December Newsletter: Watching and Waiting

My winter so far has been cold, calm, and quiet. Cold, as I haven’t put up much of a fight against the changing weather. In previous years I’d crank the heat to create a bubble for myself; this year, I’m pushing myself to get more warmth out of exercise and cooking. It seems I notice the cold less every day.

It’s been quiet because I unsubscribed from Spotify, along with a load of other streaming services and apps I barely used. My habit of filling the space of silent hours with music or podcasts started seeming more and more like just that - a habit, meant to quell anxious symptoms, serving more to continue the cycle of anxiety.

In its place, a richness of quiet spaces has been filling my days. There are hums of the fridge in the kitchen; there are birds in the morning and throughout the day. These are tapestries that demand your time to be fully enjoyed; it took hours alongside them before I was able to start settling into them. What I feel in them now is the quiet waiting that I always feel in the time before Christmas. I remember times when I was very young, sitting and watching the Christmas tree, lit up in a darkened room. It felt like a watching, not just a looking, though nothing was going on; its presence felt like a story that was in the process of unfolding, its gifts underneath hints of the future. Like any kid, I very much wanted the tangible toys that were inside those boxes, but the seeds were being planted to start watching a larger story unfold, one where gifts of love come out of the darkness, in forms unknown. 

To reveal some forms you’ll be encountering soon:

As this month will bring us to the end of archival material we can share, and as the following months will have us focusing on rehearsing new material, the following changes will take place to our Patreon in the first half of 2025.

Instead of Archive Sundays, every month we will share 1 full show recording from the archives, newly mixed from the board multitracks. We will be picking our favorites, and your requests, from our 2018-19 tour with Naked Giants, and our 2022 tour on MADLO. Feel free to cite shows you’d like to hear in the comments below.

Instead of Archive Sunday streams, the upper two tiers will get a general band stream once a month, with opportunities for Q&A. (Band’s Delight stream will continue on with random selections.)

Instead of monthly performance streams, I will be posting 2 new songs a month, written and recorded in a few days each, plus 1 rerecorded old song from the high school vaults. We are working on getting a 4-track restored to fully functional; I’ve never used one for recording, and am excited to try it out as a return to the fast-paced, experimental recordings of early CSH. Songs are not guaranteed to be high-quality, but I will try and stick with ideas that feel like good ones.

Thanks for sticking around, and stay tuned for December streams soon!