Sneak Peek: Album Tracklist (With Descriptions + Teasers)
... teaky getting leaky with sneak peekies
Alrighty folks,
As the Eating & Drinking & Being in Love release date draws near (September 20th, eek!) I wanted to give you, my loyal Substack fans, a bit more detail on what to expect. It has been a rough few weeks, which I will certainly go into in another post, but as time moves forward, so must I.
At risk of sounding hyperbolic, I do believe that this album is, if not the, then a culmination of my music up until now. I wonder if every album I make will feel like that. That is not for me to say right now, though! Right now is a time for anticipation, for riling up the crowd, for glory!
I read (or probably saw on Tiktok) a really nice quote by an artist talking about their music – or maybe it was an author talking about their books – I’m not sure. The big idea is this: I have to treat the next album as if this one was already a resounding success. If all goes well, then tomorrow is just another day of work. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?
Anyway, today I present you with the full tracklist of the album, accompanied by a short description of each song, accompanied by a teensy (30 second) teaser of each song. Obviously, you can listen to the ones that are out already, and even more obviously, there will be a Digging Deep™ post for each song on the album, but hopefully this will abate your appetite for now. Or maybe it will whet it!
You can presave the album (and by doing so help me out) HERE.
Track 1: Eating & Drinking & Being in Love (Intro)
This one really just fell into our laps! We were sitting in the studio, messing around, getting set up, when Michael and Andre just started vibing. We captured the moment in its entirety, and afterwards I recorded an improvised, rambling voice note in my car. Voila!
Track 2: Honeydew Moon
I wrote this song with Garrett Nash in September 2023 – after coming up with the title, we wanted the song to incorporate as much fruit as we could without it becoming overindulgent. It was an easy song to write – everything flowed, everything fit, and it all came together like a Sunday afternoon at the beach. It’s about being with someone that you want to spend the rest of your life with and looking toward the future, catching glimpses of the lovely little moments you both will have. Of course, hints of Big Thief, Counting Crows, Wilco.
Track 3: Lunch
I wrote “Lunch” after reading Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, an incredible collection of his poetry. The poems are mainly set in 1960s NYC, and being from the city myself, I found a deep resonance within my own life. The chorus of this song is taken from the final stanza from “Steps,” one of my favorite poems in the collection. “Lunch” is about finding such a beautiful, deep love that you laugh, surprised that something so wonderful could happen to you. It’s a yearning, pining song at its core, but gentle in its instrumentation and vocal delivery, building to a release in the end. I recorded the song with Jack Kleinick at his home studio in LA (the only one on the album not recorded in NYC). We used paint brushes to strum my nylon string/rubber bridge hybrid guitar that I jerry-rigged myself, creating an almost percussive sound that fills the body of the song. It’s in 5/4, which isn’t quite a standard time signature (although I do love my 5/4 songs), but it doesn’t feel inaccessible – many people won’t even realize it without listening for it.
Track 4: The Painters
“The Painters” is the banger of the album, the song that people find themselves singing along to, even when it’s their first time hearing it. I wrote it with Josh Zegan in May 2023, and we wanted to make something that would pay homage to the feel good music of past decades (70s, 90s, perhaps) while still rooting itself firmly in the modern age. It’s a song for driving down the coast with the windows down, then finding a spot on the beach and cracking open a nice cold beer. Find tastes of Counting Crows and 1970s soft rock like The Eagles.
Track 5: Fixer Upper
I wrote this song in May 2021 while dealing with the aftermath of a big breakup. Let’s set the scene: you’re in a relationship and you like walking around a specific neighborhood in town to look at all the houses. “Oh, that one’s nice!” one of you says. “I like the porch on that one,” says your partner. You both imagine yourselves living in these houses together, building a life, doing repairs, mowing the lawn, painting the fence, and then you break up. You can’t go back to that neighborhood again, but you still find yourself noting different houses that you know the other person would love. That sucks! But it’s still beautiful to know the other person lives on in you, somehow, some way.
Track 6: Nothing New
You only get so many “firsts” in your life, and even more so in relationships. I remember this episode of How I Met Your Mother where Marshall and Lily realize they’ve never peed in front of each other (and in this wacky scenario she has to!), and she laments about the loss of romantic mystery in their relationship. After she pees, they realize it’s actually a new first for them! I think if you find the right person to spend your life with, those firsts don’t matter as much. There’s a joy in sinking yourself so deeply into another person. I wrote “Nothing New” with Sam Varga in February 2023, and that’s the crux of the song: growing old with someone can be as beautiful, if not more, than the sparks of a new relationship.
Track 7: One More Night (With My Friends in the City)
Some of my favorite songs are about friendship: “You’ve Got A Friend” by Carole King, “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” by Randy Newman. Rose and I wanted to write something that falls in that category, both sonically and thematically, but with a tinge of wistfulness too. My childhood friends and I always talked about living together when we got older, but now that we find ourselves spread across the country, that dream has faded. Still, it’s the most powerful friendships that can survive the greatest distances, and every time we see each other, it’s like nothing has changed. Your best friends will always be your best friends (see my older song, “What if it all works out in the end?”), and even one night with your friends when you’re all back for the holidays can hold immense significance.
Track 8: On My Mind
“On My Mind” is my favorite song on the album and potentially my favorite song I’ve ever written. It’s one of those life songs, the kind of songs I’ve always heard and wished I had written (“A Little Bit of Everything” by Dawes, “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell, etc.). Songs that feel like the movie Big Fish, all-encompassing, life-spanning. Wistfulness to bitterness to acceptance to contentment. I wanted the recording of the song to feel genuine, live, organic, like a band just walked into the studio, picked up their instruments, and banged it out. I recorded acoustic guitar and vocals together, and at the same time Joe Ulmer recorded the drums in a different room. That’s the glue that holds the song together – one good take where we both lived in the same pocket.
Track 9: Joshua Tree (Interlude)
Sometime in the summer of 2017, I did a solo trip ;) to Joshua Tree and slept in a camper van under the stars. I ended up writing a poem about the experience that year, and for this interlude I decided to put that poem to music. It’s kind of a cowboy poem, if you will.
Track 10: Romanticizing Poets
I wrote this song when I turned 27, and that’s obviously a charged age for musicians and creatives. The “27 Club” has been mythologized, romanticized, celebrated even as the infamous age at which so many bright young stars have tragically died. Too many people (myself included) have exalted these stories as legends while forgetting the very real people with very real issues behind them. I’ve always wondered if my music would be better if I was more tortured, more troubled, more mystical. I use so much of my own life in my songs that I often feel like I’m fictionalizing it, and I don’t want to lose the humanity of it all in my journey for success. The song is set in Paris, and the lyrics make references to things like the “white Bics” supposedly found in the pockets of the musicians that died young (fake), or “Saturn Return,” the astrological transit that occurs when the planet Saturn returns to the same ecliptic longitude that it occupied at the moment of a person's birth (about 29 years, taken from Wikipedia). We often whitewash the more unsavory parts of a person’s life to keep them on a pedestal that we’ve posthumously constructed, and that does as much damage as forgetting them in the first place.
Track 11: Teeth
“Teeth” deals with a darker side of love, the inevitable doubt that creeps in when everything else seems so good. I find a level of insecurity in happiness, as if it’s not really meant for me. There’s a guilt to it, a worry that the fire could fizzle out, and that’s what we tried to capture in this song. Listen for influences like Noah Kahan, Phoebe Bridgers, Ryan Beatty.
Hope you enjoyed the teasers, and get HYPE for the album!
Love,
Teaky
HYPE I YAM