DLRDG007

When Aiesha drove across the country in 2016, I told her to take pictures of all the fog she encountered. I knew I wanted to start writing songs again after not really having written songs for a few years. And I knew that if I was going to do it then I wanted them to be about America in the broadest sense. But I couldn’t yet see what that would look like. When I tried to picture it, all I could see was America in a shroud, so she said she would try to help me see just that. I was living in New York and starting to miss the south, starting to miss songs, and starting to feel confused about the city. Had I made a mistake moving there, giving up on songs? I thought maybe writing songs again could be my way of having the south and the city simultaneously. It worked for a while.

We had a top-floor apartment on Hancock in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Aiesha moved to the city after her trip, we both moved in with our friend Xander. We set up a table in the living room with recording stuff. He and I would work on various kinds of music, especially with our friend Nick. We had a monthly NTS show where, for two years, we would come up with a concept and make an hour of new music for the show. It was noisy, and sometimes––often––we made really personal music in our own way. We liked the noise of it, and we developed a style. Somewhere at the end of the two year run, in May of 2017, the deferral and longing got to be too much: I wanted to write songs again. A different kind of personal music, one which I thought didn’t have to be so starkly different from the kind of music we had been doing.

I had been writing songs since I was 11, but from about 23-25 I didn’t really feel like it. I tried a little bit here and there throughout those years but I was burned out. But when I recorded the first song in 2017, it all came back: guitar directly into the interface, handheld dynamic microphone, drum programming that Xander taught me how to do and which I learned the bare mechanics of. The first song I made, “Abandon,” was rough. It still sounds rough to me, barely a song, just this side of embarrassing. It was me getting my feet back on a ground I used to know so well. But in two weeks I had written and recorded sixteen songs. I released them on Bandcamp in early June, like I used to do, as four EPs. I made their covers look a little dark, like the music I had been trying to make with Xander and Nick, and used the photographs Aiesha took in 2016. They were called Dark One, Resignation, Run to the Wolf, and Deep Black. I broke them into four song EPs because I wasn’t ready to make anything as fulfilling as an album.

What were these recordings? They were kind of awful sounding, which I didn’t mind or notice until way later, but nonetheless no one could take away from the fact that they were songs, that I had found song again. I liked that they were kind of like demos. They sounded to me like some of the country songs me and my friend John were starting to find like Donald Adkins’s “Lonely Side Walks” or Lee Royal’s “I See Love There in Your Eyes.” These were some of the best songs and recordings I had ever encountered, so whatever mine ended up sounding like was more than enough.

I was busy for the next six months and didn’t record much, but something more broadly had switched. We moved to a fourth-floor apartment on Troutman in Bushwick, again with a table and gear in the living room. For the first time in a very long time I was writing songs with a guitar on the couch in my everyday life, songs that I might record if I was gifted another crazed couple of weeks. I got them in January of 2018. In a week I recorded eight more songs, for two more EPs called Warp & Woof and Nightfall. I wanted to have at least one more EP to release as well, so in early February on a Friday night, I wrote and recorded four more songs, finishing them the next day for an EP called Gilder. A lot of these songs and titles referenced a chapter called “The Gilder” in Moby Dick, a chapter of unbearably good calm. I don’t really know why I did this, I just wanted some kind of American iconography that I could get behind: “Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary?”

In March of 2018, I asked Frank, John, and Avery to help me try our hand at preparing for a live show, hoping to turn these in-the-box songs into band versions. After that happened, I was anew, ready for a band, ready to write songs for a band, ready to leave the computer songs alone. Maybe I’ll do it again some day, but for now I have these recordings to remind me of how good it is to sit down and put a song together with reckless abandon. Listening back to these songs makes me proud of the fact that I found song again. For those who have lost it out there, I hope these songs, in all their poor simplicity, lead you to also find it once more.

Aaron, Durham, NC, December 2023