top of page
Lifa (2015)
In the summer of 2014, I got a WeChat message from Fino saying that she was coming back to Chicago with a mind to record some new songs with Seth and I. This came completely out of the blue and was very exciting news for me. Fino was in China at the time and I was thrilled that she would travel half way around the world for the soul reason of making music with me. But that was Fino's style back then, spontaneous and inspired. Needless to say, I was down and I began to demo out a lot of acoustic guitar based instrumentals in preparation for her arrival.
When she arrived in Chicago we immediately got down to business writing new songs. I called up Seth and luckily was able to book some last minute recording time in a few different local studios. We had fresh material and were very excited to capitalize on this momentum and go record the new songs right away. We had a blast in the studio and after a week had come away with mixes of four beautiful new compositions that we all really loved. She hung around for another week with us in Chicago before flying back home to Shenzhen with the rough mixes. And just like that, she was gone... Again...
One of my favorite recording memories is just watching Fino get behind that condenser mic and sing her lyrics so gracefully. Fino sings in three different languages on this album and I think that her energy and talent for weaving melodies really give this album a very unique edge. Her and I really had a special chemistry and I wish that we had been able to make more music together. To me, this is kind of the Fino album and sadly, after Lifa, Fino and I would never again get the chance to work that closely on music. I sometimes wonder what could have been if we had continued to write and perform together. She is such a unique talent.
However, this album is also a poignant one because it marks a few more significant lasts and firsts.. This was the last time that Nagi and I would collaborate on a song. She wrote the lyrics to the final track "Sam's / 君の声" and just before Fino arrived in Chicago in the summer of 2014, Nagi had moved out of our place in River City and back to Japan where she would go on to live and work in Tokyo for a time. As for firsts, the song "上下" is the first track that Cheer and I would sing together on. We put the track together in her apartment in Chinatown and enjoyed the process so much that it sparked a creative partnership that would last for many years to come.
Upon its completion and release, I got the sense of having finally reached something that I had always hoped to one day achieve. I really loved the sound of Seth's production on these full band arrangements. they held elements of all the best things from our past work as well as a few new elements and sounded a lot cleaner than our past recordings. I especially loved how the album featured many different languages, vocalists and all of their unique perspectives. It seemed more like a story with reoccurring characters as opposed to an album from the perspective of one individual. It felt like a personal triumph that had been achieved through intense collaboration.
I had finally found the Nature's Neighbor signature sound. But the times were changing fast. College was over and I was now entering a new stage of life with Cheer by my side. I got a job at a used record store in Wicker Park and Cheer and I moved into a bigger unit in River City. Then, a few weeks after this album's release, I would end up proposing to Cheer. It was the end of an era and the dawning of a new one. It truly was an amazing time..
Vivi (2015)
Vivi is a little three song EP made up of tracks that were mostly recorded in the same era as the Lifa sessions. But, seeing as these three songs were much more electronic and sample based than the bulk of the material on Lifa, I decided that they would fit much better on a separate smaller release. Here is a bit of background information on two of the tracks...
~
"憂いの水 (Water of Sorrow)" was recorded in 2012 at an old house in Jefferson Park that a few friends of mine were living in at the time. Seth Engel and Adam Salsberg had converted the basement into a makeshift recording studio that also saw use as a practice space / DIY music venue. They called it "Space Jam" in reference to the 1996 Warner Bros. film of the same name. It even had a life size cardboard cut out of Michael Jordan decked out in his Tune Squad uniform.
Adam and Seth had this idea to make a compilation album called Mercury Mayonaise, which would feature their favorite Chicago based DIY artists and they wanted to include a track from me on it. I was honored that they had asked me to be a part of it and wanted to give them something really special that showed that I was a significant artist in the DIY scene. The concept was that they'd have an artist show up at Space Jam, get them all set up with various instruments all mic'd up and ready to go. Then they'd just press record and see what each artist could whip up in a day.
Being a bit too intimidated to show up with absolutely nothing, I brought my laptop over that had a Logic Pro project file with chopped up samples of various water sounds that Terrill Mast and I had recorded a few weeks prior. I asked Terrill if I could use the samples to create my track for the compilation and he said "Sure, just come up with something original." So that's what I set out to do. Before heading over to Space Jam, I arranged the water samples into a few rhythmic patters that I thought would be a good starting point for a track.
On the day I showed up at Space Jam to make the track, I was a little unsure as to whether or not I could make something that would be up to par with some of the other artists featured on the compilation. They played me a track by Nnamdi which totally blew my mind and inspired me to let loose and get weirder. So they set me up in the basement and they went up to the second floor to their makeshift control room. They communicated with me through a pair of headphones and a little talkback mic which really made me feel like I was isolated down there. I was all on my own and it was up to me to make something great or pack it in and go home with my tail between my legs.
So I went to work. I really can't remember much of the process of putting the track together because it was all such a blur, but here are some snapshots I can still recall... I remember banging away on a djembe, stomping as hard as I could on a kick drum pedal, singing Jeff Buckley style backing vocals and then singing lead vocals in Japanese... After about an hour and a half a transmission came down from the control room saying something along the lines of "Sounds good man, I think we got something. Why don't you come up and have a listen?" So I went up to the control room where I added a bass part, some midi synth lines and to top it all off, I asked them to mic this small turtle tank that they had in the control room and I swished my fingers around in it to add more water vibes to the track.
We wrapped up the session and they gave me a rough mix of the track which is what ended up on Vivi. I took the track home and played it for Terrill and asked him what he thought and he said something like "Sounds cool man, I like what you did with it." And in fact I agreed with Terrill, I really ended up liking how it turned out and fell in love with the vibe of that rough mix. Seth and Adam ended up mixing it further and made some edits that I thought took away from the magic of that original bounce, but you can hear their version on the compilation album if your curious...
redbeardrecords.bandcamp.com/album/mercury-mayonnaise
I really felt like recording this song with Adam and Seth in Space Jam helped to give me a lot of confidence. It showed me that I could indeed come up with the goods when put into a recording situation and asked to "make something cool" on the spot. It still remains a milestone in my early recording career and listening to in these days immediately sends me right back to Space Jam with Michael Jordan and the turtle tank...
~
"Gonna Kill Me With That Stungun" was recorded all the way back in early 2011 in an all day session that started after a wild house party. The house party, which had taken place the night before, had seen someone break a piece of wood off of a doorframe in a drunken stupor. The next morning, I found the piece of wood lying on the floor, picked it up and started recording the sounds of me striking the wood with my fingers to replicate the feel of Middle Eastern / South Asian hand percussion. Then I added some more percussive layering using other objects found around my room, put an acoustic guitar part on top of it and that's how the track was kicked off.
Soon after putting vocals on the track I showed it to Daniel Lee. He loved it and immediately started writing his own verse as well as a very catchy sitar melody. After all of that was laid down we felt that we really had something great in the works and that is when we brought it to Mike Nardone. Mike had a great feel for jazz chords and quickly added some beautiful chord changes on acoustic guitar and layered bass and his vintage Fender Rhodes on top of them.
By that time, all three of us were really fired up about the track and how it was developing and sat around brainstorming where next to take it.. I always love that part of the recording process where the possibilities seem limitless. At that time, our dear friend Matt Nauss had stopped by for a evening visit and upon playing the track for him, he and Nardone had devised to chop up and sample segments of the track and make new sections from those chopped samples. Mike had a go first, chopped up the acoustic guitar parts and rearranged them in this really cool glitched out way. When he was finished he handed the laptop to Matt, who took it into an empty room with headphones. After about an hour Matt emerged with this incredible section filled up with chopped guitar, vocals and Rhodes that blew everyone's minds. He took Nardone's glitched out vibe and took it 3 steps further.
