Claude says:Stevens recorded this at his Brooklyn office and in scattered rooms across the Northwest in 2014, using his mother's death two years earlier and their childhood Oregon trips as the raw material. After five years on The Age of Adz's electronic sprawl, he came back with spare folk arrangements and some of his most direct writing about loss and abandonment. You got into it that summer it came out, then let it sit until spring 2024, when you worked through the whole first half — "Death With Dignity" through "Fourth of July" — like you were finally ready to hear it again.