Here it is, friend, documentation that we once lived and breathed in a space, at a time. The pandemic forced us to listen to isolation, and artificial intelligence dawned a new age of skepticism. We have grown so accustomed to circumnavigating our imperfect humanity that its inclusion in our output has become optional. Albums, photographs, and videos once categorically attested to the real; now it’s a choice. Knowing greatness and failure will inevitably precipitate all artistic choices, we chose to make this album. Isolation, in addition to being an all-too-familiar state of being, is a recording term. It’s when the component parts of a song are recorded separately. The opposite of isolation in recording parlance (but also, perhaps, in society) is bleed. Bleed is when you can hear the drums and guitar in the vocal mic, because it’s all happening in the room at the same time. It’s scary to bleed because it means you can’t easily manipulate things later. It’s a photo without a filter. It’s bleeding. In 2022, as we toured our flopped isolation album called Juniors, we felt lost. We rediscovered Simon and Garfunkel records on long van rides. We marveled at the profound way these works testified to a place and time. Around that same time, Ben Folds hosted us for a month in Nashville as he made his album, What Matters Most. With Ben, we apprenticed in the art and craft of recording together in a live room. Making that record with him taught us so much as we came home prepared to make something new for ourselves. We wrote 11 songs almost immediately. Then we hosted a weeklong blind date in western Mass. It was us two plus a cousin, some old friends, a guy we found on TikTok, a flutist we once saw on stage with Kishi Bashi (the latter two we had never actually met in person), a studio engineer, and an intern. So here is... Softly Softly. Please come bleed with us. Yours, tim and paul