a lot of different experiences
with people. You have a relationship with somebody for any period of
time, and you're going to experience a range of human emotions in
that relationship together. It's like, here's the dominant
narrative of this relationship, and here are some other
threads of narrative that kind of go in different directions that are
also part of that relationship. With my family members and close
friends being involved, it's not just, this is the truth of
it, and that is some smokescreen. It's here's the truth
of it, and then here are other parts that are also true, but
not for the dominant history of the relationship.
P: You mean
you're presenting other directions a song could have gone, or you're
intentionally making the meaning ambiguous?
J: Neither. The
song "Hot Air Balloons" is not about Asher at all, but he
and I have experienced in our relationship tensions that map onto
that song really well. So it's like this song was originally written
about somebody else, but 5% of it could be about a specific time that
Asher and I experienced. So having him contribute to the song in the
way he did creates multiple layers of narrative. It's actually about
this person, but also, there's like 5% of this other
relationship that could also be described by this song.
P: Is it more
like combining experiences from multiple things to turn it into one
story, or is it that this one story actually applies to multiple
experiences?
J: Maybe it's
both. "Life of Plenty" is my most concerted and intentional
effort at creating a song influenced by sociology. Kevin performs on
that song, and he's a person I met in my sociology program; I don't
remember if that was intentional, but it sure does feel that way now.
I wrote that back in 2012 with my band in Madison, but having Kevin
perform on it, and combining that very critical sociological
perspective that we both share as a part of that song, and both
playing lead guitar on it, I think the song related in a couple
different ways to experiences I had in Wisconsin and also experiences
I had in Kansas City.
P: Speaking of
that song: "Life of Plenty" is a new version of "Vita
Copiae" from All the King's Men. What inspired you to do
a new version, and what makes it special or different?
J: Well, from
Operationalization to All the King's Men, I did "Life
Emulates Decay". There are certain songs that I kind of retool
over the years based on my experience, and "Life of Plenty"
just seemed fitting for the political climate we're in. In Wisconsin,
I was mortified by the stuff that Scott Walker was doing, and I've
been continually mortified since that time, especially with the
absurdity that is Donald Trump. It seemed timely and it also works
pretty well in the context of the trio that I have.
P: Is that Evan
who does the spoken parts?
J: Yeah. I gotta
tell you, the first time I heard that stuff, I was just about crying
with laughter. I was so happy with it. He did that on his own at his
home studio.
P: I'm curious
about the album art. I like the presence of both the sun and the
moon, and the weird ambiguity of the mountains and the sky. Is that a
tornado? Is it actually related to a dream you had?
J: The different
places in the album art are different places that are meaningful to
me. It's actually ten or twelve different places. The big white tower
is this abandoned building here in Kansas City that I think is really
cool. It's the first dilapidated building that I remember really
being drawn to when I was a kid, when my dad would bring me to Kansas
City. And it's still here, all these years later. I don't know the
history of it, but I've always been drawn to it. In general, I've
always been really fascinated by places that are sort of falling
apart. Next to the tower is a little A-frame house that actually
exists in Marshall, Missouri that I've had a lot of dreams about.
It's my literal dream house that I've thought about buying, and it's
currently dilapidated and not occupied as I understand. And below
that, there's the train station from Marshall. A lot of it's from
Marshall or around Saline County, Missouri. There's a quarry, there's
the Missouri River near Columbia. All of these places depicted in the
image are either places that I've dreamt about, or places that I've
been really drawn to, or places where I've felt like I had an
experience of pure joy. They're all kind of "hot sites",
all mapped into one world. There is a tornado involved, harking back
to Tornado Head. Thematically, The Dreaming Season depicts
four different seasons in the landscape. It's bright and green on one
side, the other side is supposed to be fall, then it's winter on the
hill and summer in the valley. All of that kind of maps onto the
concept of the dreaming season, that cycle of coming to terms with
something. That's really what a lot of the album is about, this
coming to terms with some kind of change, or waking up from a
metaphorical dream. There's this natural progression, this
progression through different phases, or different seasons of coming
to terms with something. I originally drew up a version of that, sort
of a pencil sketch, and then I ran into this artist, Margaret Anne
Seiler, from St. Louis. I really like her architectural studies, so I
asked her if she'd be interested in doing it. She sent me some
drafts, and I sent her photographs of each place I could find,
saying, here's what it actually looks like, but have some artistic
license, and change it up a bit. I don't want it to be a realist
rendering of all these places at once, you turn it into a common
place. I thought she did a really good job. She even painted stuff
that I wanted, but that I never told her about, so I don't know how
we got there.
