something new this way comes...

my new single, Nobody's Baby, drops Nov 7th!

I have done everything but what I was supposed to do today. I cleaned my kitchen. I picked up things that have been in the same spot for months, decorative things, and scrubbed the tile counter beneath them. I thoughtfully rearranged gourds that I guess I’ve subconsciously decided to never eat. I cut up apples and crushed cinnamon and put them together for a day-long slow-boil on the stove. I replaced my water filter. I repotted a plant. I did one solitary squat.

All because……………….. I am getting ready to release new music.

Nobody’s Baby comes out this Friday, November 7th*. You can pre-save here. (And please do. It really does make a difference for the artist.)

*This date was changed from 10/24 do to a technical error on the distribution side of things.

I’ve been playing the song live for the better part of the year.

I went on tour in the Spring with an Irish musician named Orla Gartland who I absolutely fell in love with. Her and her entire band, actually. Saz, the drummer, is a true life force, and a nostalgic open-wound who is deeply obsessed with The Manic Street Preachers, a Welsh rock band from the 1980’s. She would force us to listen to their entire catalogue the moment that alcohol entered her bloodstream. Then there is the inimitable bassist and keys player, Scarlet, a tall and slender musical savant who ripped heaters with the tour bus window cracked while we chugged steadily from town to town in the dead of night. Then, Orla. So talented and kind and original. One of the most expressive voices I’ve ever heard, singing songs with lyrics and melodies that leave her listeners better than she found them.

When you open for other artists you often are asked to make concessions on the size of your band. I trimmed the performance down to just myself and my multi-instrumentalist best bud, Gage.

Touring as a two-piece is a great way to become a better musician. There is very little to hide behind. No roar to hide a bad note, no cacophony to mask a botched solo. It’s also an interesting opportunity to reimagine the songs. Gage and I spent months composing a two-person arrangement of about 8 songs that have 40+ tracks on them. He used a Fender Jaguar to get the low end while also keeping the chug, and I switched to a hollow body for a resonant mid range sound and the occasional shred.

I am lucky. I have wonderful fans that travel for shows, that sing as loud as they can, that stick around to say hi afterwards, that show up wearing the merch, and show up for me. I love playing all of the songs I’ve released as FIGHTMASTER live.

It was an adjustment playing the new song live. Suddenly people aren’t singing along. They are listening. Do they like it? Are they bored? Have you given away too much personal information in this one? There’s a significant amount of time spent in my falsetto, a part of my range which has always felt very intimate to me. And, of course, there’s always the content. I think you’re going to miss me….

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When we were prepping for these shows, Gage really listened to “Emmett” for the first time. That’s a song I can’t believe I got to write. It came to me in one sitting, like some divine message that I was finally ready to receive. And just in case you think I am tooting my own horn, it’s not the quality of the song that I am talking about. The thing that makes that song so important to me is that it felt like a perfectly nuanced distillation of over a decade of grief and confusion and estrangement and disappointment and longing wrapped in one angry, gentle, desperate love song. A song from my inner child to me. A song from me to my dad. The song feels like The Odyssey of my own life, an epic poem that lead me home to myself, and to my dad, after a very, very long time apart. My dad has heard the song. He excitedly told me after our show in Ohio, “I love the dad song!”

Maybe it’s not too late but life’s proving shorter than I realized,

Maybe there’s still a way to honor the story without a reprise,

Maybe it’s not the ache that hurts anymore, it’s the lack of the ache

Did you know I changed my name?

But only the first, I kept ours the same.

Sometimes when I sing “Emmett” I get trapped in a memory. Sometimes the lyrics get caught in my throat. Sometimes I can feel the honest impact of a heartache that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to avoid.

When I look out at you all, and I see that the song has taken on a new life in each of your bodies, and has incorporated your memories and your heartaches, I come back to my own body and I feel the gratitude of getting to perform art that feels so personal to me, and simultaneously, so personal to you. That is an exceptional thing. I hope for you that you have a moment in your life that you get to experience the level of honor and gratitude that those moments bring me.

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I digress.

Nobody’s Baby, the new single, comes out at the end of this week. I coproduced this track with my friend Gabe Goodman, the producer of one of my favorite songs, “An Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” by Del Water Gap.

The new single, to me, is beautiful. Fiddle and banjo and warm acoustic guitar and a bass line that moves with agility and sway. The drums were laid down by Jorge Balbi, the drummer for the legendary Sharon Van Etten, and I swear he plays the drums like they’re strings.

Like Emmett, Nobody’s Baby came to me in one sitting, spilling out like a poorly kept secret I apparently could not wait to tell. It is a playful and painful love song that captures a feeling that I think we have all felt. But, I will not over-describe the meaning. I want the song to have its own unique journey with you. Once she is released, she is no longer mine.

I cannot wait to hear your thoughts. I can’t wait to experience your reactions. I don’t make art in a vacuum. I make art for myself and I make it for you. This, the release, is the important part. This is the moment I pull the blinds and let the light in.

There’s so much more to come. For some reason Substack feels like this weird safe space for me to actually talk to you all about the project and the band and what’s next. I don’t feel like I am sending my thoughts into the void here. Here I feel the way I do when I am on stage and I am singing the lyrics and I look down and you are too.

I say this only to you, Substackians: Next year is going to be prettyfuckingcool. Nobody’s Baby is the start of the very cool thing, the beginning of the next chapter. Let me know what you think. <3

All my love. - ERF