i moved to portland in the summer of 2010 to get out of the heat and be with a woman. my eyes were going bad and i needed something new. i bought some gear and built a lo-fi, dungeon studio in her basement. i started writing songs for fun, songs i wanted to write. i didn’t care if anyone heard ‘em. that wasn’t the point. i’d spend days in the cave, playing any instrument i could get my hands on, trying to come up with anything that sounded dope. it felt like a final say, like i was dying or slowly disappearing. i was definately disappearing. and if i had anything to say, i should say it now. pop, heavy, slow, big, whatever. i just wanted to write and not over think the consequences. i was tired of thinking. i spent 100 bucks on a series 10 bass from a store on hawthorne. it was the ugliest thing i’d ever seen. at the time, red fang was the only band i knew in portland. and they were busy with their own record. so i said fuck it and played everything myself. i’d walk around my neighborhood and write songs in my head. i’d get back to the house and record. eventually i found my groove and wrote wire. the 10 songs that came after would make up what i now call metamofo. my woman and i were driving up the coast when she leaned into me and said metamofo. “metamorphosis motherfucker… yes, yes i am.” we thought it was funny. then we thought it was good. i wrote, recorded, moved, sang, sung, spun, lost some hair, killed my voice, found it again, broke my bass, and blew through what little money i had. i was totally fucked. and totally alive. i sent a copy of the record to some friends to hear. one of them sent it to another and then another and somehow it ended up in thomas’s hands. he was in ghostland observatory. he listened to it and called my friend jeff to tell him that he wanted in, he wanted to work on it, he wanted to put it out on his label. at the time, i’d come to hate labels. i never seemed to be a good fit. i was always a little off, a little weird, a little late. but this seemed different. his band was different. his whole thing was different. it was almost foreign, yet we came from the same place. ghostland put out their own records, they were never justifying anything to anyone. it was one of those things that i would’ve been into if the idea wasn’t mine. but now it was mine. and that shit was punk to me. eventually, thomas and i got on the phone and rattled off ideas on how to make things work. we talked about bands and music and old philly soul and things we liked and things we didn’t and how for some weird reason this just felt cool. i started sending him tracks. he started laying down new drum parts and synth arrangements. i remember when he called me about wire and said, “i want to make that one part feel more alive, you know, when you say i wanna make it passed the lights..” he sent me a rough of get on a few months later. and the rest followed.