P: Sounds like a
cool process.
J: Yeah. And my
brother did the Joshua and The Ruins logo, and I used that same
artwork that he did to create the album title.
P: There's a
line in the liner notes where you're referring to different types of
dreams, and one of them is "realizing you're the backbone to
someone else's pipe-dream project". Is that connected to the
song "The Dreaming Season"?
J: That's
exactly where that concept came from. Maybe you've felt this, where
in real time, you're like, I am part of a sinking ship right now. I
am holding this thing upright, and I need to get the fuck out of
here, before I get sued, before this person gets sued, before they
ask me to invest any more time and money – just have the courage
to walk away from this. And that's really hard to do. I don't
like quitting on things that I commit to. But then all a sudden you
realize, yeah, the signs were here, but I didn't see them. Now I'm
gonna look like a schmuck, but I gotta get out of here. I had that
experience again recently, just in the past few months, and I was
thinking about that song a lot. The dreaming season as a concept is
that sort of time period in one's life – I've had it too – where
you think this major aspiration that you have is going to end up
being this incredible thing that makes you famous and successful and
wealthy or whatever, and you're just completely deceiving yourself.
Some people handle that gracefully, and some people can pivot and
grow, but some people can't, and it's a real catastrophe. And it's
like, well, it's my dream to do this, and that dream changes or it
doesn't stick around, or it completely falls apart. That time period
of going through that, and that naïveté, that's what I referenced
when I came up with that phrase, "the dreaming season". I
had that when I got out of college, I had it when I first started
making music as a professional pursuit, I had it when I got out of
college again. It's happened a number of times.
P: That hits
some personal meanings for me, too. It's heavy stuff. That's the
point of writing it, I suppose.
J: Yeah, it is
really heavy. The whole album is really, really heavy. There's a
musician that I absolutely love named Stephen Steinbrink. Brad turned
me on to him. His music sounds very bright and beautiful, but when
you actually listen to the lyrics, they're extremely personal and
very heavy. It creates that kind of tension there. I modeled part of
the album production process along that kind of approach. Especially
"J. Edgar Prufrock" was designed to be an appreciation of
Stephen's approach.
P: I think "J.
Edgar Prufrock" and "Predator" are the two most
immediate, dare I say, radio-friendly songs. "Prufrock" has
a sort of comforting 90s indie rock sound but yet is also slightly
challenging, slightly edgy. And lyrically it's quite an interesting
song. The peach and the claws appear to be referencing Eliot's "Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", but is Edgar really a reference to
J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI?
J: Yeah. J.
Edgar Hoover was kind of a quirky character, also potentially not
very happy. There's this sort of apocryphal question about his sexual
orientation, his gender identity, and it seems like he had at least
some aspect of his life hidden from other aspects of his life. That
resonates with me. I feel there's this tension in hiding the
different parts of your individuality from other parts where you
shine. It's not an ode to J. Edgar Hoover or anything. "The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is already about self-reflective
inquiry and lost meaning, but I felt like the song I was going for
was a little edgier than that. And that's J. Edgar, like, I'm not
comfortable necessarily with sharing or being everything I am with
the world all at once, so I'm going to get angry about it. That's
where the idea came from. And then I thought it was just kind of
funny as a title.
P: Are you
describing different career paths, journeys, or alternate paths your
life could have taken?
J: Yeah, that
song was written while I was living in Portland. I was going through
kind of a tough moment, being a musician full-time in Madison, and I
was trying to find a job. Portland is a really uncomfortable place to
try and find a job, because everybody goes there, and everybody's
trying to find a job. The temp agencies are filled with people with
master's degrees. I was working this really weird job and I was not
having great success with it, feeling really uncomfortable with some
of the things going on in the job. I was just like, what the hell do
I do now? I was liking cooking. I was liking electrical engineering.
