This album unlike any of the others I've made so far has been extremely autobiographical.
I wanted to make something that felt intimate, slightly inhuman and cathartic. That's been the image stuck in my head for years at this point, and I was at the point after releasing riverside that I had the skillset to explore it. There's something about self isolation, being stuck in a room, and the strange alienation of my own perception being contorted into something beautiful. If riverside is about burnished stone from trails well worn, recluse is about sights and sounds from the window, drywall, carpet and concrete. The point of view is narrower, retreading memory from a place much smaller. Gentle escapism, tiny worlds within a bedroom, sensitive to the idea that even the idealized depiction of the outside world is too much to handle.
The cover art depicts a strangler fig tree sitting in the corner of my bedroom, in place of where my computer desk would be. These trees have been fascinating to me recently - they grow from the tops of other trees, roots descending downwards until their host decays. They leave behind a scaffold indicating something that was once there and important, outlines webbed around to suggest a form.
In exploring inhumanity and intimacy thematically, I found myself titling tracks in a way that resembles a set of tag descriptors on a file. Single words in sequence wrapping gently around the contours of a given work, elaborated upon until a feeling is given. Normally a set of tag descriptors might be a set of genres or more concrete information about the work itself. What I wanted to do was take something generally used to filter and categorize and use it to evoke texture and emotion. Given that I came up with all of these after making the songs themselves, I hope this has some associative power.
(I fear that the title scheme I went with for this album made it a little less accessible. If it's to be read in sequence as a poem might it would sound extremely robotic and stilted. In previous work I've tried to make this sequencing feel naturalistic and varied.)
I've had a lot of doubts about this album from the point of its conception. It's not something I came at with a lot of reference points, yet I wanted to say something extremely specific that I can barely articulate with words. I get a feeling that it's the most honest piece I've made so far. At this point I've dropped the pretense I was stuck in for the past couple years of making sure everything I'm making is nice, cute, and accessible. I've been trying to self-redact less and be more sincere, and this is a product of that. Now that I have it out of my system, things feel more open than ever to explore. I wonder what will happen next!