A Costly Collection

I was terrified. When the world shut down in 2020, I was forced into stillness like everyone else. But I wasn’t ready for what I’d find in there… what had been lying dormant in my mind my entire life. Before writing for this record, I had always written to make sense of things. Created to express, to understand, and to give meaning to my experiences. But before the great pause, I was able to keep a lot of inner turmoil, beliefs, and judgments at arms length. Going, going, going to avoid. I didn’t have to address what I didn’t want to feel. And to be honest, I had become pretty numb. When COVID hit, it was like everything I thought I knew about myself was challenged. All of a sudden, all of the mistakes and shadows… the ones that I neatly categorized and filed away neatly in the corners of my head… were made visible and flooded into the forefront of my mind. They consumed my thinking. I lost the security and safety that comes with knowing who I was. I lost confidence in who I was and what I was doing… in my relationships, and in my life, felt like both the hero and the villain at times…and that scared the shit out of me. The idea that I was just as capable of bad as I was good… paralyzed me. I was so afraid to be seen because I didn’t know what would come out… as if I had lost all authority in my life. 

Slowly, after some self-work and time, I started to unfold the tightly pressed beliefs and definitions I carried about myself… to see that I was the grey between the black and white… and began the journey to acceptance… the journey to believing that I am more than one thing. And allowing myself to be more than one thing. To get rid of the idea that anyone can be so completely defined and accept that there is a duality that lives within all of us, with a million stops in between. That all of us are on a journey to a better understanding of who we are and what we hope for… and it is an incredibly messy journey that requires some grace and self-compassion along the way. All of these songs come from being in a pretty dark place and just trying to pull together evidence that all isn’t lost. That the bad doesn’t wipe out the good. That, regardless of what transpires in my life, I have the ability to choose what to do next… that dark and light co-exist inside me. Separate but dependent on each other in order to be known. My choice lies in what I choose to focus on… which wolf to feed.

In the summer of 2021, as the world was slowly emerging from its necessary sheltering, Eric (Hillman; Foreign Fields, Hembree, Boom Forest) and I spent two weeks in Viroqua Wisconsin - a small organic farming town - putting these songs together. It was nothing short of a cathartic. In the mornings we’d walk to drop Eric’s kids off at school before heading to the studio. In the evenings we’d play pick-up soccer or take Eric’s dog Ava to the park. On days when studio time bled into the night, we’d decompress with chess games & nightcaps. We spent one more week the next winter finishing the record. The whole experience proved to be a reminder that there are cadences and seasons to life that are unavoidable. We are continuously growing and creating who we are in the present moment. Nothing else exists. Grace, forgiveness… for ourselves and others… provides us opportunities to let go, and enter into new seasons. To empathize and understand ourselves better, and hopefully, help us to correct course and be the most loving and authentic versions of ourselves. To find a home in our bodies again through acceptance. And to live from that place.