It begins with a few good lies. Then something terrible happens and those lies are shattered. You’re looking for someone to blame but also terrified and barreling off into god only knows where when you see something else—maybe a girl on a rock, or a hummingbird midflight, but something—and you see that where you are is just nowhere, and you see where you are for what it is, and everything becomes clear for a moment. You’re going to die someday, and it’s terrifying. This is the album.
These songs were written in the throes of passion, while slinging roe in the Bering Strait, and while staying up all night keeping an eye on an old man named Larry who would occasionally stumble out to the kitchen and ask me where he was. They are songs that were captured in a park outside Beijing, and songs we first charted in a basement in Chicago when the country’s economy was collapsing. One of them is a song I wrote to the woman I ended up marrying. These are personal songs.
Sometimes they twist out of control or nudge off darkly. They are full of my loneliest moments. Once or twice they might sparkle uncertainly.
—Gabriel Chad Boyer
Lyrics by Gabriel Boyer
Music by Normal Feelings
Normal Feelings is
Gabriel Boyer – vocals, organ, keyboard, fun machine
Malcolm Felder – organ, guitar, bass, drums, ciblon, kendhang agen, percussion, backup vocals
Jason Allen – drums, melodica, bass, organ, keyboard, kenong, kempul, peking, percussion, samples
Phil Arezzi – guitar
Piotr Wereszczyński – guitar
Alex Yoffe – celempung, peking, gendèr barung
Dan Katayama – guitar
Paul Medrano – tape ghosts
Michael Gorka – guitar
Recorded in Chicago, IL, Eugene, OR, and Yanjiao, China
Produced by Jason Allen
CDD Pre-Mastering by Scott Craggs.