Insurmountable Distances came about from a period of a rather intense sense of doubt and loss around my personal identity. I began by contemplating very literal lockdown-enforced distances, then turning this into a drawn-out struggle with differences in identity and chasms in communication arising from the distances between people that make each person fundamentally different, and finally finding the insurmountable distances within myself, which are those that sing loudest to me on the record, an awkward shellshocked restraint that makes its own sound and leaves the largest imprint on the music.

Robert Mapplethorpe used to say to Patti Smith that “nothing is finished until you see it” (yes, like any self-respecting music-and-lit-loving hipster, I have read Just Kids), and I am inclined to agree, because I couldn’t have brought this album to its complete, self-sufficient state (moving out soon and everything, the whole deal) without the aid of two friends and collaborators in the visual realm: Gerard Julian (www.gerardjulian.com), who, in an act of wise prescience, set up and took the picture that, months later, upon rediscovery, I knew would have to be the album cover’s centrepiece, besides taking all the pictures you see of me on this profile, and Sira Ayats (www.siraayats.com), who lent her watchful eye and attention to detail to help design the cover and gift it its appropriate aesthetic depth. Without them both, I could not have finished this, for these elusive insurmountable distances would have escaped me, and I would have seen nothing beyond these 9 tracks of personal anguish and existential questioning caught on tape. Thank you for making this an album.