I was trying so frickin’ hard in 2009. I really felt like I was on a mission. Open was being recorded, the songs were already written and I had some friends helping me perform my songs on stage about once a month. All this buildup. All this momentum. I wanted to keep it going, and as we got closer to the release show, I was writing songs very quickly and making simple videos of them right away on YouTube. No obsessing over the lyrics, no test tracking. In the one for Tornado I still have bedhead from the nap that I was taking during the storm where the song came to me in a dream.
But I let these songs sit for two years, for a lot of reasons. When I got back to it, I wasn’t going to plow through the project, so it took another two years to record them. I really wanted to start cultivating a spacier sound, and this album resulted in a collaboration that would become Dalmatian Toadflax.