Dearest Listener,

If I wanted to be reductive, I could call this simply a classic breakup/heartbreak album. But like many a self indulgent songwriter might admit, it feels much more than that to me.

It’s equal parts a diary entry, a love letter, and a long winded goodbye to the pieces of myself I tried and failed to give to someone else for safe keeping. Turns out those pieces wanted to just be let go, not Held or Kept! Nor did the someone else ever even really Want them in the first place!

This album is where I just… put it all down. It felt like the only way I could set those pieces free! Of course, in the process I found so many other ways to do that. But in the end, it was by exhuming all of it that I realized what wanted to be buried again, and what wanted to stay out in the light.

Before and in the making of this, I was dealing with the ways in which I chose to grow so long in the shadows of others. Others whose concepts of “goodness”, “badness”, and “reality” mattered to me more than my own. Then I blamed them for it instead of just… gathering my gumption to uproot and grow somewhere different, a more suited environment in which to be my entire self.

Of course it’s more complicated than that, because for so long I chose to stay small that I might be worthy of big Love. “God’s” love, a man’s love, my own love.

And goddamn it man, love can become so cruel, so full of contempt! I’ve been so cruel and full of contempt! It’s taken me so many years to gain any grasp on it- the shame, the responsibility, the pain. It’s always been so hard for me to maintain where I begin and end. What’s mine to mourn? What’s mine to atone for? What’s mine to forgive?

To be totally honest with you, Listener, I still don’t really know! However I do know that this is what “render tender/blunder sunder” means to me.
Sometimes you gently cut apart something until you’ve reached the beautiful, vulnerable essence of the thing. Sometimes you fuck it all up so bad you’ve uprooted it entirely.

I’ve done all of that here, and saved the remnants for y’all to witness. It could be the worst or the best thing I’ve ever made! It could be both at the same time! But it’s no longer mine.

With all that I’ve got,
jud/jude/judith