You Know I'm Not Going Anywhere, Jamie

I was giving the band’s other albums heavy play at other inflection points in my life over the past five or so years, namely my last year in Philly (A Flourish and a Spoil and Telephone), and my first year in New York (Popular Manipulations), and I got a lot out of their music then. Something about the rawness of the vocals and guitar, the introspective songwriting, and the fact the I ran into members of the band in person like three times while living in Philly made them the right sound for a homesick heart. But does the effect carry over to You Know I’m Not Going Anywhere?

Mostly! A lot of this album sounds like my missing my friends feels and that could be for a whole bunch of reasons. The state of the world has made me think a lot about the relationship that I value that I’ve neglected and the new ones I’ve built and how I’ve changed. It’s an album that is exploring new territory for the band, employing more synth and detailed layering than their earlier work which retained a lot more of their live sound. Sometimes this works ("Cheap Regrets," "And All the Horses Go Swimming"), and sometimes it doesn’t. But hey, aren’t we all trying out some new stuff now that we can’t do what we used to be able to when we were younger?

I think that gets to the heart of my experience with this album. I sympathize with the longing ("My Only Ghost"), life-changes-are-complicated ("Changing," "The Clouds"), but still ultimately hopeful ("4th of July") sound on this album, but it’s hard to tell yet if the couple tracks that I’ve had stuck in my head over the past week will still stand out to me years later, the way songs like "Lyla" and "6 AM" do. What works is that the album makes me feel a bunch of things, good and bad, and that’s really the whole point of listening to and making music, so great job, the Districts.