This record took years to make. The initial writing for the record began as early as 2015. I was playing around with some weird chord arpeggios and wrote the bridge to IDWK. Originally, this was going to be the bridge of “Patience and Paranoia” but I felt that this bridge was too good for that song so I wrote an entirely new song around it. Puzo, the first iteration of Bookends, and Fallow came next. Two Weeks Later followed. Then came an early version of Better Off along with some songs we’ve set aside for now. In 2016 we released No Beauty in Routine and quickly realized we needed some help to flesh out these new songs live. Matt Mahler joined the band towards the end of 2016. We had to put a pause on writing new songs until we ironed out the transition. This would add another creative mind to the process.
In mid 2017 we resumed working on new songs and Puzo was finished. By then, we realized we were heading into a new place yet again. The songs were poppier and less linear than the work on NBIR. They had more thematic similarities to the work on Winter of Our Disconnect than I think I realized at the time. These are relationship songs. Winter of our disconnect is Man vs. Man. No Beauty in Routine is Man vs Society and the central conflict of Between the Bookends is Man vs. Self. After the first batch of songs were finished, I realized that most of them were about the same subjects. Between the Bookends is a record about living among memories, arrested development, resisting change, loss, unrequited love, aging, agony, and ultimately moving forward. It was then that I decided to tie all the songs together. Here is where the characters took form and coalesced into the record you are listening to as you read this.
We recorded an alternate version of PUZO late in the summer of 2017 with Jesse Cannon and released it in early 2018. In January of 2018 we booked time with Adam Cichoki to record Between the Bookends in May of 2018. The band finished making demos of the record and then started again. We timed ourselves as if we were in the studio and recorded the entire record again at Jordan's studio before we did the real thing with Adam at Timber. I cannot stress enough how crucial Adam's production was throughout the recording. After inntial tracking wrapped, we had to finish recording the record’s numerous overdubs over the rest of the year at Jordan’s studio. This was great and I feel that it gave us time to rewrite sections that didn’t feel as developed until we got them down. Adam then mixed and mastered the record to perfection. We got the final masters back in January of 2019 thus ending the creation of the album and beginning the long painful process of preparing to release it.