Alie: While we were living in New Mexico, I was able to finally move my childhood upright piano to my house. This is the piano that was given to me when I was about eleven, and I hadn’t lived with it since I was eighteen and my dad was alive. I missed it a lot, and it finally made our house feel like our home in 2020 - right before the Holidays and chilly weather. I got it all tuned up and one day after making a nice little fire in the fireplace, I began playing around with different melodies, chord structures and then effortlessly landed on a classic C assembly. I was reading and singing through a bank of lyrics Jake had written. Some of the lyrics still existed in other songs at that point, but that day we found them a permanent home in this three-verse troupe of a song. The chorus, “I have a hard time letting go” fell out of me. It’s so simple, but I felt it encompassed the general emotion in each verse. The thing I kept feeling was no mater how many times I’ve been forced to “let go” of something or someone meaningful, it hasn’t gotten easier with more practice. But what I’ve learned is that, I do not regret the closeness I found in those relationships even though they couldn’t last.

Alie: I asked my friend Meagan Grandall, who at this point had sung harmonies on almost every song on this record and last, if she would like to take the lead melody on one of these verses. She’s someone who’s friendship fostered so much of my own growth, and who’s music and voice warms and inspires me. She took the final verse, which largely speaks to living in the Pacific Northwest, which is where she grew up. In the final Chorus, we both sing the main melody, doubling each other, which feels almost like a sister comforting another sister in this life of too often “goodbyes”.

Jake: For me, “Postcard” is about wanting to hold onto the memory of a long gone friend. And knowing, perhaps hoping, that we’ll be the one to “save a seat” at the table for another after we’re gone. None of us knows what’s after all this. I always say “You gotta die to find out”. Whether something or nothing, we’ll all be together someday and for me that is a beautiful sentiment.

Jake: In this song, we talk about a century plant that we had in the front yard of our rental house in Albuquerque. “I almost cried when the century plant fell.” For those unfamiliar (like I was), century plants are “monocarpic”, meaning they only bloom once in their lifetime. Some, like the agave in our front yard, can grow stalks 20-30 feet tall before they fully bloom. After what started as a small bush began rapidly growing a stock, I took photos of it nearly every day for several weeks as it grew to nearly 25 feet tall. It was so strange and beautiful - like nothing I had seen before, being from the Pacific Northwest. However, it was too shallow in the soil and didn’t have the roots to support its weight and ended up falling before it fully bloomed.