In March 2014 I released The Optimist, which remains our most popular album in both the physical and streaming worlds. I’d worked on it for a year, recording bits and pieces all over California…Aaron Bishop and Bob Matthews recorded bass and drums in Bob’s LA studio, I recorded guitar at home, vocals in Hayward, and Rick Moore and Kiel Williams recorded lead parts at their studio in Murphys. It was a scatterbrained and beautiful mess, just like the finished product. The genres are all over the place, the subject matter kept bouncing back and forth between a breakup album, a love story, and folksy stories about murder, banjo playing fathers, and drug mules. The songs I thought would connect with audiences most strongly (The Lampolier, When You Come Near, Grindstone) went one for three, while Little Spoon—which I wrote in 20 minutes and only included because Grindstone was too depressing to end the album with—unexpectedly became the most popular song on the album.
Weird and beautiful things continued to happen after the album’s release. The sound engineer & voice over guy for the Adam Carolla Podcast became a hardcore fan of Philip Marshall Cates, leading to me receiving random tweets about Samantha and the word “respite” to this day. Dancing Slow, which was about as blatant a Bon Iver ripoff as I could manage and was never intended to be performed live, became a perfect segue into Moonshine at live shows. Grindstone ended up in some coffee shop playlist in Sweden and ended up getting a couple hundred thousand Spotify streams in a month. And in 2022, when I ran a silly but fun March Madness-style tournament on Instagram seeking to crown Grover’s Best Song, Sick of You handily beat everything else to win the belt. I couldn’t believe it. But also I totally could. It’s a lucky song.
Sick of You is about the doomed relationship that haunts much of the album, albeit a much happier part of it. The relationship had turned long-distance, and been fraught, but a reunion approached and I had high hopes about where it would lead. I got fanciful about growing old together, but I didn’t want to lean on old clichés. One of the strongest examples of healthy, lasting love in my life was the relationship between my mom’s parents, Grammy and Papa. Grammy—okay that’s awkward; I’m going to use her name, Joni, from here on out. Joni grew up in Salina, Oklahoma before moving to Oakland, where she met my grandfather. By that point she’d been married twice before and wasn’t particularly interested in formalities. She spoke her mind, she was the queen of sarcasm, and she never made any effort to cover her Okie accent. Joni was five feet of fire, but when she called my Papa “Sugar” it was the sweetest sounding thing. The type of love I wanted to write about (and, presumably, the type of love I hoped for) was theirs. I wanted to be a fool for my beautifully imperfect little old lady.
Eventually my relationship ended (there’s a reason the album opens with Sick of You but originally closed with Grindstone), and work on The Optimist began. There are a few songs I could probably do without (sorry Dancing Slow and Handle The Lonely), but beyond that I had very few regrets about the album. It’s rare for me to listen to something even 3 years old without cringing, but there’s honestly not much I would change, given the chance. The only thing I really struggled with was my vocals on Sick of You. It was the first song I recorded in that session (I sang the whole album on a random Monday night) and as the engineer and I worked together we came up with some really cool ideas/techniques, but we didn’t hit our rhythm til the second or third song, and Sick of You always felt so timid and immature to me. A bummer both sonically and thematically—it’s a confident, mature song, but here I was yelling “run this town” like I was Rihanna’s hype man.
I realized last fall that March was the 10th Anniversary of The Optimist‘s release, and I’d recently stumbled on The Oh Hello’s 10 Year Anniversary version of “Hello My Old Heart.” Why couldn’t I make one of those? And, since I wouldn’t dare touch The Lampolier or Little Spoon, I might as well choose the one Instagram voted for. And, ya know, if the fact that I’m a much more experienced and intentional singer than I was 10 years ago just happens to solve my issues with the vocals, that’s a happy accident. I recorded new vocals at home over Christmas break, and I also reached out to Marshall to see if he could play something on electric guitar that more accurately reflected our live show. Kiel’s original work was great, but he and Marshall are so different stylistically, it made sense to move towards our band’s current sound. Lastly, I reached out to Jimbo to see if he could provide some of the backing vocals that he’s sang at so many shows. I’d been working with Kiel on another project, so I asked if he could remix this one as well, and here we are. For the artwork, I pulled one of the alternate pieces of album art that Alexis Wagner had made for the project 10 years ago. And, just barely under the wire, I was able to get it scheduled for a true 10-year anniversary release in March 2024.
Much has changed since this song came out. Joni died in an accident in April 2014, a month after the album’s release. I still have the voicemail she left letting me know that the final show of the album’s tour had been published in the Datebook of the San Francisco Chronicle. “Hey sugar, just calling to say hi, and to let you know that your picture’s in the Pink Pages!” It was hard, and it made singing Sick of You hard. But also on that tour, I’d played Sick of You at a bar in Oregon when a woman who’d been otherwise uninterested in my show popped her head up when I sang “When you leave Indiana…” Her friend sensed some kind of cosmic connection I guess, because she found a way to introduce us. We broke the ice by discussing why I wrote the song. And here we are, ten years later, married with two girls, slowly and beautifully getting sick of each other.
I don’t know whether it’s weird that now, when I sing the song, I don’t think much about that failed relationship or Joni’s death. And I think I need to start lying when people ask me if the song’s about Katie…they find the truth so disappointing. But I feel pretty certain about what the song is to me: two gifts from my Grammy. First, a reminder that love works best when it’s an honest reflection of the people feeling it. And second, a small but essential step down the path that, 10 years later, has me happier and more loved than I ever believed possible. And if you want to hear songs about that, keep an eye out for my next album, Hold Tight Together, this summer.
In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy Sick of You on your streaming service of choice, and also consider joining us for an in-person celebration of The Optimist at Murphys Creek Theater on March 15. Get your tickets here. Thanks for joining me on this ride. I appreciate you and hope you never get sick of me.