By then it was way past sundown and we were all laser focused on finishing up the track. Nardone took Matt's section, added these beautiful saxophone layers on top of it and then got out his trusty 5-string to track some more bass. I distinctly remember sitting next to Mike in my room late at night, both of us chain smoking American Spirits and watching him track this incredible bass part. It was probably the best songwriting experience I had with those guys.. Everyone was focused on the singular goal of making this song as brilliant as humanly possible.
But after that day long recording session, the song sat around for about 6 months with none of us having any idea how to finish it. Mike Byrnes added a second layer of bass at one point and I added some additional layers of percussion but that was about it. We had built up to this epic section where Nardone's saxophones were blaring this dissonant chord with droning bass underneath it and no one could figure out where to take it from there. Eventually, I think either I, Terrill or Matt thought of the idea to just loop that dissonant chord over and over while treating it with layers of distortion effects to make this Sonic Youth style discordant drone that eventually would turn into pure white noise. Then, in the style of The Beatles' "I want You (She's so Heavy)," we just decided to make a sudden decisive cut at the height of the white noise section to abruptly end the song.
In all the years since making this track we have made lots of experimental songs but this one still stands out to me as being one of the wildest adventures in sound that Nature's Neighbor has ever embarked upon. We've never made anything like it since then. It stands alone amongst all the other NN tracks as something truly unique and I'm very proud of that.
Pidji (2016)
Coming off of the only Nature’s Neighbor tour we ever did in early 2015, I was pretty burnt out on playing shows and really wanted to record new music. After fishing around for a few new approaches to recording the idea came up to make an album with Seth in the Owlery, a practice space on the west side of Chicago. The idea was to make an album with a consistent drum sound and a cohesiveness that none of my previous albums had ever attempted before.
Leading up to making this album I had always recorded songs on a laptop, usually with just one microphone in whatever space I could use at the time. I would mostly record in bedrooms or living rooms of my / other people’s apartments around Chicago. But for this album Seth was at the recording desk and we were working in a place that felt more like a real recording studio. It had no windows and felt like a place where I could block everything else out and focus completely on recording. We used much better recording equipment and really tried to make a rich and full sounding album with many different textures while still retaining a cohesive sound that would mainly be achieved by using the same drum set up on every song.
Cheer and I were still living at River city at the time in unit 528 and we were jumping through hoops trying to prepare all of the paperwork for her Green-card application to the USCIS because her visa had expired or was just about to. We had been married in a courthouse downtown in February of that year. When I wasn’t working at the record / video game shop in Wicker Park I was demoing out songs on Cheer’s laptop at home. It would be the last album I would make while living in River city.
Because Cheer and I had recently married we were planning a three month long trip to Nanchang to visit her family. A lot of what this album ended up being about was the preparations for securing Cheer’s permanent resident status in the US and preparing to go back to China. Cheer participated very heavily on this album singing lead vocals on many of the tracks and creating much of the album’s artwork. Without her special touch this album would be significantly worse and much more boring.
This album also marks the return of Brandon into Nature’s Neighbor as a player, producer and writer. He had a huge roll to play on a few of the songs and wrote most of songs 8 and 9 himself. Brandon also convinced me to use his small collection of analogue synthesizers and stop relying on MIDIs so much. It was the first time we had worked on music closely together since the making of Thingamajiggy three years previously.
Another significant thing to note about this album is that it was the last one where Terrill was still living in Chicago. He would move away from Chicago at the end of 2015 back to his hometown in Herndon Virginia. After this album Terrill and I would mainly work together long distance through emails.
More than halfway through making the album we had the privilege of moving over to a studio then called Minbal where a few of my friends like Mike Nardone had interned. This was a real deal recording studio with an old console from the 80s and all the choices of mics, outboard gear and amps you could dream of. Seth was able to get us in there at a discounted price and recording in that studio was one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve ever had making music in my life. There were many vintage keyboards and guitars there and also a piano from the 19th century.
After about 9 months of recording on and off we had basically finished the album and it was time for Cheer and I to go to off to China. We said goodbye to Terrill who would leave Chicago for good about a month after we left, we moved out of River City where I had been for the past three years and got on the plane to Beijing. While in China I had countless incredible experiences. I was privileged enough to visit places like the Forbidden city and the Summer Palace in Beijing. And later in our stay Cheer and I would take a week long trip to Sanya which is a city in Hainan. Sanya is probably my favorite place in all of China but Nanchang will always be the most special to me. It was wonderful being introduced to all of the family on Cheer’s side. It was such an intense and meaningful experience being in China that I had to demo out a song when I was there. So I texted Seth explaining to him that we had one more song to record once I got back to the States.
Upon returning from China Seth and I got together and recorded the final song for Pidji and it was quickly mixed so that we could get the album mastered and put out through a small Chicago label called Sooper Records. It will always be one of our strongest albums.
Drawing in Pen (2017)
After recording Pidji with Seth at the Owlrey and Minbal studios I really wanted to make a laptop album again. I wanted to go away from the live band sound that was so prominent on Pidji and go for something a little more abstract for the next one.
Upon returning from China, Cheer and I moved up to Lakeview and for the first time in 5 years I was living in the north side of Chicago. I set up a small recording station in our studio apartment with one USB condenser mic, acoustic guitar, a MIDI keyboard and a laptop. It was overly simple but I enjoyed the freedom of being able to record on my own again uninhibited by studio schedules.
After Brandon returned from a trip to Hong Kong he moved into an apartment in Edgewater and I would often visit him there as he worked on mixing his album “Ennui Heart.” He taught me a new technique that proved to be they key to unlocking the direction this album would eventually take.
Brandon showed me how to use the EXS24 sampler which allowed me to morph the pitch and speed of any sampled sound with my MIDI controller. A few days later I went out to Irving Park with my Zoom to get some field recordings. I recorded the sounds of logs, leaves, stones, insects and metal objects. After recording these sounds I returned home and made a rhythm track out of the samples using the technique Brandon had shown me. I wrote all of track nine track in 3 hours that day and decided that all the songs on the album should be written using this sample based approach. I would gather strange and raw samples from my immediate environment and then use them to create the core of each new track. The end result is an album full of strange and warped sounds but also mundane every-day sounds.
After a few more songs had started to develop I found myself getting stuck. This was usually the point where I would go over to Terrill's apartment and he would help to further form the tracks. But because he was no longer living in Chicago I did not know what to do until I realized that Terrill and I could still write songs together long distance via email. I sent him a few tracks and luckily he loved them and started adding his own layering to them which greatly enriched the sound of this album. I was glad that we were still able to write together even though we couldn’t pass at the laptop back and forth like before. After he left Chicago it became painfully clear to me just how important of a collaborator he is to me personally. I found myself obsessively listening to his 2012 album "Flash Fiction" while making this album. Song number eight is dedicated to him.
Cheer was interested in collaborating with me on this album as well, finding the home recording approach much more comfortable. She was reading a book about ancient Chinese mythology and contributed some wonderful lyrics in Mandarin that described some of these mythological characters and their adventures. Her vocal performances on this album are particularly strong.
The end result is an album with a far smaller cast of collaborators that is shorter in length but equally as vibrant in its instrumentation and overall effect as Lifa and Pidji. More importantly, I proved to myself that I could make a really good album on my own with just a laptop and a few instruments.
