There are several reasons why I decided to retire the moniker Blood Revenge, a name I’ve been playing under for the past near decade. Some of it has to do with getting older, some of it with a better understanding of history and society and my place in it. A lot of it comes from a changing perception of sounds, what I look for when things feel sonically static, what I try to make when I don’t find it, what I feel as inspiration, what I put on when I do the dishes. There’s more to say about all this, probably a whole essay, but I’m still looking for the right words.

Divorce is a title I’d been batting around for some years, in the wake of my own and beyond, when the word held new and old meanings. This has to do with music, but also with feeling like I’ve earned the right to use the word, something like a sense of entitlement, which sometimes serves me very little but other times gives me clarity and perspective, helps me work past the fear, callouses or scars. If you get it, you get it.

There’s a lot many of us can say about the creative process, and for me one of those things is how steeped it is in visceral moments of exhilaration and anxiety, also known as inspiration and inhibition. Thankfully, the former has never been an issue—I seem to find it anywhere—and it hasn’t waned yet. Less thankfully, the latter is there too, a reminder that making music is necessarily in cahoots with my neurotic mind. This is fine when it leads to, say, an afternoon mixing fifteen minutes of one note, not so much when I decide something’s not ready to be shared with the world yet, if ever. These days, I try to challenge that second part, a process of deeming the thing unsustainable and deciding it can’t be lived with and must be let go of—that’s what the hard work is. (There’s a metaphor I’m thinking of here, but I’ll spare you.)

Declaring a piece of music “done” is usually more of a decision than I’d like it to be. Every time I start working on something, I follow my ears, taste, and intuition, anticipating to a sense of closure: the levels are right and I’ve satisfied my insatiable desire for more synths and more guitars; I have done what I can do, I am good to go. But so often I haven’t and I’m not. There are always more synths to add; there are always more guitars.

Divorce was made in two different apartments in Manhattan, NY, a few different homes in Carrboro, NC, and on a Hudson line. “I’m Gonna Open Wide Up!” started in the house I live in now, while my wife, Jen (before I became her husband) was downstairs. It was the day after I turned forty, and when I was done for the day, we hiked Occoneechee Mountain and got chicken wings for lunch. I told her it was the last song like that that I would write; it was time to move on.

Justin Blatt came over months later and added the violin and viola to it that I knew I wanted but didn’t realize how much I needed until he started playing. Bill Lee added sax, piano, and his magical, ethereal singing voice from Upstate New York. Charles Chace mixed it at his house after he put his daughter to bed, exercising cast iron patience as I made the most annoyingly nitpicky of requests. Michael Charles Wood put it onto cassette. We hadn’t met in person until I picked them up from him, and the validation of having new ears on this thing was more essential than I grasped at the time. I asked Jen if I could use one of her crystals for the cover, one that had to do with letting go, and she gave me a piece of malachite. Gratitude is the bare minimum.

So, Divorce is a letting go. It’s also a letting up and a letting listen, a letting lay, a letting in, a letting out, and a letting be. Not everything should to be let go of, and certainly there are things more urgent than songs, but this is where I am and where I’ve been, and I need to make some space. That’s what this record is for me, and maybe it’ll be that for you. Or not, which is fine—that’s why they call it music.