Noah Gundersen

In early March of 2020, I was sitting in a friend’s apartment in Los Angeles, penning the words “I guess I just get nervous when things are going ok” with a sense of quiet dread. The sun was shining. Traffic snaked in an unending crawl. The city functioned with all the patterns of apparent normalcy. But below the surface ran a palpable undercurrent of mounting anxiety. The novel coronavirus had crossed the ocean and made landfall in my hometown of Seattle. Every day brought more sobering news of the reality of the situation. Life as we knew it was about to change.

Two weeks later, I moved off the grid as the world went dark.

There is a moss-covered cabin deep in the woods of Washington State, nestled in the foothills of Mt. Baker, just off the North Fork of the Nooksack River. It has no WiFi, minimal cell reception, a water supply fed by a nearby creek, and a wood-burning stove for heat. This is where I spent the last year and a half when I wrote this album…