Vein Matter (2017)
Mike Walker, Brandon Studer (aka Wren Smiles), and I started this little EP seven months ago via email and kept bouncing ideas off each other. It was like piecing together Frankenstein’s creature for its reanimation, and we were mad scientists at work. Then things eventually came to a slow stop sometime in May, and the three or four tracks we had produced with began to gather digital dust. You know how it goes.
Fast forward a few months to this August when Radhika Bhatt and I set out on a trip to Chicago in a car packed to the brim with musical instruments (plus we kidnapped Zachary Klaus on the way) to stay with Mike Walker and Cheer Zhao at their apartment in Edgewater. I had left the city over a year ago and it was my first time coming back. During that trip we all reconnected, reveled, and recorded four of the seven tracks that are on this mini album. Also featured is Austin Thomasson (aka Austin James Christ) who provided some spacey guitar during an all day recording session at his place in Logan Square. We had regained our momentum and set out to finish what we had started.
To me, Vein Matter encapsulates many of our collective dreams and feelings of Chicago, and of leaving something we love so much behind us as we continually venture onward into the next chapter of our lives. As such, I am happy to leave this behind for you all as I make my way across the globe to live in India for eight months. Cheers!
- Terrill Mast, October 4th 2017
Jade (2018)
This album was actually made over a long period of time in between recording sessions for both the Drawing in Pen and Vein Matter projects. Both of those albums were very electronic and centered around using a laptop to cut up and manipulate samples. It’s a fun way of creating music, but sometimes I would get burnt out on all the time spent hunched over a laptop making microscopic edits on two second long chopped samples. And when that would happen, I had this acoustic project that I could turn to that would satisfy my need for a simpler, more ”back to my roots” way of songwriting.
The acoustic guitar has always been my weapon of choice when it comes to the craft of songwriting. When I look back at how I started writing songs, it was the act of sitting down with an acoustic guitar and finding interesting chord changes to sing over. That’s what I was doing in my bedroom at age 17 and for a few years, that was all I needed. But as I got older and learned more about the art of recording, I got caught up in all the different methods of production one could utilize in order to create a more unique piece of music. The acoustic guitar was still there, but I guess I got swept away by the excitement of finding new ways to create a song.
But after about seven years of doing that, I started to contemplate a few questions, like “In my search for new recording techniques, have I lost something?” or “Have my muscles for writing a great song started to atrophy?” “Can I even write a great song??” Although I still loved manipulating samples, making loops and creating electronic soundscapes, I started to see all of these new techniques I had learned as sort of getting in the way of the true art of songwriting. Because really, at the end of the day, all a great song is about is beautiful chords / moving music, a great vocal performance with a strong melody and lyrics that connect with the listener. Millions of people didn’t connect with The Beatles’ song “Yesterday” for its production techniques, they connected with it because the vocal melody is gorgeous and the lyrics are simple and effective in their emotional appeal.
So for this acoustic project, I set myself a few hard rules… No click track, no percussion, no electronics and most importantly of all, no MIDI instruments or digital effects of any kind. I was also listening to albums like Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Jessica Pratt’s On Your Own Love Again and Elliot Smith’s first two solo albums. Those albums admittedly had a big impact on me as well during the making of this album. After recording the first song “Ponyboy” I really got into the groove and started to get excited about creating an entire album of acoustic tracks. I was hoping to make a collection of songs that showed that even with all the production tricks completely stripped away, or perhaps due to the absence of all that production jiggery pokery, I was able to create songs that connected with the listener on a raw emotional level. Just like the artists I mentioned above… I was sort of trying to put my songwriting skills to the ultimate test.
It was also sort of a melancholic and reflective time in my life. Looking back now, I can clearly see that I was in some sort of funk and although I was satisfied with some aspects of my life, I was very unhappy in others. I had been gaining a lot of weight, was very unhealthy and smoking tons of pot constantly every day. I had hit a point where I felt like the best years of my life were behind me. Something that, looking back years later, I can see was definitely not true, but it doesn’t change how I felt when I was going through it. Lots of my friends had moved out of Chicago and Cheer and I had moved very north to a town called Edgewater which is a nice place but can feel a bit removed from the more lively parts of the city. I also had this job where I worked from 3:30AM until 9:30AM and when I was getting off work was when 99% of the population was starting work. So I had the whole day to myself but couldn’t really spend time with anyone, so I would just wander around Chicago aimlessly and smoke massive joints. Weed was still illegal in Chicago back then, so I had to sneak around to get high. I just felt sort of listless and alienated from almost everyone around me.
But one light in the darkness was recording these songs with a few dear friends. At first I thought that I should be the only performer on the album, so as to get those feelings of deep isolation across more effectively. But after getting about 70% of the way through the recording process I decided that I’d collaborate with two people. Daniel Lee and Terrill Mast. Since Terrill was no longer living in Chicago, I just emailed him some tracks that I thought could use some piano. I sent three songs off to Terrill and I think the piano layers he sent back are some of the most beautiful performances he's ever done on a Nature's Neighbor album.
Then there was Dan. We reconnected in a big way on this album. He was the first person that I really collaborated with when I moved to Chicago and since the first day we met we have had this indescribable chemistry. Dan played a massive roll in the first NN album You Me and the People and when we play guitar together our parts seem to mesh together perfectly to form this whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts. Back in 2014, when Dan moved back to Chicago, he had visited me in River City a few times to demo out some songs on acoustic guitar in hopes to record them in some new project. We wrote some great stuff together but ultimately didn’t end up recording final versions for any album for one reason or another. Thinking now was the time do finally get those songs down, I texted him asking if he’d be down to record some of those tracks for the album and he said yes. “PBI” and “Old Timer” came out of the sessions I did with Dan that year. Visiting his home in Oak Park we sat down and played acoustic guitars just as we had back when we lived together in 2010 and 2011. It was a great moment.
At the end of it I came out with 9 acoustic tracks that I was very satisfied with. The album felt like the most personal and raw piece of music that I had ever made up to that point and I thought that, for the most part, it showed that I was able to reach the goal I set out to achieve, that of writing great songs with an emotional power and resonance to them without any of the trappings of modern recording technology. Simple songs for a very complex time.
After struggling to come up with a fitting album title, I decided on “Jade” which was inspired by a very beautiful jade necklace Cheer had purchased while we were visiting her family in Nanchang. You can see the jade from the necklace on the album cover. I used to wear it around my neck every day for many years. I suppose the name was also meant to evoke the simplicity and beauty of something that you must mine very deeply to acquire. Something pure that was refined slowly over many years, deep within the earth.
Ur (2019)
Ur is our last album for the decade. It serves as a wave goodbye but also hopefully a doorway into new possibilities. Ur was initially inspired by a conversation with Seth Engel about trying to write songs by starting with the drums first and avoiding typical guitar based songwriting by using more synths and pianos. I also was very interested in recording an album at Pallet Sound in Bridgeport. Seth and I recorded this album at Pallet in 13 separate 10 hour sessions spread out between the months of February-August 2018. Mixing then began several months later and was finished around the end of that same year.
I was incredibly fortunate to have the pleasure of working with some new friends on this album. Most of them were introduced to me by Seth. All of these musicians have brought so much more life and richness into this album than I could have ever hoped to do on my own. Seeing each one of them in the studio working was a very exciting and educational experience for me and I was extremely impressed with how each one of them approached the recording process in a unique way.
