Tacoma Park was conceived the night after the 2016 presidential election. And when I say conceived, I mean the wheels of conceptualization began turning for us, as they would do again and again, it is the mechanism that makes our band work.

I’d known John for years and had seen him play countless times, but it was only a few months before that night that I’d seen him solo. The ineffability of my feelings made them stronger, that for reasons beyond any obvious one I could see, I found our spirits to be kindred. He was playing guitar alone and with a looper, which I was doing then too, but he was also doing a lot that I wasn’t at that point in my life, like singing and playing songs. There was a thread of improvisation, weaving in and out of its prominence, and maybe that’s what connected me, but I like to think it was something more than that, deeper, dare I say, energetic. Whatever it was, I went up and asked if he wanted to set something up, and I remember it feeling urgent, like the pairing made so much sense it needed to happen as soon as possible. He was into it.

We played at the Cave in Chapel Hill along with Nathan Golub, and I remember thinking the night before that no matter what happens in the hours to come, my feelings would be strong, oozing out of me, for better or for worse, different most likely, than any I’d ever felt. Unsurprisingly, there weren’t many people out that night, and I wouldn’t have been either if I wasn’t playing the show. But I was, and so was John and Nathan, and we did. It’s a small thing, ultimately, but we each took our turn transporting one another and anyone else who might have needed to get out of the house for a bit, or so we hoped. It felt like everything had changed, even if was the same, as it had been, a matter of perspective, eyes being open, directed towards things they’d been looking past, a realization or many that what we thought was right was wrong, or just not right enough. When our sets were done, Nathan went home, and John and I hung around drinking the rest of the PBR and talking about that thing I felt when I saw him a few months earlier. It seemed he felt something like it too.

*
It’s hard to write liner notes for your own record. Obviously, objectivity is out the door but it’s more than that, like trying to describe a painting from half an inch away. I doubt anyone wants to hear about the night when I drank one more beer than intended and cranked the latest haul of tracks John had sent over, recording more new parts than intended, sending them off, and awaking the next morning to the endorphin rush of seeing that he’d already downloaded them. Or when we finished the first round of mixes and listened to them together on his back porch, speakers set up on the far end, his dog out there too, a nice day when there hadn’t been too many yet, my first time that season wearing cut-offs. We took it all in before the sun started to set, and we beamed, imagined the possibilities. But nobody wants to hear about that either, even though that’s what this record is, a collection of moments and interpretations of conversations, which happened to occur during one of the most collectively anxious periods either of us or anyone we knew of had ever gone through. How am I supposed to know how to talk about that? How is anyone, really?

Our process was this: John started half the songs; I started the other half. John sent his to me for new parts, and I sent mine to him for the same. John mixed his songs, I mixed mine. Then one day, I lost the files. I sat down to mix one afternoon and the guitars, synthesizers, shakers—they were gone. I had rough mixes—the ones we listened to on his porch—but those levels were set, embedded like names in cement. I’ll spare us all the rehashing of angst and self-beratement I went through, but know that it came on fast, heavy in tone and volume and lasted days, until I told John, who after walking me through a few last-ditch checks but to no avail, offered that maybe this just meant they songs were done. What could I say? After all, they were.

I’ve lost things before—keys, papers my students wrote, a favorite t-shirt in Memphis once, and, yes, files. It’s the brain I was given, interest based it is, I care not to spend time with the organizational. An aspect of my life could be described as a struggle between embracing and trying to change that, and while as I’ve gotten older that embrace part takes the lead more and more, for better or for worse, the voices of change still sing like a phantom chorus. This is not to say that I don’t learn from my mistakes (John showed me his method for saving files, and I now use my own ragtag version of it), but I’ve also learned that maybe it’s okay for me to exert less energy on the rewiring of something that was never even wired in the first place, and more on grappling with the emotional conundrum of the need to exorcise myself of something I feel but cannot see by making music

*
When I began writing for solo guitar, I was trying to make the instrument sound like a synthesizer. I knew nothing about synthesis back then other than that their sounds were the ones I wanted to make. I used pedals, open tunings, and new picking techniques to emulate what I was listening to, but I couldn’t hit the self-set mark because I didn’t know what I was doing and didn’t know what questions to ask. Guitar playing became an endeavor of searching for something, of figuring something out, or if it always was, now I understood that. I won’t say I was dissatisfied with my playing, but rarely did I become completely lost in myself, in my curated environment, in the sounds I made, the way I did with what I was listening to. The question, though, remains, why? Why was I holding onto my guitar so tightly and with both hands?

A subtractive approach to making music requires multiple, simultaneous systems of letting go. There is the letting go of allowing yourself to try everything under the sun without questioning choices or intentions, not deeming an instrument too indulgent, a track too excessive. There’s also the letting go of deleting what you made, scrapping without abandon, not the killing of darlings but the knowing that nothing is darling. Perhaps this letting go was of the times; perhaps the times were what we were letting go of.


*
I don’t consider this piece of writing finished, and it was several years ago when I decided that’s okay. It’s never been easy putting my work into the world; there’s always something to tweak, always the benefit of a fresh set of eyes. But of course, for something to truly be complete, it must be set free, or released from the confines of whatever mechanism I’ve chose to work it with, mind and desktop alike. I made a deal with myself: just because something is “out there” does not mean it’s finished. If you’re reading this on the inside of gatefold’s back cover, know that one day you could also read it on a flyer, or as a Twitter thread, or Substack.

I think that thing John and I saw in each other, was that grappling, two people trying to figure something out and, coincidentally, in similar ways. Or maybe we both wanted to engage with something we knew we never would on our own. Or maybe we just wanted to make music together, because, why the fuck not? That’s what we do. It’s unclear, as it should be; it’s certainly unfinished, as it will remain.

Ben Felton, June 2022