back cover: cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/565921792204472341/1073390458560069772/backcover.jpg

something that matters is my first full-length album. It is both a demo and a standalone LP. I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as I enjoyed making it.

The full album is actually 13 tracks long, and includes a cover of The Mountain Goats’ Jeff Davis County Blues off of 2001’s All Hail West Texas; it’s just that covers are not kosher for bandcamp. If you are at all interested in hearing this, it appears on the ‘proper’ tracklist between Antecedents and 1896; I will send you the file if you want. As always, if you know me, ask me for a full download of the album and I shall provide.

Truth or Consequences samples the films Bottle Rocket and The Friends of Eddie Coyle. (‘Till We Set Fire To The House) samples the film Chungking Express. Antecedents samples two Hudson Valley radio stations (I believe the outro sample comes from WFNP 88.7FM, which during the daytime plays classical music but in the evening hosts SUNY New Paltz's student-run radio station). Days of Heaven is indeed named after Terrence Malick’s beautiful 1978 film. Bonus points if you spot the song it interpolates. The album title was taken from the title of a brilliant Merchant Ships song, the final track off of their For Cameron EP (an odd but I think fitting example of a nanogenre I’d refer to as “twee screamo”). Any relation between this album’s lyrics and my own thoughts or experience are a private matter between myself, my tax attorney and God.

This project is both a demo tape and an album. Which seems sort of odd, but it’s been done in the past. I intend this as a document of my songwriting and guitar playing that will one day be recorded professionally with a full band, but it’s also a standalone “demos album” which functions as a distinct aesthetic project in and of itself. I credit Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, whose music I have been endlessly obsessed with and inspires much of my own writing and playing, for this dual idea–in the early days of the band, Isaac would record demo tapes but title them and create artwork in such a way that they function as distinct albums. What might be the band’s best recording pre-Lonesome Crowded West is a lo-fi demo entitled “Live in Sunburst MT” which is included as the second half of their EP Interstate 8. It’s seriously awesome stuff. Seriously, listen to that version of Beach Side Property.

This all matters. You are loved.