This album is a new mixture of musicians and so the resulting sound is really quite different than anything we've put out previously. This time around Seth has definitely been more like a bandmate than simply the recording engineer and drummer. Him and I wrote nearly all of these songs together swapping instruments and bouncing ideas off of each other. Often times we would go into an all day recording session with basically no plan for what kind of music we were going to record that day.
Not all songs were written this way however. Sanzhi Pod City is an old song that I had written way back in the fall of 2012. I had tried and failed many times to record it over the years and I was happy to finally do a solid version of the song. I was also lucky that Pallet had a lovely Steinway baby grand piano available to play. Pallet Sound is a wonderful studio. I've never enjoyed the recording process quite as much as I did this time around.
Now that it is finally finished and we have come to the last year of this decade I can look back on everything leading up to this day and smile knowing that it was all necessary in order for us to bring you these 10 songs. I hope that you connect with and enjoy this album that for us was such a pleasure to make.
Wind City Airport (2020)
Wind City Airport, more than any other album in my discography, is a work that signals the end of an era. Not only was it the last album that I made during the 2010s, a decade that saw the birth of Nature’s Neighbor, but it was also the last album to be made while Cheer and I were traveling back and forth between China and the US. It was the last album made while Cheer was working as a flight attendant for American Airlines. And it was the last album made in a pre COVID-19 world, before the pandemic would alter the course of so many of our lives.
And although I could not have known that so many things were about to drastically change come 2020, I did feel a sense of things coming to an end. And that feeling of things ending is all over this album. You can see it in the album cover, a photo taken by Cheer where I’m on our balcony watching the sun go down over Chicago’s Lower West Side. You can see it in song titles like “Counting the Minutes” and “January Again.” And you can hear it in the lyrics I wrote and the way that I sang them. There is a deep melancholy to this entire album. It’s something that, at the time of making it, I didn’t fully understand. But now, looking back a few years later, I can see a version of me that somehow intuitively knew that with the dawn of 2020, things would never be the same.
And that is a sad feeling. I loved the 2010s, for the most part anyway. I feel like the first half of the 2010s was filled with this great optimism. Maybe that was just me being in my early 20s, I’m not sure. But I’m sure that most American’s can agree with me that the second half of the 2010s felt a great deal darker and heavier than say 2010-2014/2015. And it’s not just Americans that can feel this. I’d go so far as to say that it was a global thing.
And that brings me to China. I had no idea that 2019 would be the last year that Cheer and I would visit her family in Nanchang together. When Cheer and I left in January of 2019, I figured that we’d be back in six months or something like that. But sadly, with the coming of COVID-19 and the deterioration of our marriage, that was not to be. Knowing what I know now, I look back on that final trip to Nanchang with a lot of fondness as well as a good deal of sadness. I loved visiting China with Cheer. It was one of the most enlightening and life changing experiences of my entire life. From 2015 until that last trip in 2019, Cheer and I visited China about seven times, usually around the Chinese New Year. We’d usually stay for a month or two but some stays were even longer. My longest stay in China was three months. And during 2018 and 2019, due to Cheer being employed by American Airlines, we were able to fly to China in business class for under $100 USD. I have so many good memories of exploring Nanchang, Jingdezhen, Beijing and so many other parts of China with Cheer. Her family was always so kind to me, and I will cherish the memories we made for the rest of my life.
But as things were getting darker in America, ominous clouds were also gathering over China, and I could feel that as well. When I first visited China in early 2014, things felt very open and free. It felt like anything was possible and I was excited by the rapid growth I could see everywhere. It felt as though China was kfinallyopening up to the rest of the world. But as the 2010s came to a close, I could feel the government cracking down and the atmosphere start to take a dark turn. Although my last visit in 2019 was full of heartwarming family moments, when I would walk the streets alone, I started to feel that maybe China was not as good of a place for foreigners as I had once thought. All the same, we tried our best to enjoy every moment. One day, during our stay at her parent’s home, I wrote the opening track ‘Counting the Minutes’ on their upright piano. It felt like the start to a new project.
Upon returning to the US, getting sick, and then recovering, I felt very inspired to start a new album with Seth in Pallet Sounds, the same Bridgeport studio where we recorded all of Ur. So I started demoing out songs and booking all day studio sessions at Pallet. I had fallen in love with the studio while making the last album and thought it would be a good idea to make one more record there with Seth with essentially the same equipment. But I also knew that if we were to record another album in the same style as Ur, I would probably lose my mind. So I just went back to writing simpler songs on guitar and piano. It felt like a more honest and grounded way of songwriting.
Although I wasn’t as keen to collaborate with tons of other musicians like I was on the Ur sessions, I was delighted to have Daniel Lee come into the studio to track a song that we had demoed out five years prior called “Fullerton.” The song was mostly written by Dan and he named it after the street that we lived on when we were roommates back in 2011. Mike Nardone, our other 2011 roommate, showed up at the Owlrey to play bass on the demo back in 2014. That recording session would mark the last time the three of us would play music in the same room together. I always loved the song and when I was making track listings for the new album I thought it would fit in snugly with the other songs Seth and I were recording. Dan came down to Pallet and we knocked out the whole song in one session.
All of the songs on this album have a world weariness to them that give the album a very melancholic feel. Looking back now, it is very clear that I was in a bit of a depressed state when I wrote these songs. Songs like “January Again” express my feelings on the sadness that comes with the end of your 20s and feeling that youthful exuberance slowly drain out of you only to be replaced by numbness and regret. There’s a fondness and longing for the simpler times that came from experiencing my tight knit group of college friends becoming fragmented, more and more overcome with adult responsibilities, moving away and slowly falling out of touch. I think most people approaching their 30s who had a close group of friends in high school and or college can relate to a lot of the sentiments expressed in songs like “By the Lake” and “January Again.”
There is a lot of loneliness that is expressed on this album as well. I spent many nights walking down empty streets at night smoking joints and thinking “What the Hell happened?” Even when you’re in a relationship or surrounded by massive groups of people, you are not immune to feelings of intense loneliness. I especially felt that way during my time spent in airports when traveling back and forth from China and The US. I know it is a privilege to travel by air, especially across the world. But there is undeniably a unique existential dread that comes with being stranded at an airline terminal with your connecting flight nowhere in sight. I wish I could do more to better explain the complicated set of emotions that served as inspiration for the creation of this album, but for now, this will have to do. This album is for anyone who is stuck in an airport or airplane with a good pair of headphones and a lot of time to kill. We may be delayed for now, but I know that someday soon, we will all reach our destination. Fly safe.
Tall Order (2021)
The story of ‘Tall Order’ and its long-form companion, ‘Otherside’, begins sometime in April 2020. I hit up my buddy Mike Walker and offered to write a single for Nature’s Neighbor. Mike at the time was in a refractory period following the 2020 release of ‘Wind City Airport’ and took some convincing, but we eventually produced ‘Otherside of Town’ in our respective quarantine spaces. We had intended for it to be merely a single, but the project quickly became a three-song EP. Then a five-song EP. Then seven. Finally we settled on a solid album with 12 songs featuring our friends from around the country.
Four months later we had completed production for the album and began the mastering stage with Nate Amos. I was experiencing my usual separation anxiety when wrapping up any project. Mike and I had so much fun making this album and I didn’t want it to be over just yet, plus we had gotten sidetracked from the original goal of producing only a single! So I sat down at my keyboard and jammed along with a very basic 808 beat that could serve as a seamless transition between ‘Monday Morning Drive’ and ‘Pocket Lullaby’. I played around with several chord progressions until finally settling on a seven-minute take which became the skeleton of ‘Tall Order’. The name was inspired by something our drummer, Seth Engel, had said to me earlier that year when he was mastering one of my solo albums. I showed Mike the demo and he thought it was cool but stipulated that we had to focus on finishing one thing before starting another and, of course, he was right about that.
