The first time I saw Kay Robertson play was at a sparsely attended show on a weeknight, and everyone called her Katie. The deep club sounds coming from upstairs were seeping through the ceiling – things felt chaotic – and my untrustworthy memory says the house lights were mostly on. House lights feel aggressive when there are so few people in a room. It felt like maybe we were supposed to be leaving. By the time she was on the stage the vibe was decimated, but after Kay played her first song I had already decided that I wanted to ask her to start a band.

As it turns out, she asked me. Via text message (an unknown number) a few months later. I didn’t know her at all when I started going to her apartment with Logan Carithers to learn these songs in hopes of adapting them for a group setting, but it became clear that we all got along personally and musically. We almost never asked questions and Kay almost never gave instructions. To this day there are songs we play that I don’t know the chords to.

After playing a small handful of shows we decided to pile into a 15x15 room in my apartment to record as many of them as we could. It was very low key and incredibly fun – we drank tea and coffee and made frozen pizzas and talked shit. In a very short period of time I had somehow acquired a new group of friends who I felt deeply connected to, and I owe that connection entirely to the transcendent appeal of Kay’s music.

Everyone who plays with her agrees that there is no reason for us to be there. That she can handle it without us, musically, and that our primary goal at every turn should be to stay out of her way. She doesn’t agree with this but she is wrong. The arrangements on this record, at their best, represent the group. In these early sessions we would all be present in the tiny room for everything. Overdubs. Failed guitar solos. Backing vocal horseplay. A certain deleted synth part that sounded like some wandering Zelda jam.

But just as we had the finish line in sight we lost the thread. Like, the whole planet lost the thread. March 2020. Ah shit. Suddenly we were sending tracks back and forth across town via email and everything felt trite, and stupid, and meaningless. Still, a significant amount of what you hear is culled from the best of those moments too and I can’t overstate how much meaning I found in having these recordings to fuss over instead of thinking about imminent death, despite the fact that Kay wanted to call the album Kay Krull Presents The End of All Times.

The two of us timed out a duel quarantine so that we could get together in November of 2020 to do some vocal tracks and (maybe) start a couple of new songs. The first day we mostly caught up and hit some odds and ends, but on day two we recorded a cover of The Fugs’ “How Sweet I Roamed”, my personal favorite track on this collection. Listening to my friend sing in that room again after so many months was a mentally transformative moment, and I genuinely believe that it is audible on the recording. You can hear it on all of this. The group, the room. You can see it. Me sitting on the floor. Kay in a chair. Brett, Logan, Caleb, and Drake trying not to laugh next to a live mic. --David Brown