It is with gratitude and joy that I am presenting you with my new album, SWEETHEART. 

When I was young, most of my family vacations were to America’s great National Parks out West. We would fly out, rent a car, spend a few days at one national park, and then my dad would drive us to the next one. These drives would often be over ten hours long. I had my Discman and a stash of Lois Duncan books to keep me company, but I mostly remember staring at the stars out of the car window. There were so many stars compared to back East.

I would squint and look for a star that resembled a tiny key. Then I’d wish on that star. The key in the star would open the box of my dreams, and my dreams were sure to come true.

In the summer of 1994, my family and I moved from Hackensack, NJ, to Ridgewood, NJ. I was eight years old. On our first day in the new house, I remember sitting on the plush white carpet of my mostly empty new bedroom. All of my things were still in their moving boxes, so there was “nothing to do.” Out of determination, I found a small boombox somewhere, plugged it into my wall, and found 103.9 WFAS-FM, the “adult-contemporary” radio station of the time. I think a Mariah Carey song was on. The magical voices coming from the box had me spellbound. It was then that I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

The last time we checked in was in 2019, when Vivian Girls released Memory. A lot has happened since then. I moved back to New York from Los Angeles, kind of by accident. I got a job working the night shift at an Amazon warehouse in Carteret, NJ. I quit drinking. I got engaged. I went back to school and got a certificate, hoping to land in the corporate world. I spent 24 hours in jail. 

I have spent the last few years working as a driver for food delivery apps. I am still working for one of them at the time of this writing. I played two shows in four years: one was in Barcelona, and one was at my rehab talent show. I wasn’t really making music or even planning on making an album. But God has his ways. 

My dear friend and long-time collaborator Dylan White and his wife married in Las Vegas in late 2021. It was there that we came up with the idea of making a record together. 

I had many song fragments that came from one of my main nighttime hobbies during the lockdowns: sitting on the back steps of where I was living, drinking from a flask of cheap liquor, setting small bonfires in these aluminum cans, and singing to myself. I would record myself singing a capella into my phone’s voice recorder—pieces of an idea that came into my head like a ghost. I sent him my voice memos of a few songs, and he began building demos around them.