I remember coming home from the airport after saying good-bye to Mandy, and like, sitting in my house and finally reading all the news articles about the aftermath of what had happened in Berlin—you know, like, the police manhunt, and the stories coming out about all the victims, and the sort of in-depth descriptions of the actual attacks—and, I don’t know why, but something inside me was just feeling so raw and so torn up that I just wanted to listen to that recording my dad sent me a few days before he killed himself. You know how sometimes you get like that? You’re just like, feeling something so intensely that you want to lean into it: like, you just want to sink into the bath or like, dig the knife into the wound? And so I started listening to that recording—I was just sitting there in my living room, like, listening to my dad doing this gut-wrenching version of that song I did with Deez—and, all of a sudden, it hit me. I was just like: Whoa. It flashed in front of my face like a stock ticker. And I immediately called up my guitar teacher, and I was like: Yo, we’ve got some work to do today. And he was like: Dope. On my way.

I mean, it’s crazy that I hadn’t realized that’s why I chose guitar in the first place, you know? I started the lessons a week or two after my dad’s funeral—honestly, I just needed something to distract me, something I could noodle around with that wasn’t the album—but, all of a sudden, it became so clear why I was doing it, and it was because my subconscious mind knew way before my conscious mind did that I was recording a grunge album.

And so my teacher came over—his name’s Martin. I don’t know why I’m calling him my “teacher” like he’s some dude who puts up flyers in Starbucks. He’s this dope session musician who’s played with everyone from the Pagers to the Sprinklers to the Rat Kings—and I tell him what I’m thinking, and he’s like: Okay, well, let’s go through some basic chord progressions. And within a week or two, I already had the skeletons of a few tracks. I mean, everyone I told about this new direction just thought I was absolutely crazy. Like, my manager was just basically like: No. And my mom and Bob were like: I don’t know about this. But they all knew, you know, that once I get my mind set on something, it’s pretty hard to get me off of it. And, you know, I mean, it’s not like the whole thing was coming out of left field. I DID grow up with grunge—like, all those records were sitting around in my house—and when I was like five or six or seven, my dad would take me with him to all his band practices, so I would just take it all in, you know? Soak it all up. It’s not totally crazy to say that grunge is my musical inheritance more than like, pop is, so when it came time to actually find my way into the songs, it was actually a lot easier than some of the stuff I had been doing before.