I am a notoriously slow songwriter. Unless I am going through a period of significant tumult, I can go weeks, or even months, tinkering with one song or another, fiddling with guitar pedals, and sounding out advertising jingles, sometimes completely forgetting that I have melodies and lyrics floating around in my brain at all.

As such, the songs included in this album span from early 2017, during the dragging rush of my senior year of college, all the way to the summer of 2019, when I finally put the finishing touches on "A Few Bands Back", which dated all the way to the week I graduated.

As a result of this, this collection of songs find me in a variety of states and moods: in the wake of the painful dissolution of a relationship, in the hope and anticipation of new, exciting love, and deep in the mire of self-doubt, at all points fighting to become a happier, stronger version of myself. I like to think I succeed.

I am also a particular and meticulous producer of my music, doing take after take of guitar solos until I hit the perfect balance of rhythmic and melodic inspiration, and listening to my mixes over and over again until they have tired my ears.

The recording of this album, then, was an exercise in letting go: it was recorded in the spare bedroom/craft room/music room of my apartment with an iPad and a small army of EarPods acting as microphones. Instead of the all-powerful Pro Tools I got to tussle with the quirky but surprisingly deep GarageBand app. Without a drumset or bass amp, I used software instruments and whatever percussion could be constructed from what I had lying around the apartment to fulfill those spots on the sonic spectrum (on multiple songs what sounds like a snare drum being played with brushes is in fact my piano stool being hit rhythmically).

The resulting recordings are admittedly mid-fi at best, but I have found myself falling in love with the way it feels so alive: ornamenting the songs you can hear creaking of a chair, my nervous exhale in the middle of a well executed take, the distant sounds of my girlfriend playing Animal Crossing, and a general feeling that puts you somehow right beneath the Smiths poster I stared at while cringing at another poor tambourine performance and in a million other places too.

This album was recorded during a time when the world was staying home and doing an awful lot of worrying. It's a time capsule of anxiety but also of an endless possibility, of a departing darkness and an ever-oncoming light. I hope that this album can pass these endless hours and calm your soul the same way recording has done for me over the past few months. Please enjoy "Love In The Time Of Anxiety". See you in 2023 with the next one.