Between Almost and Done
Firstly, thank you for your patience.
Almost has been done for a little over a year. I don’t really have a good reason as to why it took so long to get it to your ears.
I think that, at its conception, Almost was one thing. Then, over the course of writing, demoing, recording, revising, and holding it very close to my chest, away from the ears of anyone who could pass judgment on it, it became another thing.
Almost was called Done for most of the time that I was making it, mainly because I had it in my head that it would be my last record, at least as Old Best Friend.
Living Alone came out in 2015. It was by no means a grueling release, but it did take a lot of the wind out of my sails. I did some of the things that I thought needed to be done to make a “successful release” and learned that even the smallest amount of momentum is not easy to build or sustain.
I also learned about myself, that there were things I would have to sacrifice that I wasn’t ready to give up. The fact that the process was difficult wasn’t the issue, it was really that there was no part of it that felt good. Some of that had to do with me, and some of it had to do with the nature of the game.
In early 2016 I realized that I still had a lot of half-done songs, some of them I’d started back in 2012. It didn’t occur to me to leave those songs unfinished, and making another record was something I knew I wanted to do even before Living Alone was released.
By the time I actually got around to putting together the details of that follow-up, my outlook on it had changed entirely. It went from being something I looked forward to sharing to something that I had to purge from my system in order to get on with other aspects of my life.
When Steve delivered the masters to me, I was still very much between two mindsets about releasing the album. A lot of me wanted to just put it on the internet and let it be nothing. Another small, dying voice inside of me wanted to put myself through everything I did the last time around. So I sat with it for a year, making plans to do something, but ultimately doing nothing.
A colleague at my day job asked me how music was going. I told him the truth, that I was afraid to release the record at the risk of it being deemed nothing by default. He put it simply, that the record was doing nobody any good by rotting on a hard drive. It just needs to exist in the world. I was fighting myself for no reason.
So I thankfully overcame my nearsightedness. Done became Almost, because that’s what the record ended up feeling like in the course of holding onto it: very close to being what I want, presented very close to the way that I want. It’s very close to me feeling finished.
I owe specific thanks to the following people:
Producer, engineer, drummer Steve Sopchak, to whom I feel like I owe the biggest apology for taking so long to release this record. His unending positivity about this record has been my fuel, and if there’s anything sonically remarkable about this record, it’s thanks to him.
Jacob Tender, the person who always makes the time to give feedback on every single stupid thing I bounce his way. He’s acted as an entire hemisphere of my brain throughout the making of Almost. I talk to him more than I talk to myself, and that’s a lot. You can hear us talk about this process weekly.
Marinda Martin, the amazingly talented artist who painted “Caught”, the Almost cover. That image gave the record a face and made it something tangible.
The handful of people that reached out to ask when the next record was coming out, or who’ve expressed excitement towards even the smallest announcement I’ve made. I feel like I’ve met most of you at some point or another in my travels, and the fact that I’ve stayed in your music rotation, that you have even the mildest curiosity about what I make is the most heart-warming feeling. Truly.
I don’t know what comes between Almost and Done. I do know that this feels better than last time, and that everything I was worried about that made me not want to release this record is actually not a big deal. There doesn’t have to be a big business plan. It can just be music for me and all of you.
Listen to Almost anywhere that you listen to music.
