Field Notes
From Isolation
Entry 001
Maybe you know by now, but if you don’t: I’ve retreated to an extremely small town in upstate new york to record my new music. I’m not here just to make music though. It’s been overdue that I take some time to find myself for as long as I can remember. It helps that it’s a good and a safe thing to be isolated these days.
Everything I release the next half of year will have been created or at least finished in the room you see in this photo. It’s upstairs in what feels like the attic of a cabin and a town of 1200 people. It’s way hotter than you can tell from this photo and there are way more summer bugs than you’ll ever know. But I am pretty isolated, so they keep me company. They’re helping me make the new songs.
I don’t know exactly why or when, but I lost touch with a certain uninhibited part of myself the last few years, and I am slowly working on traveling back to that person. It’s a version of me that is eager to be open about everything I’m doing, working on, and going through. So I’m approaching it in the way I know how: focusing on creating and making the music and art I want to make and sharing it with this community that we are growing together. This isolated recording process upstate is a part of that process. I think it’s important for those who listen to and relate to my music to know that every lyric I say in my songs, I mean wholeheartedly and I have felt deeply, and the subject matter in all the new songs is going to be a direct examination of the things that are on my mind now as somebody struggling to understand who they are while pushing forward towards an uncertain future of following this wild dream of mine. These songs are self-contained healing processes for me, both in the way they’re created and the subject matter they cover. A lot of people ask me why it’s important to me to go out of my way to respond to every comment and DM and letter I get in my PO box…And that’s because this music is real for me. I’m not out here recording tracks just because I like to rap and I’m certainly not doing it to get famous. I don’t take having a microphone for granted. I’m trying to figure this life out the same way you are and hoping to help others in the process. Music is my way of doing that.
So this retreat to great loneliness and simple living is an exercise in learning how to be alone with myself. I’ve been in and out of long, steady relationships my entire life since childhood, and for the first time now, that’s no longer the case. As a musician and a person, there’s a wide open future out ahead of me, and I want to make the most of it every day. Get lost on purpose as they like to say.
Here’s my mission: in real time, I’m gonna share the behind the scenes process of making the next era of my music—snippets, demos and verses that’ll never get released, the way I’m planning to launch all of the new merchandise and stickers and DAD HATS I’ve been working like crazy on, and my weird adventures in the small towns throughout upstate New York which I’ve been documenting with my buddy Tom Flynn on a little film camera—all as they are happening. I don’t have it all figured out yet, but I want to embrace chaos for a change rather than documenting this all in a new book later (though, I suppose that’s still an option). But for now there’s no reason to wait. We all need change in more ways than one and we all need ways to get us through the strangest and most challenging period of life that a lot of us have ever faced.
So these are my field notes on trying to find yourself.
Much love & compassion & I hope to hear from you throughout this process as we get ready for new music,
Dylan