In the summer of 2019, Maggie, Luke and I seemed to practice every day. All three of us also cleaned houses for her mother’s business, and at night I cleaned dishes at a bar to save money for France. It was a meditative time and one of the few stretches when I strongly felt I’d loosened my grip on a sense of “self.” I used to lay on the grass in the backyard of the dirty apartment I shared with University of Michigan architecture students, simply reveling in a rare feeling of mattering less. I also “got” William Carlos Williams more than ever that summer.

The Raw Honey album Riverbed came out in 2021, but I’d heard this song many times before, in living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens. Maggie was also an early witness of my own songs, by way of her sister Sarah Hopp, my great friend and the co-consciousness of Planet Made of Diamonds Twice the Size of Earth! I learned a lot about playing guitar (and swimming/picnicking) that summer, and was lucky enough to record with them.

This is one of the most resonant songs I have heard about death, and it reaches me in an almost purely poetic space — Trying to remember the dead / Is like wind stirring the riverbed — an opening in which I feel immense gratitude for life and its troubles. It’s always felt like a song that exists a priori, or necessarily, and which was created by a person but is not really hers. I love this song and I recorded this ahead of Riverbed‘‘s release on Life Like.