October Newsletter: Leaving Town

It hardly feels like October here. Green still dominates the landscape, but that will surely change by the end of the month. Around then, we’ll also hit the 11-year anniversary of one of two EPs we’ve put out, “How to Leave Town”. In spite of its length, I chose to call it an EP because it felt looser than a full album; it started out of scraps that didn’t fit on Teens of Denial. It came together fairly rapidly after I moved across the country from Virginia to Washington.

I knew very few people in Washington, and had never been there before. I moved because a friend was offering space for me to live, and because I knew I didn’t want to stay in Virginia, or move to New York as most of my college friends were doing. I took my parents’ minivan (seen on the covers of the first two CSH albums), filled it with everything I’d be taking, and drove over the continent in four days, staying with relatives in Chicago and Minneapolis, and a friend of a friend in Bozeman. I remember the intensity of the last two days of driving - all that flatland of North Dakota, suddenly breaking loose into huge, ominous mountains and winding paths, just as the sun began to set. 

The landscape of the drive worked its way into the bones of the EP. A long intro I’d made with no song to follow it became “The Ending of Dramamine,” its first instrumental minutes humming along like the Dakota flatlands, only to eventually pivot into a dark song about fears and shadows. Other song pieces I’d been working on, like Beast Monster Thing and Hey, Space Cadet, suddenly had a new angle to them as I looked at them from outside the east coast, snapshots from a place I’d just left. I wrote a new song, America, to fully glue together the travelogue. 

Though it felt as though I was leaving most of the world behind, the world was slowly creeping up to me in different ways. Very shortly after posting How To Leave Town on Bandcamp, I met Andrew, and the EP is what drew him to agree to work with me for an upcoming show. The audience listening to CSH was still quite small, living on independent online communities, but that would soon change. Pitchfork posted a review of a track on HTLT (I think Beast Monster Thing) out of nowhere. And unbeknownst to me, Jake Whitener, a collaborator of Chris Lombardi’s (though not at Matador Records at that time), had become enough of a fan to want to sign CSH to his own label. But before doing so, he passed the link along to Chris in case he was interested. In the end, he was.

And so as summer pivots into fall, I’m reminded of that strange pivot in my own life, where I drove headlong into the unknown, and ended up with one of my favorite releases, and the start of a big new chapter in my life. I wish the best of luck to everyone this October, wherever in your journey you might be during this chapter of your life.