So, the new Kleenex Girl Wonder album I produced is out today via iTunes, Amazon, and Bandcamp. (You can use discount code “stfriends” to get 20% off at the KGW Bandcamp store.) I am very happy with how it turned out, and I am beyond honored to be working with one of my all-time favorite songwriters.

My history with Kleenex Girl Wonder goes back over ten years — Graham’s early opus Ponyoak is among the defining albums of my teenage years. I have very specific memories of listening to “The Mohican Antler-Yard Alphabet” in the front-corner stairwell of Hunter College High School, thinking about the song-opening lyric “I saw you at the seminar…” and wondering what college would be like.

I found two references to Ponyoak in the second volume of my high school journal: a lyric from “Anne Marie” on the front-inside cover (which, as any fragile and writerly high schooler will tell you, is valuable real estate), and the sensitive troubadour anxiety expressed in the page pictured here. (“I don’t want to be another my girlfriend left me - wah wah wah Lou Barlow Graham Smith poser asshole.”) Note that on the same page, I mention that I should write a song about ”instability, [illegible], boats, blankets, kisses, etc.”

Embarrassing and amusing as all this is, I still relate to the self-important and emotionally myopic teenager who wrote it — and in many ways, I feel like I’ve been writing songs for that teenager ever since. I endured my first-ever major heartbreak on Halloween of 1999, and suddenly I was hearing too much of myself in songs like Sebadoh’s “Willing To Wait” and Kleenex Girl Wonder’s “Tendency Right Foot Forward.”  I tried my best to fight it, buying up Boredoms side projects from Clamazon and writing editorials in my school paper about how “emo kids” should be killed — but for better or worse, this was the music that spoke to me. No matter how hard I tried to show the world that I was cool, that I didn’t care, this music was there to say “yeah, you care. You care a whole lot.”

Nearly ten years after falling in love with Ponyoak, I had the pleasure of playing drums on “Tendency Right Foot Forward” with Graham himself at my own band Get Him Eat Him’s final show at Union Hall. It seemed like a fitting sendoff, seeing as some of the first Get Him Eat Him songs were written about the very heartbreak that had me blasting Ponyoak on repeat, on my headphones, in the hallway of my high school, wondering if some day I would go to college, have a girlfriend, start a band….