I was thinking about going to medical school for maybe ten minutes.
When you're not happy and you don't know what you want to do,
anything can sound good for maybe five minutes. The "woulda,
coulda, shoulda been there" thing at the end, I really like
having all of those different voices approach it in different ways,
and saying different things, because that's how it feels in those
moments where you're going through that self-doubt. You hear all
those whispering voices saying not quite the same thing, so you don't
know which one to listen to.
P: That really
speaks to me, just thinking about those imaginations of the
directions I could've gone on. That feeling of: what am I, what am I
supposed to be doing?
J: I think
that's very palpable for everybody in our generation. That's maybe
more relatable now than it ever has been for a previous generation. I
don't know if that's true, but there is this peculiar contemporary
trope of criticizing semi-young people, i.e. people who are in their
mid-30s now, which I find kind of supremely ahistorical. We were told
for a long time: "You can be whatever you want, you have to go
to college to be successful, and you're going to college so you're
going to be successful." And then everything turned upside down,
and those people are ridiculed for being kind of confused or
malcontent. For me, I graduated in the summer of 2008, and by the
fall of 2008, the entire economy was in shambles. So what better time
to feel completely malcontent? The sociologist C. Wright Mills talked
about the difference between a personal problem and a social issue. A
personal problem is something that one out of 10,000 experiences. We
don't really have talk about that from a perspective of sociology.
But if 7000 out of 10,000 experience that, it's an actual social
phenomenon that's related to our society, so we need to look at that.
You can't blame that one individual for those feelings.
P: I see some
similarities in "Maybe That's What It Means", "True
Colors", and "Predator". In particular, I see the
struggle of writing and making music, which is something I can relate
to. Is that something you had in mind with those songs?
J: "True
Colors" is another one where there's the foundational narrative,
like, this is who the song is actually about, but then this is who
the song is sort of about. With all of my songs, I try to reflect on
all of my music as if it was written about me. Like, if I'm pointing
fingers at people, I always point them at myself. In the writing
process of "Hot Air Balloons", I had the first two verses
figured out. And then I thought, what am I doing here writing this
song? What if this song was written about me? What am I adding to
this situation? That led me to write the third verse of that song,
about "when I got on a roll, I have to wonder what role I play."
To look at how have I done something like this to somebody else.
"True Colors" is pretty on the nose, I think. There was a
moment in the production of that song, in terms of inviting
contributions from others, where I very nearly lived out what I was
complaining about having seen someone else do – threatening the
integrity of a relationship, in an ironic lack of regard or respect
for boundaries, for the sake of the art. It was this moment of pure
hubris on my part. So I pivoted, and instead I ended up writing the
last part of the song about myself: "When everything is just
fuel for the fire, I can't believe you got me again. The ruins left
by each tornado's spire, why couldn't I see?" I very nearly cost
myself relationships by pushing too far for the work, which is
exactly what I'm indicting in the song. This whole idea of
sacrificing everything so you can create something with it, that you
have to suffer in some way, I don't believe that. But the proclivity
is there, and you have to be very aware of and intentional about
avoiding it, or at least keeping it in check. If you're going to
build a fire, you probably want to have a good fire pit, and some
rocks, and you keep the stuff that doesn't get burned away from it.
P: "Predator"
might be favorite track on the album. Is it also about the struggle
of making music?
J: "Predator"
was a tune that I did with Andrew Hall in Portland in Saturday
Morning Cartoons. We never really went anywhere with it in that band.
It's not just about music, but it's like any sort of thing you
produce, any sort of project you create, and then not getting the
recognition for it. I think people can feel that way whether or not
what they're creating is artistic. In a lot of my songs, there's this
sort of changing of voice between feeling one way and then shifting
positions and responding to that feeling and that thought. "Life
of Plenty" does that, "Predator" does that, "The
Dreaming Season" does that. It's more globally that feeling of
being let down, and then coming to terms with not having all that
recognition you thought you deserved – whether you deserved it or
not. If the song "Dreaming Season" is somebody who doesn't
get it, "Predator" is about somebody who's started to get
it, but they're not happy about it.
