I recorded and mixed this in Oakland and Berkeley, Ohlone land, between January 2018 and June 2019. Andrew Weathers, brilliant and generous as always, mastered it. It’s meant to be played loud.

This is a California album, with occasional references to other spots in the American West. I wanted the songs to evoke this place in a disorienting way, so the typical musical signposts of California are either absent or shredded into some other matter. “Borax” is the only song here that’s directly autobiographical, and the other songs are either fictional or wholly adrift from narrative. There are character studies, arguments, dubious prophecies, nightmares, daydreams, and, in the last song, a secular prayer. The throughline is the American West as we can see it on many levels of scale, from individuals seeking solace up to our ecologies and the rickety systems we’ve welded onto them.

The frequently invoked notion that California is a place to escape from history and start anew is illusory and damaging. People have been living and tending nature here for thousands of years. All things do change, and natural wildfire cycles make that especially clear in this part of the world. But when we develop deeper connections to the places where we live, and when we open conversations with their many histories, we can ground ourselves and begin to craft a future that offers us something better than senseless turbulence—maybe even wonder. This is a dire album and it reflects a dire present, but my wish is that, over its length, it evolves from mourning to compassionate hope, offering at least a little encouragement that we might play small parts in a healthy future stretching on and on.

Thank you.

–August 2019

Originally released August 16, 2019. Cover photo taken September 12, 2014, at Badwater Basin, Death Valley.