recorded in:
san francisco, california
berkeley, california
san rafael, california
allston, massachusetts

all songs produced, recorded and mixed by tate robertson.
additional recording on tracks 5 and 8 by jordan pories.
additional recording on track 11 by scott thompson.

released by marlowe records, 2017.

this album was conceived in a small madrid apartment in january 2016. that time was probably the first spell of real uncertainty i’d had in my life. i finished school in may 2015, and replaced my high hopes with the banal drudgery of office life. unable to stomach that status quo, i quit my job to “travel” or “find myself” (i can’t remember which, not that it matters much) and set out to leave boston--where i was living at the time--forever.

sitting in that small apartment, having hoofed around europe for a few weeks, i finally found a small window of time to make a beat. in the months prior i’d tried experimenting with wonky synths and fast tempos, trying to become something i wasn’t. it hadn’t been going well. sitting there, a few thousand miles away from home, i tried to return to a familiar place: grabbing a jazz standard, running it through logic and over a simpler, crunchier rhythm section. the result became “goldwatch.”

the theme of using music to return to a comforting place persisted when i moved to the bay area that next month. i was suddenly, finally, thrown out of my comfort zone, and i used my production to make sense of the tumult. i even got back into rapping, an earlier love of mine, to express my uncertainty. that uncertainty found a vehicle to express itself in the depths of my subconscious nostalgia.

the result of this labor blossomed in the span of a few months. i began calling it an “album”, patching it together and sending it to my friends. 24 songs became 17 songs became 12 songs, and rough demos started to sound a little cleaner. now, more than a year after i started, i have a product which i hesitantly (always hesitantly) can call finished. of course, now all i can think of is the next one.

thank you:

dad, mom, tilly, jordan, jon, scott, jimmy, sid, clem, greg, blair, sarah, joey, sam k., blair, morgan, evan, buckets.

as well as:

chet baker, bill evans, dorothy ashby, archie shepp, stan getz, dave brubeck, stanley cowell, patrice rushen, les mccann, dave holland, and many more.