“You can never go home,” sings Matt Sheehy during the climax of “Afraid of Summer,” a familiar warning on the dangers of revisiting the past. It’s one of several songs on DRRT—the 2012 debut album from Sheehy’s band Lost Lander—that grapple with finding one’s place in the universe and locating the balance between past, present, and future.
Music is a purpose-built nostalgia machine—our favorite songs demarcate emotional rites of passage like rings in tree trunks. So it’s a surprise and a relief when revisiting Lost Lander’s DRRT to discover that it’s deeper, darker, more desperate, and more resonant than remembered. The raw undertones in Sheehy’s songwriting have only grown in complexity over time.
When calling Sheehy out of the blue to talk about the album, he just happens to be on a walk with DRRT’s producer, Brent Knopf (of Memomena and El Vy). Back then, the two spent months turning Sheehy’s rough demos into DRRT’s expansive, art-rock panoramas, often with just the two of them fleshing out sounds, while also enlisting more than a dozen friends and collaborators to add to the canvas.
“It was very nomadic,” remembers Knopf, who was also playing with Sheehy in the band Ramona Falls at that time. “It was very mobile. We used it as an excuse to go somewhere and record in a new space. One of the places we went was Cannon Beach—we holed up in [their] convention center and used the upright piano. At that time I was making a bunch of music with just a laptop, headphones, and backpack. We used that approach for the making of DRRT.”
A different session included introducing themselves to new-to-town drummer Dana Jennsen (Dana Buoy, Akron/Family), immediately setting up microphones in his basement, and having him play along to several songs, sound unheard. Many of those takes are on the 2012 debut.
“The main thing I remember from that time period is just how much of a paradise Portland was for artists,” says Sheehy. “I’ve wondered if that was the time of life that we were in or if there was something special about the city at that time—or maybe both.”
Sheehy’s previous effort, 2008’s solo album Tigerphobia, features luminous beds of acoustic guitars that feel at home in a coffeehouse or around a campfire. Vestiges of the project’s folk-inflected sound can be heard on DRRT, but it’s leavened by purposeful electric guitar, fuzzed-out bass lines, drums lightly traipsing or heavily thundering at the appropriate moments, and the occasional orchestral flourish, all topped with Knopf’s sophisticated array of keyboards.
“The whole approach was: How can we move around? How can we capture special moments?” says Sheehy.
For DRRT’s rollout, much hay was made by music journalists (this one included) of Sheehy’s day job as a forester. It was a convenient hook on which to hang descriptors of Lost Lander’s sound—one of introspection and exploration, of both interior and exterior discovery. It was easy to imagine Sheehy conceiving DRRT’s reflections on mortality and the grandeur of the universe while roaming deeply in the woods of the Pacific Northwest, where old-growth trees conceal ancient mysteries and constellations peer down from overhead.
“There was this idea that got latched onto with DRRT, [one] of mixing the synthetic world with this very earthy, sort of, soul—[an] acoustic-guitar-in-the-forest kind of thing,” says Sheehy. “I do think that that was real, but I also feel like there’s a theme that I have stuck with that I don’t think was fully articulated on [the] record. It’s more about a sort of dichotomy between the machine and spontaneity—or the spirit world. Not to get too woo-woo, but in a Joseph Campbell way.”
That rough theme of a natural world colliding with a technical one (the CD package folded out into a make-it-yourself planetarium, flashlight not included) coincidentally came at a particular inflection point in Portland’s music scene when the movement of chamber-folk bands like Blind Pilot and Loch Lomond were ceding way to more digital-oriented, synthier ventures like Blouse and Onuinu.
Related: Read the Mercury’s review of Charlie Hilton’s—lead singer of Blouse—new album, River of Valentines.
More personally, DRRT marked major shifts in Sheehy’s own life: His mother had recently passed away, and he went through a major breakup right as the sessions were concluding.
“I think we were one or two weeks away from mixing,” says Sheehy, “so we were about to really be in crunch time—and [my fiancée and I] broke up. I was like, ‘Hey Brent, can I sleep on your couch?’ We even recorded a B-side in Brent’s basement while I’m using his couch like ‘Heartbreak Hotel’.”
Knopf, too, was dealing with turbulence in his own life at that time, including conflict with the other members of Menomena. “We get along a lot better now,” he says, “but at that moment in my life, it was a very difficult time psychologically for me—the Lost Lander record was this incredible catharsis of just being able to salvage music out of something that was more fun.”
Despite interest from labels—one European label adored the album but demanded a song be removed—Sheehy opted to self-release DRRT in January 2012 following a successful Kickstarter campaign.
More than 100 live shows followed that year, with Lost Lander morphing into a live band that included drummer Patrick Hughes, bassist Dave Lowensohn, and—significantly—keyboardist/vocalist Sarah Fennell, whom Sheehy married in 2016.
A second Lost Lander album, Medallion, came in 2015, followed by 2019’s Aberdeen—both a theatrical piece and album.
Sheehy is in the early stages of what may become a new Lost Lander record, and Fennell is playing shows around town with Night Brunch. Knopf’s new project, Port Velvet, has several singles on Bandcamp and a show at the Alberta Street Pub on September 4.
If it’s true that you can never go home, there’s always the idea that you can set up your tent somewhere new—much like the philosophy behind DRRT’s on-the-go recording sessions and its pop-up universe inside the CD’s package. And if DRRT’s worldwide impact didn’t match its more localized one, it remains a totem of a particular time and feeling in Portland’s musical timeline.
“I am tempted to just be very existential right now and say that I don’t really understand how the world works in general most of the time—I don’t really know what success is supposed to mean,” Sheehy reflects. “Brent Knopf is one of my favorite artists of all time, and he agreed to produce [DRRT] and co-write some of the songs. I guess I feel like I achieved a lot of dreams with that record—I got to live these peak experiences with these people that I love very much, and it was all because things came together around [DRRT].”