After my old band Two Inch Astronaut broke up I wanted a new vehicle for the songs I was working on. I'm always writing and was interested in trying something new outside of the more rigid framework of that band. As time has gone on it has remained a solo project but has become more collaborative. I'm fortunate to be friends with a lot of unfairly gifted people who are kind enough to lend their talents to this project.

Writing is the most fun part of this process for me. I'm constantly writing and whatever I'm working on currently is what's exciting. I think whenever you write a series of songs at a particular point in your life there winds up being some kind of through-line you can pull on, and then you lop them off and that becomes an album.

At first I really wanted to distance myself as much as possible from my work in Two Inch Astronaut, which definitely shows on the first few releases. On Bunny I really wanted to get back to my sort of post-hardcore roots and explore the sound we worked in in Two Inch Astronaut, so now I kind of feel like I've been there and back in terms of my relationship with that band and it had a lot less of an influence one way or the other on Frog Poems. I'm sure there are melodic or sonic habits that I developed in that band that'll always show through in my work, though. Two Inch trafficked in the diy/punk world and that's really the only one I know and therefore the one Mister Goblin lives in as well.

I've been all over the place in terms of both. It used to be that I got rid of any idea that didn't yield anything pretty quickly, and I used to be pretty dedicated to recording everything live in one sitting and really favored analog approaches to tracking. As I've gotten more comfortable with writing and recording I've eased up on being a purist in either field. I think at this point I've written songs so many different ways and recorded in so many different contexts that while I might have approaches that I favor, I can see the value in doing things differently, too.

The criticism I've always heard about Mister Goblin records is that they're "too dynamic" or trying to accomplish too much without a unified sonic purpose or something. Instead of changing that (because I'm stubborn) I think I just tried to do it better. I wanted to make a record featuring all the kinds of songs I like to write, but just have them be better versions of each variety. In that way, hopefully it could feel unified as a project and also like it doesn't all need to neatly fit into one microgenre.

I recorded this record in two separate studios and it was all mixed and produced by Seth Engel. Seth is really creative and was instrumental in helping the record feel united in spite of the different gear/different locations. We took things really slow with mixing and basically tried to run down any idea that anyone had about what might be cool, so there are definitely some pretty bold production choices on this one which I like.

I used to work in early childhood education and I was thinking a lot about models of growth and development when I wrote these songs. A lot of them have to do with traditional ideas about how a human life should unfold and how that's impacted by the context we currently live in. There are a lot of nods to children's literature and other stuff in that zone, like, "Goodnight Sun" being an inversion of Goodnight Moon. "Run Hide Fight" is about doing active shooter drills when I worked in a Kindergarten classroom. Dalton Day who did the cover art is an early childhood educator, so I thought that fit nicely.

I've been rereading a lot of Lynda Barry's work, who is one of my favorite writers or artists in any medium. She's a comic book artist and writes a lot from the perspective of younger people. I think she has such an incredible way of channeling that voice and her work is extremely hilarious and also profound and sad in a way that I'm deeply envious of.

The title of this record actually came from the artwork, which predated the record. My partner showed me the piece and thought it would be a really cool title for the record, and then I wrote the song "Frog Poems," and things just kind of snowballed from there.

"The Notary" is the song that's closest to my heart, I think.