P: It sounds
like there are several things going on in "Predator".
There's some tension in that line, "When will I have my reward".
Sometimes you feel like you deserve something, and it's just not
there. You have to just accept that it's never going to be there. If
you feel it, then it is there, and if no one else does, maybe that
matters, but maybe it doesn't.
J: Right. And
the reward versus the revenge, those two kinds of voices. That's
where my brother sings, by the way. My brother asked me what that
song's about, and I told him that it's sort of me just talking to me.
I think everybody has that conversation: oh man, I should have this
recognition. There's this kind of ego trip expectation when you
create something. If you're lucky, you can kind of keep yourself in
check, and say, no man, that's not what we're here to do. That's not
why we're doing this.
P: "When
It's Published" sounds like a bizarre story. What happened
there?
J: It happened
when I was much younger, right out of college. I figure it's pretty
obvious, but nothing happened with this person. That song is a
lyrical adventure. It's verbose almost to a fault. None of my other
band members perform on it. It was a production choice to have all
the guitars be a little bit loose. And there's this thing I'd always
wanted to do with this song. I sang the vocals, and then I reversed
the vocal track and applied a very long reverb on it, and then I
reversed both of them back. So the reverb is a preverb that sucks
into the word rather than coming out of it. The whole idea is that
the timing is off. If I had been just a little later, or you had just
been a little earlier, where would it have wound up? The production
of the song reflects the subject of the song with this person who was
much older than I was. I like doing things like that.
P: "Hot Air
Balloons" is another song that sounds pretty heavy. It could be
about a breakup, but it sounds like there's more going on, like you
have gone through some change, and that you're acknowledging some
mistakes that you want to move past. That song is full of great
lines, like, "The winds are unrelenting on the moral higher
ground."
J: Thanks!
Again, this song means multiple things. There is a little piece of it
that could apply to Asher, there's a little piece of it that could
apply to various other people. It could apply to a romantic breakup.
And I thought about those things while I was recording the song. Some
of the guitar parts are played with this sense of loss, intentionally
pointed at multiple different people. So it is about multiple
different people. But the foundational narrative is one of those
fake-outs where you think it's maybe a romantic breakup. It's
actually about a band breakup.
P: I've been in
enough bands that I think I understand. It's a bit of a cliché that
the breakup of a band, or really the whole experience of being in a
band, has parallels to being in a romantic relationship, but it's
eerily true.
J: It's a cliché
because it's accurate. So that's the foundational narrative, but it's
about some other people as well. I think that's my favorite song on
the album to play. Once I had that one ready to go, there was no
question that this would end the album, because this song is, for me,
a testament to personal growth. It also has this theme of growing
from anger to letting go. In that way, the song, the lyrics, the
whole thing grew outside the bounds of its original intent, that
foundational narrative, to be about a lot more than just that band.
That band broke up right at the same time that I quit graduate school
for the first time. I experienced a lot of anger at that time of my
life – a bitter, confused air of resentment that blew toward a
whole lot of people, including myself. I finally had to say, "I'm
going to pray for peace and to be released, and I'll adjust, and I'll
just leave you alone". Getting to that place can be very
difficult. And I've had to get there a number of times. What started
off as a really angry song about a breakup of one kind or another
ended up being about a lot more. It feels like the right place to end
an album that's about coming to terms with things not going as
planned. Musically, the chord structures, some of the counterpoint,
the playing styles, the technique, that was all new for me, too.
That's kind of a testament to growth.
P: There are a
lot of great lyrics in this album. What's your favorite line?
J: Well, first
let me start with my least favorite line. It's in "Double
Helix". I like that song a lot, and I love playing it, but it
has my least favorite lyric in it that I've written since I've
started The Everest Ruin/Joshua and The Ruins thing: "what you
thought was a doughnut turns out to be a whole-grain loaf of bread."
P: No! That's
one of my favorites!
J: Yeah!? And I
lived it! That's how I actually conceptualized things at the time.
