Well hey there! tom from moongrass here, reporting from the distant future…

It’s been TEN YEARS to the day since Moongrass released our second album Shadow in the Country. It’s absolutely bizarre to look back at 2015 from where I’m sitting today, to think about the creative moment we found ourselves in as a band, to think about the community and the scene we were part of, to think about the people and spaces we’ve lost and gained and the ways my life has shifted.

I have been staying up nights over the last couple months working on some cassette tapes to commemorate this album’s birthday. I bought some blank tapes, stamped them at my kitchen table, reworked the album art that Don did for us way back when, and sat and dubbed these 25 tapes 3 at a time. I was dubbing them in real time and had a pair of headphones plugged into the tape deck, so the twelve songs on this album that we spent so much time playing in weird bars and people’s backyards from 2013 to 2015 were repeating over and over through tinny little speakers next to me while I meticulously cut and folded the covers or stamped our name on the tapes.

I don’t know that this meditation really gained me any insight into the record, or the passage of time, or anything like that. But it felt good to put my hands on the record again, spend some time with it. I think it deserves that.

tapes for sale at moongrass.bandcamp.com

Our first album, All The Wrong Notes In All The Right Places, was something that, to my admittedly hazy recollection, came together really quickly. We needed to get some CDs made that we could sell at all the random show opportunities that were coming up for us. It was a collection of really important songs but also a slightly slapdash recording, speed and honesty were a lot more important than polish and presentability. Something Eli said in these days, which has really stuck in my brain, is that it’s important to think of a record as a snapshot in time. That it’s a photograph of the band as they were in that moment, and that chasing timeless perfection will eat away at a vital part of what an album can be.

Shadow in the Country had more ambition than the first record, the songs were more mature and we had all evolved as players. We thought a lot more about things like theme and cohesion. But we maintained the idea of treating the record as a snapshot in time, we just dressed up a little nicer before the picture got taken.

The twelve songs on Shadow are largely pretty dark, often about regret, losing control, running away from problems, and trying to put a finger on the bad feeling in your gut. Or that’s my read anyways, I’m sure the other boys hear them differently. The songs are sad, but they are also incredibly stirring, they lift my heart up with incredibly bright moments like the sun poking through black cloud cover immediately after a thunderstorm. There is joy in all this despair, and part of that joy is feeling recognized in your pain. These four guys I shared this band with gave me that joy, I felt (and still feel) seen and heard by them through the music in a way that is rare. Their songs, the ones on this album, make me feel alive, and it was a privilege to contribute to them, and to have them contribute to my own.

I don’t really know how interesting or notable this is for anyone reading, but it’s really been useful for me to look back at a truly important moment in my life, a decade on. I think I understand myself a lot better having been through this process of making these tapes. To physically have my hands on a record that we did ten years ago, to reflect on and narrativize a moment that was pivotal for me, and to take a real honest look at these songs that have been percolating in my head and in my muscle memory for so long.

A whole lot of things have changed for me, and for all of us, in the last decade. Nostalgia is a painful thing to me, the friction between the past and the present. Between the person we were then and the person we are now. I feel the absence of things and people I’ve lost. But there is joy to be found in the pain of looking back, just as there is joy in singing your heart out about how bad you feel. And that joy is amplified through connection. So thank you for listening to this album and reading my words. Thank you to my moongrass boys, to everyone who helped us make this record, and to everyone who helped us make this band.

In conclusion, I think the album is good

<3 tom from moongrass