The Cost of Living

We started working on this album in 2019. Josh and Justin recorded the acoustic guitar part for “Coyotes, Lower” in February of that year. Aside from vocals, it’s the only thing we recorded together in the same room. Fittingly, the very last thing recorded for the album was our friend Will’s vocal part for that same song, which he recorded himself in June 2024. In a sense it took five years, but much of it we worked on alongside the songs that ended up being on our first album (Everything and Time, 2021). In the time between, Josh moved out of the city, Molly and Justin moved upstairs. Everyone started new jobs. We scraped and clawed for every minute we could get to work on music amidst the many claims of work, family, relationships, life. And we wrote two dozen songs, nine or ten of which became The Cost of Living. 

The final lyrics for the album were written and recorded about a year ago, in the spring of 2024. While the seeds of our current slide toward right-wing authoritarianism had certainly been planted, looking back now, it seems a more innocent time… at least somewhat. While these songs are not overtly political, there is a preoccupation with things very much at the heart of our current social and political crisis: class resentments, petty jealousies, false prophets, vigilante justice, the warping of our shared sense of reality by a toxic internet culture. If we wrote these songs now, they’d be angrier, more raw and barbed, and less understanding of their characters’ decisions. For that, we’re grateful we were able to write them when we did, at a time when empathy seemed normal and natural.

-C.M., April 2025

1. Spare Room

Working title: “The Cost of Living”

Guitar and Banjo: recorded by Josh at home in Western Mass in May 2021. Drums recorded by Justin at the Berwick in Roxbury, MA, October, 2021. Electric Piano, Organ, and Pedal Steel recorded by Justin (in Logic Pro) January-February 2022. Vocals recorded by Justin and Molly at home in Jamaica Plain, MA, October 2023. Bass recorded by Andy Arch at his home in Bourne, MA, Spring 2024.

JG: This was a particularly creative period for me. I was writing and playing a lot while still living in Dorchester. Two major songs emerged from this time: “The Cost of Living” ("Spare Room") and “Consolation of Memory” ("A Consolation"). The earliest demo I have of this piece is titled “Preach-like.” It was originally in a different key and strummed differently, but something about its feel or perhaps one of the initial chords reminded me of the Tom Thumb song. Through multiple iterations, both the feel and tempo evolved. In the second round of demos, I titled it “Broken Promises,” which was the first version to feature the dropped-out, solo guitar section. The ending was later salvaged from an abandoned musical idea that hadn’t found a place elsewhere. 

JK: The demo that Josh sent me in Spring 2021 was fairly complete, and I believe those were the guitar and banjo tracks we used in the recording. I tracked the drums for this one (as well as “A Consolation”) in the first room I had in The Berwick rehearsal space in Roxbury, MA. That room was a cavernous, former loft space on the second floor and it was full of lots of weird old junk. At first I had several overlapping drum tracks in the outro part, and it sounded cool when it was just guitar and drums, but as we added more instruments and vocals it started to feel cluttered, so it eventually got pared back to just the main drum part. For whatever reason, I was practicing playing without a rack tom, and that’s how this song was recorded (so the rolling tom part near the end is a floor tom and a snare with the snares dropped).

MS: This song had some lyrical challenges, like singing the word “ga-rage.” My only regret is that in sung form, “half bath” loses the correct New England pronunciation: “haawf baawth.” When we were trying to figure out what to do with the end of the song, I remember forcing Justin to leave his office so I could try to figure out a “round” approach a la The Beach Boys or Feist.