In first grade, I made an extra-special Valentine for my crush, (He was an older man- a second grader.) I hid it in his locker. Later that day on the playground, he told me he didn’t like me back and then pushed me off the swings I skinned my knees, cried, then told my mom I was sick and went home early.

This was one of the first songs we had for the new album. Eric brought it to the table soon after we had played one of our most fun shows ever at The Crepe Place in Santa Cruz — this tiny little bar/restaurant that had the kindest staff, the nicest audience, and… you guessed it… the most delicious crepes! Anyway, all the boys in the band met beautiful women from the town, but we had to leave right after the show. I think they all wondered, ‘What could have happened if we stayed a little longer in Santa Cruz? Maybe I’d have married her?’ Eric was the one who chose to express that idea and turn it into a song.

This was one of Greta’s ideas that we wound up tracking towards the end of the recording sessions for the album. At the time, we were in the midst of a Chicago winter without any heat at the studio. Most of the tracking was done in winter jackets, gloves, and scarves. We were running small space heaters and heat lamps in the “control room” to stay warm, and in the bridge section of this song you can hear the sound of the heat lamp being bumped into. It sounds like a guitar being plugged in, but it’s actually a heat lamp being bumped. We left it in the final recording.

When we were writing and recording this song, it was by far my least favorite song we had. Once we got the final mixes back, this quickly became one of my favorite songs on the album. I think the bridge section is one of the better sections of music in the whole Gold Motel catalogue.

This lyric had a funny origin — I had brought a rough demo to the guys and we all started playing together. The original hook lyric was, “Are you in on your own joke?” for the chorus, but Eric had misheard it and said, “Are you sleeping with your own ghost?”. It was such a cool accident and we all liked how ambiguous the phrase was, so we kept it.

Cold Shoulders” was the first song we worked on post-Summer House. I don’t quite remember who contributed what, but I do know we put that song together as a band. To me, this song has a lot more personality than a lot of our other material, and I think that’s because the song itself is made up of five distinct personalities. The synth we used on this song is called the Solina String Ensemble, which is often referred to as the ARP String Ensemble [the defining string machine of the late 70’s disco era]. It’s the same synth Joy Division used on “Love Will Tear Us Apart” — one of my favorite sounds in all of music.

This song came to me after having just moved back into my childhood home in the suburbs of Chicago as an adult. There’s a quiet stillness to everything there — huge elm and maple trees, neighborhood block parties, garage sales, morning joggers, lots of church goers — but there’s also this sort of underlying unease when strange things happen. The phrase “Slow Emergency” as a way of describing that sense of anxiety when everything around you looks perfect and serene. The title is a play on the book “Long Emergency”, which my brother had read in high school and had a huge impact on him.

This song started with that melodic line on the bells. Once I put a chord progression behind it that was heavy on minor chords, this playful melody line took on a bittersweet tonality, and “bittersweet” is a huge trigger word for me in music — I’m constantly chasing after that feeling. Greta and I wrote the lyrics together and tracked it for the album. The original drum loops I sculpted for the early demos of this song made their way into the final recording, which we A/B-ed with the real drum take.

Dan texted me late one night and said, ‘I think I may have written my first song that Gold Motel will want to use!’ and the next day, he played us “Musicians”. The lyrics “Most of my friends are musicians in a subway station” was especially interesting to me because there is one Chicago subway musician we’ve all heard, who sings in an El station in Chicago. This man has incredible soul and grit in his voice — he sounds like a modern Otis Redding. Despite the fact that he has experienced no success or support for his music [aside from a few generous pedestrians], he still sings. We have many friends who are incredibly talented, but who rarely step into the spotlight. This song is an ode to that idea — that whether or not there’s success, our friends and we will keep on singing and playing because that’s what we love to do.

This song emulates the kind of traditional merits of pop music that I grew up on, and in a way I wrote it as an homage to those respective sub-genres of pop that are so near and dear to my heart: British Invasion, powerpop, surf rock, etc. We employed a few Johnny Marr guitar-tracking tricks that he used in the studio with The Smiths – layering the acoustics with every chord position of the chord in the progressions, keeping high up on the neck and using open position chords to achieve a “harp” like sound, etc.