As we continued putting the finishing touches on the album I would escape into ‘Tall Order’ to keep adding layers until it became a medley of almost every song and style on the album. Then we took it a step further and decided it would be cool to get every artist featured on the album back for the single. It took months to figure out who went where and what each section needed, and even in the final days of it’s mastering I was still changing things around. Now, almost a year later, we both feel like it’s finally time to close the book on the ‘Otherside’ saga and let other people hear it for a change. The irony of it all is that we’re starting at the end of our journey with this single release but, after all, that’s what we set out to do in the first place.
O T H E R S I D E (2021)
Produced and written mostly during the first wave of COVID-19, this album was my saving grace during the insanity that was 2020. The idea was initially kicked off by a text message that Terrill Mast had sent me in early April. He asked me if I wanted to make one song and at first I was hesitant. My previous album did not get the kind of reception I was hoping for and I was feeling uninspired to make anything new. When a difficult situation arises my initial instinct is to respond to it by writing songs, but I felt completely spent and overwhelmed by the global circumstances.
Looking back on that moment I would say Terrill sent me that message at the perfect time. He said, “I wrote this song and it needs your voice. We can make it a Nature’s Neighbor single. I want to feel like I’m a part of this band again.” After a while I said yes, and that song became ’Otherside of Town’ which ended up being the final track and the theme for the whole album. Our idea to release a single quickly turned into three songs, then into a five song EP, then seven, then nine and before we knew it we were sitting on 12 brand new tracks. It came together so damn quickly, I was shocked.
We worked in isolation, Terrill in his basement in Virginia and me in my condo in Chicago, both recording everything at home. There was no going into the studio this time for obvious reasons, except for Seth Engel to record his drum kit. Working via email is something that Terrill and I are very used to at this point, and it was so refreshing to work with him again. The two of us hadn't worked this closely on an album since 'Vein Matter' in 2017. In many ways it felt like a sequel to that album, and even echoed a few lyrical motifs from it. I am forever thankful to have such a strong creative partner with such a distinct voice. I am even more grateful for the fact that Terrill had the sense to give me that push I needed to start writing again. Terrill basically single handedly produced this entire album.
While Terrill and I shared vocal and lyrical duties for the album, he sang on it far more than he had before on any previous NN release. We were both inspired by imagining what the other was going through. While I spent most of my days looking out onto Chicago from the balcony of my condo, Terrill would walk through the forest of his backyard in suburban Virginia. Because we were separated by roughly 750 miles we could only talk about and speculate on what it must be like to be in each other's position during this difficult and tumultuous year. The lyrics on this album really show the infinite amount of empathy and love we have for one another and how we are strongly connected despite the physical distance.
Terrill also brought some new faces into the fold. Benni Perkins is the first person to have played on a NN album without having first met me in person. Extremely talented and a welcome member of the collective, Benni sang the lead vocals on 'Shades of Yesteryear' and gave one of the most compelling performances of the entire album. Some old friends also made appearances as well, like the brilliant Brandon Studer who contributed the first sections of the 8 minute epic 'Bold Move' and of course his voicemail recording in ‘First Mother’s Day’. Perry Cowdery provided beautiful guitar layers, and Seth played drums on five songs.
While making this album it really felt like the world was falling apart all around us and I think the songs strongly reflect that feeling. We poured all our fear, joy, and reflection into this album. We really did. At times it felt like we were all just barely hanging on, but we made it through, thank God. Although we have yet to see the end of this dumpster fire we call 2020, I have high hopes, and I’m glad we were all able to pull this one off.
YM&TP (2021)
Of all the albums I’ve made over the years, You Me and The People, the debut album from my previous band of the same name, was always the one that I wanted to revisit the most. This is for a few reasons. Reason number one being the fact that this album marks a very special time in my life where I feel my songwriting took a massive leap forward. It was also the time that I first began to truly collaborate with other musicians, which is the whole point of Nature’s Neighbor. Almost all the songs from the original YM&TP record are very solid and probably stand the test of time better than any other collection of songs from my college era, which lasted from 2011 to 2014.
The songs are all great and I’d hold them up against anything. The production on that album however is another story entirely. Which brings me to my second reason for revisiting these tracks. Let’s face it, back then I was self producing this album and I really had next to no idea what I was doing when it came to mixing. Basically, every song on the original album suffers quite a bit due to poor mixing choices. They are all very muddy, especially when it comes to the low end frequencies. I had no idea what EQ was and I also did a very crude job with the album’s mastering. So revisiting these tracks 10 years later gives us the chance to do them the justice they deserve by creating clear, richly detailed mixes and a nice warm master.
Now, one might ask the question, "why go through the trouble of re-recording these songs from the ground up?" If you want to revisit the album, why not just polish up the original mixes and remaster them? And my answer to that is that I wish I could, but sadly, all the original project files were lost when my old hard drive crashed. We will never be able to re-access the old mixes. They are forever lost. So the only option was to recreate the songs from scratch. And to be honest, even if it were possible, re-imagining these tracks was a lot more fun than simply touching up the old mixes.
It also just felt great to dust off this old album and dive back into it 10 years later. I was 21 when we originally released YM&TP and Terrill was just 19 years old. We were so young and proud of our creation and I remember handing this album out at so many basement shows back in 2011/2012. And the response we got from our peers and friends was very reassuring. Basically, everyone really loved this album when we put it out and for me it was the first time that I was recognized by my peers which really did mean a lot at the time.
Selecting the three songs to remake was also pretty easy. Terrill and I immediately chose these three tunes because we felt that they would fit well together. ‘Worst Storm’ is probably the one song from the YM&TP era that I have played live at nearly every NN show. Terrill and I played it every night on our 2015 tour. ‘Tankerbell’ is an old fan favorite and was an obvious choice for revisiting. ‘Converted Attic Space’ is definitely a deep cut from the original album but seeing as it was made exclusively by Terrill and I back when we lived together in 2011/2012, it also seemed ripe for revisiting.
I think that we have definitely achieved what we set out to do when we initially decided to revisit these tracks. We have successfully breathed new life into these three songs and have given them the re-appraisal that they always deserved. The dream is to one day revisit and remake all of the songs from the original album, releasing three at a time in a succession of little EPs until we finally have recreated the entire YM&TP album. But if that pipe dream never comes to fruition, we will at least have this EP to show that we were able to successfully recapture that magic from the original 2011 album, but this time in high definition. In a way, it felt like being a director going back to an old film that I had made early in my career and getting the chance to re-edit it in order to get a bit closer to the original vision.
So now, exactly 10 years to the day the original album was released, we give you YM&TP Mk2. For those of you that were around to hear the original album, we thank you for sticking with us and hope that you like these versions as much or maybe even more than the originals. For those of you that have never listened to the original 2011 release, here are some old tunes that mean the world to us and we hope that you can get something out of them. Enjoy the music.
Nighttime Underpass (2022)
Here is a little mood for you all to soak yourselves in for a little while.
This track was made directly after both Will and I left Chicago. Will had moved to California and I to Kyoto. Will and I are no strangers to long distance recording, having made the Walking Around album all without ever being in the same room even once, we are very comfortable with that dynamic.
Due to this, the instrumental track ‘Nighttime Underpass’ came together in just two days and a few emails. It felt great to make something so spontaneous and to see it come together so quickly. It serves as a colder, more desolate counter-piece to the warm and inviting Walking Around album due out later this year.
