ATTN: RELEASE STATEMENT NOV 1, 2021

A year ago I was in Michigan, playing Pokemon Red and working on an album in the basement. I beat Pokemon Red and I burned out on that album, so I put it down and went outside. I wandered through the woods, my eyes adjusting to the newfound golden glare of daylight. I lay on the dock and jumped in the river. I took late night drives in the country, as the scent of summer through my open window turned to the crisp distant bonfire of fall.

A sudden heartbreak led me back to the basement, wondering what to do with myself. With no goal, I sat on the basement floor, in the room I had friends over for band practice from middle school through to those nebulous years after college graduation, picked up my guitar and one week later I had a song called “blue night oberon.” It hovered before me, a shimmering doorway to an unknown mystical land. I put on my favorite purple beanie and my dad’s old jacket and walked through the portal.

A few months later, my laptop was on the proverbial fritz, and the files wouldn’t open. “I guess I’d better wrap this up,” I said to myself, and upon completing the journey through the dead wasteland of troubleshooting, I wrapped it up.

This story truly begins, however, in the summer of 2010, just after 9th grade, on the dock at Bandemer Park. I spent my days with my buddies Oliver and Ryan, just having a grand old time in the sunshine and the water, staying up late and watching stupid movies, our bikes hastily strewn in Oliver’s front yard. When movies were over, we’d get back on the bikes and go back to the river to swim in the moonlight. With a pocketknife I carved into one of the dock’s wooden planks: SHVT VP AND ENJOY THE WEATHER.

Occasionally I’d get the chance to proudly show friends the faded remains of my adolescent scrawl. Now here I was a decade later, back on that dock in mid-pandemic isolation, wondering what the hell was going on, looking for my old message of comfort. I searched the dock, but the words were gone, scrubbed away by the years.

shvt vp and enjoy the weather
an album by Magic Toaster
Released December 2, 2021