This album is a grab bag of tracks that never made it onto a LP that Gabe I recorded under our Lower Stacks project, but they sit right at the heart of that writing period. You get pop songs here, song suites, character songs, musical tunes, tuning experiments, and more.

One day when I was in a transitional state between jobs — I’d accepted a new job while I was still working at the old one — I set up my iMac on the kitchen table and brought my recording equipment with it. I was alone in the house and had never recorded in the kitchen, so I thought I’d give it a try, because I liked the acoustics in the space. The wood floors and size of the room created a warm and full sound.

I went through quick phases with my music, especially in the early days of my songwriting. Around 2006 I discovered Gillian Welch and really loved the slow vibe of her music. I couldn’t figure out how to sing with it, which was fine. I was most interested in capturing the feeling of the music, so these are entirely instrumentals.

When I started graduate school in 2008, I bought a Mac laptop for the first time and immediately started experimenting with GarageBand. Initially, the concept for this music was that it would function as theme music for a podcast or some other radio program. I didn’t have a specific program in mind, but that was the driving force behind the idea.

One of the best things to happen to me as a songwriter was to make music using FrutiyLoops. A friend I worked with in the Twin Cities added the program onto my computer and soon I was creating all sorts of songs with the program.

Badlands is the first album where I thought I might be writing legitimately good music. One of these songs (“Deserter”) would show up as the opening track on the second Lower Stacks album Love In All Directions (2018). That version is nearly all instrumental. This one is sadder and slower and has singing. I think this one is better.