Go get lost somewhere deep in the city... It’s a dark rainy night and you didn’t bring a jacket so your hands are shoved deep into your pockets and your shoulders are tense. Still you’re so mesmerized by all the dripping neon lights that you don’t even notice that you’re starting to shiver. You might just disappear down a dark alleyway, never to be seen again.
Walking Around (2022)
Once day back in 2018 when I was recording Ur with Seth at Pallet Sound, the door opened and a guy named Will walked in. Seth had told me that someone was coming to repair the Fender Rhodes and so it was not a complete surprise to see him. I was however, surprised by how immediately friendly Will was despite never having previously met me. He quickly fixed the Rhodes and hung out with us in the control room while we played him some of the mixes we were working on and chatted about music we both were into. When it came time for him to leave and for Seth and I to get back to work he gave me a big hug and expressed interest in working together sometime. I must have made a remark to Seth about how nice he was because I remember Seth saying something like “Yeah man, he’s also the best pianist I’ve ever met.”
After getting back home from the studio, I watched the Pallet Sessions video Will had recorded for the Puddle Splashers YouTube channel in which he performed his piano instrumental ‘Arctic Fox’ and I was totally blown away by his virtuosity and by the beauty of the composition. I then downloaded his 2017 piano instrumental album ‘Set Adrift’ and immediately fell in love with the music. I knew then that if I ever formed a new lineup for Nature’s Neighbor that I would need him on keyboards.
About a year and a half later I had made plans to record two tracks from my album ‘Wind City Airport’ on a Pallet video session and that meant that I would need to form a new live band. I called Will and we found a day to meet up and talk about it. I met him downtown at the school he taught piano lessons at and we then drove over to Pilsen to get some tacos at Los Comales and discussed the details. He was again very enthusiastic and after a few rehearsals we successfully filmed those two songs at Pallet.
When I sat down to watch the videos, my favorite part of the whole thing was easily watching Will play. He laid down some of the most incredible layers and his performance was totally engrossing. After that video session we both knew that we would need to record some music together but we didn’t know what it would sound like or how we would go about doing it.
Then the pandemic hit and everything screeched to a halt. Everything except the endless amount of DIY music that seemed to be exploding onto streaming sites like Bandcamp. I quickly noticed that Will was frequently releasing some incredible ambient music onto his Bandcamp page and I became addicted to his albums like Music For Quiet Spaces and Window. I would listen to those albums when I went on long drives around the city and his music became part of my soundtrack of 2020. After listening to Window for probably the 50th time, I finally decided to reach out to Will and tell him how much I loved it. He had been hitting me up through instagram with propositions of creating music together and after a little back and forth we finally decided to make a full length album together. This concept eventually evolved into Walking Around.
I had just finished recording Otherside with Terrill and was ready to start a project that felt completely different. So in December of 2020 I recorded the guitar parts for the title track and sent them over to Will. Within a day or two Will sent me back this incredibly beautiful track that he had crafted from the fragments I had sent him a few days earlier and it was then that I knew we had stumbled upon something very special. We then began sending tracks back and forth until we had amassed about 4 tracks. It was at that point that I suggested to will that we bring Terrill on board. Will made a leap of faith when he agreed to bring Terrill on, a person who he had never met previously and whose music he was not familiar with. But Will trusted me and when Terrill entered into the project it quickly became obvious that the three of us had a very unique chemistry. We were making an incredible album and we knew it.
Writing music long distance style with these two incredible musicians was one of the highlights of my entire songwriting career and it really helped me get through the end of 2020 with a smile on my face. The album we ended up with is probably the most ambient collection of songs that I have every worked on and I absolutely love the entire album from start to finish. It really is something special. We created vast musical landscapes that you can easily lose yourself in and the whole album will take you on a journey that leaves you feeling transported by the time it is finished. We hope that you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed the process of creating it
Michael & The Whale (2023)
2020 was a breaking point for me personally. I had been living in the city of Chicago for over ten years by then, and although the city was and always will be my spiritual home, I found myself thinking more and more about getting out of not only the city itself, but America as a whole. It was a combination of external and deeply personal issues that led me to the conclusion that I just had to get out of America for a while. Ever since my college days, I had always dreamed about moving to Japan. But after graduating, life and other adult responsibilities had gotten in the way, and so I began to accept the fact that I’d probably never achieve that goal. Lots of dreams die in that way I suppose.
But when I hit that breaking point in 2020, I thought “Fuck it, I’m doing it now.” And so I applied for a job teaching English in Japan. Fast forward to 2021 and I was informed that I not only got the job, but that I would be relocated to a rural town nestled in the mountains of central Kyoto. I was set to leave in early October of 2021, which gave me about half a year to prepare for leaving Chicago. At first, I had planned to go for just one year and then come back, but as October grew closer and closer, I was overcome by a creeping suspicion that I might never return. And so I set to record one more album with my friends in Chicago as a sort of farewell to the City that I had called home for nearly 12 years.
The lyrics in this song are sort of me saying “Well my friends, I may not be coming back.” And after a year and a half, I am still here in the mountains of Kyoto and it does indeed seem likely that I will not be returning to Chicago for a very long time.
I suppose the whale that appears in the song’s lyrics, and the character, who is named after me, being “swallowed by a whale” represents the way that one can become overwhelmed by the way adult life and its many responsibilities can leave you feeling paralyzed and unable to make a change. People take temporary jobs just for the money, get into unhealthy relationships or develop destructive habits that seem to take over their lives and by the time they break away from them, if they ever manage to do so, they often find themselves looking in the mirror at an exhausted and well-aged face that they don’t recognize. Hence the line “when it spit him out, he had grown old.
I didn’t want to let that happen to me any more than it already had. I felt like I had fallen asleep at age 24 and then woken with a start only to realize that I was 31 and that seven years of my life had passed like a fever dream. The whale had spit me out, but now I had to make a huge change in order to take back control of my life. So I “turned myself into a bird” as the songs says, and flew away from my old life, all for the hope of a chance at a new start in a distant land far from home. Perhaps it was wrong of me to leave my old life behind, and that decision still torments me from time to time. But it was something that I felt I had to do, and I’m glad that I had the balls to do it.
The Glass Album (2023)
Recorded in 13 sessions over the course of 4 months, The Glass Album was produced by Seth Engel and I at Ohmstead studios in Chicago’s Humboldt Park. The studio was run by our good friend Adrian Kobziar, and I would say it’s the nicest studio that we have ever worked in. Adrian has a wonderful collection of mics and outboard gear as well as a very extensive array of amps and instruments available for clients to use. He possesses an intimate knowledge on how to mic a drum set to a magnificent effect, which he displayed on this album. I think this album has the best drum sound of any of our previous works.
This was the last album I worked on before moving to Japan in October of 2021 which gave the recording sessions a feeling of urgency and finality. When I make an album with Seth I am always saying “this could be the last time” and he would usually just roll his eyes and laugh but this one really did feel that way because at that time we had no idea when I would be returning from Japan. Because of that, we really put a lot of extra effort into this one and made sure that every song was very strong and that the album had no weak moments.
The concept of this album in terms of its overall sound was that each track was specifically designed to sound nothing at all like the track that preceded or followed it. We basically wanted to make the album feel like a collection of songs that do not belong together. The only thing that links them is my voice and the drum sound. This sort of felt like returning to the early days of Nature’s Neighbor where our albums had a very scatterbrained feel to them. But also, strangely enough, I’m not sure that we accomplished that goal because even though the songs are very different in style, the album still manages to feel somewhat cohesive and sort of makes sense in a weird way, at least to me.
