(Me & Davey, album release party, Blind Pig, Ann Arbor, MI, 7/17/10, courtesy of Robert Hendricks)

Well, it seems like a lifetime ago. In reality it was the heart of last winter and we were locked inside a building within which we’d come to feel quite at home. Twice I stayed overnight in that studio—enclosed by the frigid and icy sterility of Ann Arbor, with every external molecule seemingly at a standstill yet pulsing with excitation inside. Maybe I stayed over because the roads were pretty treacherous. Or maybe it was because we had cracked open some pocket of warmth in what we were creating and I wanted to stay nearby to it for fear it’d no longer remain when I returned in the morning. And though I was mostly a nervous wreck, completely frantic within the infinite second-guesses and agonies of present-tense creation, a certain part of me was absolutely blissful in that ecstatic and electric process and knew it. The first time it was both Zach and I. We ordered a pizza and some Coca-Cola and stayed up all night losing our minds, running around the big space in our socks like it was a junior-high gymnasium lock-in, banging on the piano and me playing pedal steel guitar along to pop country on the stereo from the other room. The next time I was all alone, and listened to the tracks an unhealthy, obsessive amount, probably truly losing my mind a bit. I knew the record was pretty much done and began to let it go, bit by bit, as you have to—the dynamism of making the thing can’t really just stop, you kind of let it drift off and distance until you somehow feel at ease again and start all over.

It’s 1:05 AM, technically July 20th, 2010, so today is the day that Deadmalls & Nightfalls is technically released out into the world—a summer world of heat and sweat and buzzing germination quite foreign to the ice-world in which it was recorded. But I suppose it’s apt because locked inside the album are certainly moments of both pure summer and pure winter. It really is an album of simultaneous ice and heat, often with the former encasing the latter: the Upper Room, a cradle of hot breath insulated from a frozen icicle wilderness. Or a luridly-lit diner in strange Ontario, glowing like fire in the middle of a savagely blowing blizzard at midnight. Or conversely, iced-up nerves in that early desirous summer panting.
Ah, how about I stop writing about these things to death now? That’s why they were made into songs in the first place!, where language can sort of mingle with a holier proximity to the memory for a better chance of really getting to the heart of the matter—that hot interior of the pure glowing past. I hope you guys enjoy the album.

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Oh, and I’d like to extend a great thanks to all those who came to our album release party at the Blind Pig! It was so wonderful to send Deadmalls & Nightfalls out there on such a magical note, materializing that pulsing energy.

And in case you didn’t know, the entire album is available for free streaming here. Just click ‘like’ and then proceed to the BandPage tab, or in reverse order, if you wish.

Tomorrow we kick off a western tour at the Bottleneck in Lawrence, KS. Please come and see us out in our travels by checking the full dates here.

--Matthew