I'm glad that it's one of your favorite lines, because it's one of my
least favorites, but it's genuine, so I left it. You give me
credence! I almost cut it from the recording, and I'll be honest: I
do tend to cut it when I play it live. It wasn't like I needed
something to rhyme with head and bed or whatever. That's actually
just how I made sense of having some intermittent cold feet right
before getting married. Obviously, in both the song and life, things
turned out well!
P: It made me
laugh, but it made me stop and think. Doughnuts and whole-grain
loaves of bread have a lot of connotations, so you can read into it
in many different ways.
J: I'm glad you
like it. Of all the things we've talked about, that makes me feel
probably the best. My favorite line, though, is in "Life of
Plenty", when I say, "we finally got ourselves a piece of
the Occupy". I was real proud of myself when I came up with
that. [Laughs.]
P: There's a lot
less deliberate humor in The Dreaming Season, especially
compared to Operationalization, but there is still some humor
and wit. Was this album intended to be more serious, but you still
wanted to have some fun with it?
J: I didn't
really have to try to do either. It just sort of happened naturally.
I think it's a more mature sense of humor, because I'm older and I
have also, I hope, matured a little bit. But the songs were more
serious, and when I released those older albums, I hadn't had all the
experiences of personal questioning that have fueled this album.
"Cardboard Box" is indicative of that older humor for me.
There are so many reasons it's a bonus track. For starters, it's
maybe the meanest song I've ever written. But it was also recorded
differently than any other song on the album. That one was recorded
live with all three musicians and vocals. All done in one take. We
set this whole song up to be about the contributions of each musician
in real time. It's a different philosophy of production that didn't
fit with the rest of the album. The rest was very intentionally
produced, and if I didn't like something, I fixed it, or I retracked
it, or I'd apply effects, or whatever I needed to. But this one, it
was like, I'm not going to mess with the performance integrity here.
It's from a different time in my life. It reflects a different
writing style and a different incorporation of Frank and Evan's
contributions. And I love Evan's bass playing on that! He did that in
one take, and Frank and I were floored. We were really impressed. The
dynamics that Frank plays with, too, it sounds like a fade in and out
in post. There's no automation, that is all him, fading himself in,
in the way that he hits, and fading out. Production-wise, that's
actually where we're going, but musically, it's not. So I put it
there as kind of a hint to what's next for us, but then also, it
doesn't fit with the rest of the record. And the whole album being
very intense, it's kind of nice to have the end of the thing land on
a joke.
P: Do you feel
like The Dreaming Season is a weird album?
J: Well, when
people close to me have listened to it, they have tended to enjoy it,
and after their initial reactions they immediately say the same
thing: "...and it's you."
P: I think
that's the first thing I said to you!
J: Yeah! It's
me! So I guess the question sort of becomes, am I weird? I don't go
through life thinking that I myself am weird, but I'm probably
objectively a little weird for people. The album is also my drawing
on experiences with other people, and artists I respect, and paying
homage to all those people. So I don't think it's weird, but somebody
who's never listened to noise music (which I played for a long time),
or who's not familiar with production techniques, could just be
completely thrown off, or at least surprised. I really like Red House
Painters' album Songs for a Blue Guitar, and that album was a
big influence. I think between Stephen Steinbrink and Red House
Painters you can hear a lot of the marriage between ambience and
acoustic pop-folk that happens here. It's not weird for me because
I've heard it before – I just brought a lot of different ideas that
have been influential to me and put them all in one place. At the
same time, when I decided what songs would go on the album, I
originally thought they didn't go together at all, but in recording
them I was surprised by how well they hang together – both
thematically and musically. I also was thinking of the production
technique of the band Spirit, which resulted in a slightly older
production style that may sound a little less modern than what people
have become accustomed to hearing. I guess overall, weird isn't for
me to judge. But I will say this: I spent three years producing this
record, and every piece of it is deliberate. There are no accidents I
had to convince myself to leave, and I love it. I drive around the
city playing the CD in my car, rocking out and singing loudly with
the windows open, or just listening intently with the windows closed.
Perhaps the weirdest part is that even after all that work, I'm just
really happy with it. It brings me continuous joy, and a sense of
contentment about some of the weirder challenges of life. I hope it
does for others as well.
The Dreaming Season
is available on Bandcamp,
among other platforms.
