“Take me alive.

Make me a liar.

Take me alive.

Don’t look away until it’s gone,

‘til it’s gone.”

The album doesn’t start off as an album. It barely starts off as a song. One might say it starts off with nothing.

With touring halted and postponed by the pandemic, there’s much less to do—much less to look forward to. Album promo dies out quickly and without a tour to practice and prepare for, all that’s left is restlessness.

There is need to create despite the exhaustion that’s caught up with him after Youngblood, two tours, and then a whole other album. A pull to the guitar and piano. An itch aching to be scratched. And yet, he finds nothing.

Luke’s messing around with what he can remember from a track off of their debut album when the feeling settles in. It’s his fingers hesitating for a piece of a second before landing on a chord that comes out discordant. It’s the way the the sound vibrates through the air, shifting everything off by mere atoms and, yet, he can feel it all.

That forgetting the chord in a song is just shy of forgetting a song—almost is, really, given repetition makes the music. And it’s forgetting a song that’s forgetting moments, a reminder ringing through the air that he is no longer who he was then—if he could even remember who that was.

Placing the guitar softly on the stand beside him, Luke listens as the last of the chord echoes through his living room. Imagines particles displaced—sent off in directions and speeds unexpected, wondering how they got to where they are now.

When the silence hits, he squeeze the armrests of his chair for a moment. Like a delayed reaction, the sound through the air is a thought travelling from the tips of his fingers through the tension in his arms and up the rise of his shoulders into a shuddered exhale.

Scrambling for the pen and notebook on the coffee table, “I think I missed the gun at the starting line,” appears in scratchy black ink and the room is no longer shifted by an atom’s width, but distances only measured in time.

So he stares and stares at the thought on canary paper, as if Luke could glare it into life. And he knows, he knows pages of verses can become nothing. He knows six minutes of melodies can simply be noise. He knows not every concept is the seed of an idea to grow. But this?