Finding A Home: Why It Took So Long To Make This Album, Part Four

It was kind of crazy of us to start a family before we bought a house, but like the album, we thought we’d have finished that task before the baby came along, and we were wrong.

We spent a few months house-hunting, which was utterly depressing and heartbreaking. The market is insane in Windsor, and things in our price range weren’t much bigger than our apartment. Every now and then we’d find a house, fall in love, imagine the rest of our lives in it, and then have it go to someone else.

Someone else’s things in someone else’s house. For a hot minute, we thought it might be ours. Nope. (But in the end, I’m so glad it wasn’t ours, because the house we ended up with was just so perfect.)

Just the fact that we were even able to consider buying a house was surreal to us. As self-employed people in this fickle music industry, we assumed we would live in an apartment forever, and never have the luxury of owning our own home. The world just isn’t the same as it was when our parents were buying houses. The only way I was able to look like a trustworthy mortgage candidate was because of those two grants I’d received, and my Spotify hit. They were two fluke years, and as soon as I filed my 2018 taxes, the bank would see how poor I actually am, so we had a tiny window in which to buy our house.

In the meantime, we were working away on horn arrangements for the album - most songs were scored with about 3 or 4 parts, for flute, saxophones, and trumpet. So many beautiful harmonies and counter melodies. Mike would put on his headphones (at his desk in the middle of the living room, which was also our dining room) and resurface hours later, having created something whole and divine - so much like the process of writing songs, but different in that it needs to complement the song that already exists. He excelled at this. I busied myself bringing coffee and treats to him and our friend, trumpeter Austin Di Pietro (who helped guide us in finding the correct range for each instrument), as they pored over MIDI arrangements. Somehow, we all managed to overlook the grating sounds of the fake instruments and come up with completed arrangements, hoping they would sound much better when executed by actual musicians (in the end, they absolutely did).

After putting our house-hunting on hold and waiting patiently for god knows what, we got extremely lucky - friends of ours were moving, and offered to sell us their house directly, saving them the trouble of putting it on the market, even though the market was wildly hot, and their house would have likely been snapped up in less than a week, sight unseen. They had hoped to see the house go to a young family, as so many houses tend to turn into rental properties for students, and in that outcome, they don’t really get the kind of love and appreciation they deserve.

Mike had taught their kids music lessons at a piano in the dining room, where I’m writing this now, and when Mike was a boy, their mother was his babysitter. I feel like our ownership of this house now is both a karmic pay-out and an advance loan, that makes us want to keep putting good out into the world as much and in as many ways as we can.