Become a member for as little as $1/month and get our new CD free...plus access to the Archive

Membership gets you into an alternate reality where art is valued, where there are no gate keepers or middle men, where you choose the art that should be heard and supported in the wider world. As a member you’ll get exclusive access to our growing archive of concert footage, studio tracks, and livestreams. As a sponsor of our livestream, you will help us do what we believe is our best work to date. Plus this month, as a thank you to our members, we’re releasing a full band studio EP called Gray May Day 1. Want one? Join for as little as $1/month and it's yours, for a limited time only. Ships December 12th, which in most cases will get to you by Christmas. Read about Gray May Day 1 here.

The Livestream: A Living Album

We started the weekly livestream as a substitute for our COVID-cancelled tours, but we've become enthralled by its potential as an artistic medium in its own right. This new medium allows for— and demands!— a higher degree of performance than either a live show or a recording studio, because it’s both at the same time. It has all the private intimacy of listening to an album closely by yourself, or of hearing a performer in tiny club with superb acoustics, yet it's also a communion with anyone in the world who wants to tune in. We’re calling it… a living album. We’ve spent the last 6 months retooling, learning, exploring and rehearsing for this new medium, and have had the pleasure of sharing the results with you every week— all thanks to the support of our members. 

The visual aspect of the livestream is also allowing us to delve deeper into the cinematic and oneiric quality of the music. We’ve always seen music as well as heard it— sometimes these images can be translated into lyrics, but now we are projecting them as light, right onto the wall and on our skin as we perform. We haven’t scratched the surface of all the visual ideas we have for 2021, but in short we want the livestream to be an audio visual art experience evocative of dreams and movies. You can tune into our livestream here if you want to join us in the dream time. And if you find that’s something you want to put your name behind, you can become a member at an amount of your choosing. Plus we’ll get Gray May Day 1 in the mail to you ASAP.

We're putting this album out in gratitude to our members: Thank you for joining our subscription adventure in these crazy times. You gave us our cancelled tours back— and that audience communion we crave—  in the form of our weekly livestream. You gave us time, resources, and a reason to release new compositions, recordings, and concert videos. You were our 2020 silver-lining, and we can’t wait to show you what we have in store for 2021.

But first, we want to thank you not only in words through the internet but also with music…sent through the actual mail. We’re releasing Gray May Day 1, a members-only EP on compact disc. If you are a member you will have received an email asking for your shipping address (if you haven't, please email us!) and that's all you have to do. If you're not a member you can still join for as little as $1/month and get Gray May Day 1 free, for a limited time only. (Shipping is free too, within the U.S.). Plus you'll get access to our ever-growing members-only archive.

We recorded Gray May Day 1 pre-COVID with our dream band: Clipper Anderson on bass and Mark Ivester on drums. We scheduled the session right in the middle of a tour, hoping to bring some of that live vitality to the studio— I remember being proudly and gleefully exhausted that we were playing so much and seeing so much of the country. We’d just played Seattle’s Earshot Jazz Fest with Clipper and were so thrilled with the trio’s vibe that we added several tracks to the session that we’d already recorded years ago as a duo— She Run Away and Taste of Honey. Seattle was stunning— scarlet leaves, blue water, white mountains, and sunshine that gets almost sentimental when you know the rainy season looms ahead. By the time we got to David Lange Studios— a wonderfully equipped and expertly run studio deep in a forest south of Seattle—  it was in fact raining in earnest. Cozy vibes abounded. I’m glad we’re releasing this around the same time of year.

Because of all the touring it took us over a year to return to these tracks, but eventually we scheduled another tour break in Nashville, where our great friend Pat Sansone lent his fabulous ears, mad studio skills, and tremendously sensitive midwifery to the project. Then the tracks went off to Nomatic Studio in Asheville, where Michael Hynes mastered it with the same subtly and artfulness of his work on our Ocean of Birds. 

In short, we very much hope you enjoy this album, and can’t wait to bring you more. 

From our hearts, 

Edda

Max