I wanted to make a road-trip album: the kind of album where you don’t skip any songs, because each one connects to the next thought, the next mile, the next change of scenery. The kind that's worth revisiting over the years, and which rewards you by revealing new patterns each time you go back to it.

*Redshift *after a song whose central image seemed to define the theme of the whole album: the sense of something receding. The universe itself. Youth. Possibilities, familiarity, certainty, comfort. The sense of things that once felt bright and close slipping out of reach. Dimming.

These songs keep some feeling of my younger selves from slipping away entirely. Joan Didion wrote, “I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.” Listening to the album, I hear the ghosts of people I used to be as I’ve moved through my 20s into my 30s. Attractive company or not.

Julian Barnes summed it up this way:

[W]hen you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire – and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company you may muster, can only be faced alone. But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from the future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records – in words, sound, pictures – you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? 'History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

Releasing Redshift marks an end for me. Because today, the album slips out of my reach. For the better part of a decade, I’ve been dreaming up, revising, abandoning, and falling back in love with these songs.

The oldest melody on Redshift dates back to 2010. That choir of water singing in wine glasses ringing in the background of a number of tracks is made of samples I recorded back in 2006 in my childhood bedroom. We tracked the first in-studio note in March of 2018. The last in spring 2022.

I hope you take time to get to know them. I hope you (or at least a few of you) might choose not to skip any of Redshift’s tracks when you listen on a road trip. I hope these songs can keep you company, as they’ve kept me company over the years.

Immediate, yet atmospheric. Wintry, yet warm. The Okay Lakes make cinematic indie/folk with meticulous arrangements and evocative layers of wintry textures. Redshift—their debut 12-track LP—is a night drive on the moonsilvered and patchily paved back roads of a sprawling soundscape, out where the county lines of art-folk, indie rock, and Americana meet.

See you down in the mud.