The recording sessions were extra special because we brought in some new people, and someone from my distant past as well. The new faces we worked with were Macie Stewart (violin), Max Beckman (double bass), Lia Kohl (cello), Al Costis ( electric bass), and Andrew Krull (pedal steel). Meeting all of these people and seeing them light up the studio with their individual talents was an absolute pleasure. And then there was my dear old friend, Nick Falco, who played piano on the 1920 classic “Avalon” which was an extra special moment of reconnection for me.
I guess this album was sort of me saying goodbye, at least temporarily, to the Chicago music scene that I had been a small part of for over 10 years. A little over a week after the final recording session I was boarding a plane bound for Narita, Japan to start my life as an English teacher in Kyoto. My life was changing and I wanted to make one final statement before I left. So this is it. An album about family, friends, memories of lost loved ones, dreams and saying farewell to the city I called home for 12 years. Looking back on it all now, it feels a little different than when I first made it, but that’s just the way it goes. I hope you enjoy it. Much love to you all.
Live Collections, Vol. 1 (2024)
This album is a compilation of various live recordings captured throughout my first two and a half years living in Japan. Some are live studio recordings, others are taken from GoPro footage of live performances I played in different areas around Japan and there are some that are just little front porch ditties my friends and I recorded on our iPhones. Aside from Terrill Mast, long time band member and my closest collaborator, this compilation features two other musicians that are also very dear to me. The first is Shintaro Nagahara and the second is Taro Inoue. Meeting both of these individuals not only broadened my musical horizons, but also opened up new worlds to me and gave me a purpose for continuing to live in this country. I will try to explain what both of these musicians mean to me and how being friends with them has impacted my life.
I came to Japan hoping to be able to meet likeminded musicians that I could potentially collaborate with to make some new music. When I first arrived I had almost no connections and no idea what the music scene in Japan was like or how to enter into it. But the universe works in funny ways and before I knew it, a path was laid out before me and I took it.
It started with my old friend Nagi texting me one night while I was quarantining in a Narita hotel directly after arriving in Japan. These were the days when the country was still closed to tourists and a two week quarantine was required for all those entering the country. I was bored in the hotel room and Nagi invited me to join a Zoom call with a group called Kikaiwa which was run by a guy named Tomo Morimoto and was designed to be a platform where foreigners new to Japan can talk with Japanese folks looking to improve their English skills.
On the call I met and briefly spoke with a young guy from Kanagawa named Shintaro. He told me, using his flawless English, that he was a musician and that he’d love to meet me in person someday. Fast forward to November of 2021, where my first visit to the small island Nagi lives on just happened to coincide with Tomo and Shintaro also visiting the island. We all met up and had a dinner party at the guesthouse Tomo and Shintaro were staying at. During the party, Shintaro and I talked a lot and immediately bonded over tons of overlapping interests and passions. He played violin for everyone at the party and blew everyone’s minds by playing a note perfect rendition of a ten plus minute Bach piece without making a single mistake.
I knew right away Shintaro was a special talent, but I was surprised to learn that he had never once tried to write any original music or play in an improvisational style. So I told him that we should write a song together and he ended up coming back to Sonobe with me and staying at my place for a few nights. It was during the second or third night that we started to try to write some music together. Those pieces of music ended up becoming “Instant Friends” and ”Indecipherable Dreams.” Shintaro and I would go on to visit each other and stay at each other’s places quite often and developed a brotherly connection that was based partly on our love of playing music together, but mostly just based on how well we enjoyed each others company.
Ok, Now onto Taro… The first day I met the legendary musician Taro Inoue, I was in Miyama visiting a cafe owned by one of my former students’ parents. The former student of mine is called Yuki and she had just graduated but was unable to attend her graduation ceremony due to her brother getting COVID the day before it was scheduled to happen. She was one of the best and coolest students I had ever taught, and I wanted to visit her parent’s cafe to give her a little gift congratulating her on graduating high school and making it into her chosen university.
When I told her I was coming, she decided to invite Taro to come by and meet me because she thought we might get along due to the fact that we’re both musicians. She said he’d be turning up sometime in the afternoon and sure enough, after downing a few cups of coffee, in walked this guy with ripped jeans, a well worn hoodie, thick rimmed glasses and a hardshell mandolin case. We had a quick jam session and I was blown away by the seemingly effortless virtuosity that he displayed on the instrument. His improvisational skills were beyond anything I had ever seen before. After we put our instruments back in their cases he invited me to his house, which was just down the street, to listen to some records.
As the records spun I found myself thinking “This is it.. This is what I have been searching for.” I then started to visit Taro and his partner Yukki nearly every week to hang out and listen to records. After a few weeks they started inviting me to come see shows that they were playing around Kyoto. Taro and Yukki are full time pro musicians who make their living by playing gigs all over Japan. They lead a somewhat transient lifestyle, traveling all across Japan, only staying in their log house in the mountains of Miyama during the dead time in between tours. They single handedly introduced me to the thriving music and art scene in both Miyama and the wider Kyoto area. I had finally found my people and I was so happy.
It then dawned on me that the one person that would love and fit in with this lifestyle more than anyone would be my buddy Shintaro. So one day, during one of Shintaro’s visits to Sonobe, I drove him up to Miyama to see a show that Taro was playing and introduced him to the gang. Everyone took to Shintaro quickly, and before I knew it, Taro had showed him a vacant house in the mountains just a five minute walk from his place that Shintaro could live in for free and Shintaro decided to start living in Miyama. During Shin’s time living in Miyama, Taro really took him under his wing and taught him so much about the art of music and improvisation. Shintaro’s concepts of music and life were expanding thanks to his many rich experiences living in Miyama and I was visiting him, Taro and Yukki on a weekly basis.
All of these experiences culminated in a summer music festival that Taro invited Shintaro and I to play in Shimane, a seaside prefecture located in western Honshu, at a venue called Pasar Moon. Taro had been playing and working as an event manager at this festival for a number of years and he described it to Shin and I as a sort of Mecca for free living, off the grid artists from all around Japan to congregate and enjoy a week of music, organic food and art. Shintaro and I agreed to play a 45 minute set on the main stage and began rehearsing. Before we knew it we were on stage at Pasar, performing the songs that we had written together in front of a big crowd of fellow musicians and artists and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life. It was probably the best live show I have ever played and for the last song, Taro joined Shin and I for a rendition of the American classic “Man of Constant Sorrow.”
Nagi, Sam, Tomo and a few other buddies of mine were able to attend the show as well, and it was such a brilliant experience to look out into the crowd and see the faces of my dear friends, new and old, smiling as they vibed out with the rest of the audience. It was an experience I’ll never forget for the rest of my life. I even got my first tattoo to commemorate the moment forever. Thank you Taro, from the bottom of my heart, for including me and Shin in this beautiful music festival. And thank you Shin, for being my brother and music partner. I love both of you very much. This album is dedicated to the two of you as well as to Nagi, for inviting me to that fateful quarantine Zoom call and finally to Yuki, for introducing me to Taro that day at your parents cafe.
.jpg)
Live Collections, Vol. 2 (2024)
Nature’s Neighbor has always been more of a studio / recording project rather than a live band. I’m not sure that I can really even refer to NN as a “band” in the traditional sense. In our 10 years of existence, NN has only ever gone on one tour and have played less than 50 live shows. Due to my relentless drive to create new music, I would say that recording has been much more important to me than playing shows. I usually get much more fulfillment from the feeling I get after creating a new song than I do playing it in front of other people. But that is not to say that I don’t enjoy performing live.
