“I wrote and recorded this album while I was finishing undergrad in Los Angeles. In an attempt to explore a mundane situation from different perspectives, I envisioned a restaurant. There we encounter a blind date, a proposal-gone-wrong and a kind exchange between a server and the person outside. The writing process took place during the peak of the pandemic, so the idea of dining out and interacting with friends and strangers felt wistful and out of reach.

I wanted to create various dreamscape-like tracks that weave in and out of the story and shared musical material. I included a string quartet because I was interested in taking musical material from the individual songs and developing it in a chamber music setting. The first song is about a man on a blind date who, after waiting and seeing a failed proposal, decides to leave. The second track follows the woman from the blind date who breaks her phone, causing her to be late. The fourth song is about a server, immersed in the hectic peak dinner-hour environment, who encounters all these people in passing.

The third song is about “The Man From There'', a character I associate with Dostoyevsky’s underground man. I read this book in college and was really intrigued by this sort of bitter outcast. In the past, this type of person might, for better or worse, have been considered a prophet. They are living a different life than everyone around them, free and unconforming, but judged and pushed out. I wanted to avoid the bitterness and imagine a person who embraces their world happily and honestly. This character is a nomad, someone who takes the time to accept the absurd and embrace something greater than the day-to-day of society. In one of the verses, he speaks to a bird whose name he knows, yet all the birds are identical. Something simple, and illogical, like this, is the type of behavior I was interested in exploring. This isn’t a goal or even a truth of mine, but it was an exercise in character study that helped me to reflect on my own aspirations and routines. The couple and the server interact briefly with this character. His song has no material from the other three, to reflect his different perception of the world around him.”

-Theo Haber