Misery

Misery started out life as a little bit of hero worship. I had been listening to ‘In All That Drifts from Summit Down’ by A Dead Forest Index a lot, and wanted to find a way to work with the same sort of dense, clustered triads as Adam Sherry does so deftly. Before they decamped to Berlin, I used to see them live often and marvel at the sheer volume of ashen, brutalist, architectural sound he and his brother Sam could conjure so purposefully. Concurrently, I had started to explore Travis picking thanks to my long-held admiration for Elliott Smith, Paul Simon, Bert Jansch and the like, and juxtaposing the weight of the first half of the song with something a little more mobile, chromatic, and organic in the second act felt like the right place for the tune to end up.

Lyrically, Misery is a tone poem that grew out of the nonsensical syllables I was chewing on while looking for a melody. Digging through various iterations of a lyric led me to what you’ll hear on the record, a pen-and-ink sketch of the all too familiar scene I’m sure we’ve all experienced, that of waking up in the middle of the night to your unconscious memory playing back scenes you’d rather forget. It’s an unsettling and maudlin experience at the best of times, and I think the tension between the simple sonics of my acoustic guitar and the rich sonic tapestry Yam, Rook, and Ryan were able to weave around it describes that mood perfectly.

Wirewalker Falls is our May 3rd.