It was always hard for me to get a proper line up of a NN live band together. There have been about 6 or 7 different incarnations of the NN live outfit over the last 10 years and all of them usually last for just a couple months at the most. I suppose that is due to the fact that almost everyone in NN is involved in so many other separate bands and musical projects. Seth has been the drummer of NN since its inception and I would never want anyone but him behind the kit when it comes to playing live. Terrill and Will are my guys on the keys, but they both live in different states. Especially now, with me living in Japan, there seems to be little to no hope of the true line up of the NN live band playing a show near you.
That is why I felt it to be extremely important to capture the sound of the NN live band in the studio. This little EP is made up of songs from two separate incarnations of the NN live band. The first lineup is NN circa 2019, during the Wind City Airport era. The second lineup is from early this year and is comprised mostly of musicians that performed on our new upcoming full length LP Projection. These two eras of NN fit together like bread and butter. Both Wind City Airport and Projection feature some of the most raw NN songs stripped down to their most bare essentials. I see the two albums as companion pieces and so combining the live versions of these songs on this EP felt very natural to me.
Both of these live sessions were filmed by our talented friend Rob for his YouTube channel Puddle Splashers, a YT page that serves as an archive for mostly midwestern DIY bands from the 2010s and 2020s. Due to never really being able to play consistent live shows as a full band, I thought it was very important to document the sound of those two separate line ups in the studio and capture the band on film for the sake of posterity. Special thanks to Rob for always being willing to turn up in the studio with his DSLR camera and capture our performances so that they can be preserved for anyone who is interested in seeing how we could “cut it live” as they say.
The 2024 session was extra special for me because it was recorded and filmed during a two week trip I took to Chicago to visit family for the holidays. The songs we performed that day in early January were all from the upcoming LP that I had written and recorded entirely in Japan. It was a long distance recording project. All my parts were recorded in Japan, Seths drums were recorded in Chicago and Terrill and Jed’s parts were recorded in Virginia. Despite this approach to recording, the songs on the album feel as though we were all able to play them in the same room as a band. So of course I wanted the chance to really do that once I came back to Chicago. So I put together a session at Ohmstead in Humboldt Park for early January. Jed and Terrill flew in from VA to Chicago, I picked them up from O’Hare and we then drove to a practice space in the West Side to meet Seth and our new friend Lee Ketch, who was helping flesh out the arrangements by joining in on electric guitar, to rehearse for a few hours. Then we went into the studio the next day to record the live versions of the songs and it was an incredibly emotional experience for me. To be able to perform these songs live in the same room with the guys that played on the record was such a special moment that I will always cherish and I’m so glad we were able to get them down on to tape.
Despite not playing live nearly as much as we should have over these past ten years, I actually really love doing it. I started singing publicly when I was 12 years old and performed live for audiences big and small countless times before it ever occurred to me that writing and recording my own original material could potentially be something that I’d enjoy. I have had my share of bad gigs where there was no crowd or a huge crowd that witnessed me completely blow it, but I’ve also had moments of triumph and transcendence in front of a live audience that left me with an indescribable feeling of having successfully communicated my deepest inner spirit to total strangers. And that is a beautiful sensation that can only be achieved through live performance. There’s also just something beautiful about the sound of a live performance captured in a moment that happened only once and then disappeared into the air like a wisp of smoke.
If you come to Japan, you have a small chance of seeing me play these songs live in solo form, but I’m not sure if NN will ever perform together as a band ever again. And that is why I wanted to put this EP together, so that you can experience the sound of the NN live band in all its unrefined glory.
Projection (2024)
Do any of us actually possess even a sliver of control over our lives? “Of course we do.” Is what I would like to say, but I’d be a fool for claiming that I had any idea what was going to happen to me over the course of these past two and a half years. Ultimately, whether deliberately or unconsciously, I think we have the ability to make key decisions that can alter the course of our life’s path, but as far as what happens along that path, it’s best if we simply let it take us where it will.
The creation of this album began roughly one month after moving from Chicago to Kyoto in the fall of 2021. And it lasted until the final touches were made to the vinyl master, two years later, in the winter of 2023. When I started writing the songs that would end up on this album, I thought I’d only be living in Japan for 10 to 11 months at the most. And now, here I am coming up on three years living and working in Kyoto. My whole life has been flipped upside down, but I think it was exactly what I needed.
This album took me the entirety of 2022 to write, and then the better half of 2023 to record and mix. 2022 was the year that saw the dissolution of me and Yuguo’s relationship, which eventually led to our divorce on the day before New Year’s. But it was also the year that bore witness to me meeting amazing and inspiring people like Taro Inoue, Shintaro Nagahara and Asagi Tsuchiya, all of whom would go on to become collaborators and dear, dear friends. It was probably the most tumultuous and yet, simultaneously the most exhilarating and life affirming year of my entire 33 years on this planet.
Every song on this record serves as a personal epiphany, and each of them mark an important milestone in me processing my disillusionment, my grief, and the new life path that had revealed itself to me. I am so grateful to have met people like Taro and Shintaro who, through their playing on this record, helped to empower me and provide a vehicle for me to express my intense feelings through the music that we made together. The song “美山” was recorded completely live, without the use of a computer, in Taro’s log house up in the mountains of Miyama.
“Indecipherable Dreams” & “Instant Friends” were recorded in Miyama as well with Shintaro providing beautiful counterpoint to my vocal melodies on his violin. The two of us recorded in an abandoned school gymnasium, a remote cabin with no heating or working toilets, as well as in the homes of close friends like Sam Shoji and Nagi Nakayama with just an SM57 and a cheap condenser mic. Shintaro and Taro have abilities on their instruments that go beyond qualifying them to be referred to as virtuosos. Taro, a seasoned bluegrass musician with decades of songwriting and collaboration experience under his belt, played his mandolin beautifully on this album. Shintaro on the other hand, although well versed in classical music, able to play ten plus minute Bach pieces without making a single mistake since the age of 11, had never written music with anyone before.
Both Shintaro and I went through very intense journeys of self discovery during the process of creating this album, and I am so glad that we were able to support each other both musically, but also on a deeper level as brothers. I think you can hear that bond when you listen to the songs we played together. Speaking of brotherly bonds, Terrill Mast, one of my oldest and most trusted creative partners came to visit me in October of 2022, when I was at my lowest point, and stayed in Japan writing music and traveling the country with me for nearly two months. He came all the way across the globe to be there for me when I needed him more than ever, something that I will be forever grateful for.
The two of us, along with Sam Shoji, wrote the song “Learning to Sail” while visiting Nagi and Sam in Yugeshima, Kamijima-cho in early November of that year. The song stands as a significant turning point in me processing my grief and, through the help of dear friends and loved ones, finding a way to navigate the sea of depression to ultimately find land. I really poured my heart out on this album, more than any other in the Nature’s Neighbor cannon, and without these friends, new and old, I would not have been able to summon the strength to finish it.
And now that it is finished, I don’t see myself conjuring up a follow up. Not this year, not next year, in fact I have a strong feeling in my gut that this album may very well be the final full length album in the Nature’s Neighbor catalogue. So please, take it in and be open to it finding a special place in your heart. If anything, I hope it can show you that even when you think you’ve reached the point of no return, if you stick it out and do your best to just get through it, there are beautiful things waiting for you on the other side. And to cherish your friends and loved ones, because they’re the ones that are going to help you get there.
bottom of page