Evasive Sentimental
a new album about portals and nostalgia or living and dying or poets or processing anger or really who am i to say it doesn't belong to me anymore
Greetings and thank you for being here. If you prefer a TL;DR version, here it is:
We have a new EP coming out on Feb 20th. It is called Evasive Sentimental and you can pre-order it here.
Our album release show will be on the same day (2/20!) at The Drake in Amherst, MA (tickets here). Please come if you can! Lost Film and Two Wrong Turns are playing too.
Perhaps you want more? Here is more.
Lucky If ILY
In June 2023 I started writing a song. I was listening to a lot of pop music at that time and one blonde pop star in particular. A very good Rhodes impersonator had found its way into my life and it was tiny enough to pair together with the op1 that I had been lugging around for a few years now without making me feel like I was really committing to a “new” instrument in my set up. This song started as many do for me: with a loop to contain the thing that was coming, whatever it was.
Becoming the kind of songwriter who sits down and starts with the concept and the words first is an aspirational goal. I don’t know if one is more “correct” than the other. I always tell people it isn’t, especially if they are just getting started in creative work or songwriting. But I suspect a lot of us who make things assume that the way that we don’t do it is the way we are supposed to do it.
The words came together on walks. I was doubting whether it was something that made sense for All Feels. This is the kind of thing I do. Maybe you do it too? Feel like there are Rules that exist and that anyone actually enforces and that you are supposed to follow if you want to be Good. i.e., RULE: this is a post-indie-rock band and that means you can’t play songs that aren’t jangles or distortion. I remember where I was when the lines “so blue so blue / the blood before the air is too new” came and also how impossible the sky looked when it did and how lucky I felt to even be alive at all.
I don’t remember making the demo that finally made its way to Jon. The song went through a few evolutions before finding itself. But when it did, the landing stuck. It’s one of my favorite ones to play live because it is so sparse and spacious and I default typically into sixteenth notes so it scratches a totally different itch. When the band plays this song we are (almost always) locked into each other or tucked in the pocket or whatever damn phrasing you prefer. Of course now that I have said this out loud it will never happen again.
Jon thought there was something in that first demo worth sharing with the rest of the world and managed to find it in the archive of text messages we fire back and forth. Noah cleaned it up a bit (as much as someone can clean up an iPhone voice memo file) and perhaps most amusing is that it was mastered because, well, we sent all the other files over and Jon had convinced us to add it to the vinyl pressing so why not?
I didn’t know Jon put it online until he told me someone bought it? That was so funny to me. I’ve spent months and years working on songs and projects and the version that someone paid money for unprompted was the iPhone demo that no one was ever supposed to hear.
There is so much more to say about this record and I’ll do my best to do so in the coming weeks before it comes out. If you make any kind of art that takes a long time to go from the magical and wild “creation” phase to the “now everyone else sees it plus I have to talk about it” phase you know the struggle: you’ve made a thing that you think was pretty good and then you went through the “thinking it was pretty bad and then you thought it was really good — like could it be the best thing you’ve made like ever?! — and then you think that’s impossible because it’s actually the worst and most hacky thing you ever did and then you walk away from it but you come back and then eventually you don’t want to have anything to do with it anymore because you’re sick of thinking about it because you’ve already made something new and you are in love with that” phase.
We’ve been sitting on this release for nearly six months. We debated timing based on how long it would take to put vinyl out and our schedules and our attention spans and our assumption about the attention spans of others. It’s all a silly game we play so that we don’t have to think about the things we are avoiding like how fleeting life on earth is. Sorry…was that too much? Just kidding. There’s a different reason. Insert your own.
At this point I think that was maybe the right move. Just enough time to move through multiple cycles of it all. The gift of distance is perspective. With enough luck I’ll still like it on February 20th.
Maybe we can discuss it in person together…this pretty picture below will take you to a link if you follow it.
May you be released from algorithmic creative death for longer stretches of time. Thanks for reading.
xo.candace