You Can't Frame a Summer is out

It's out. You Can't Frame a Summer, ten songs, everywhere you listen as of this morning.

I want to say something about why it's sequenced the way it is, because that's the part people skip past and it's the part I spent the most time on.

The record opens with "Rhode Island Timing" and closes with "Every Sweet Thing." In between it goes exactly where a summer goes. Somebody turns up at a moment that makes no sense on paper. It catches. It gets loud for a while — that's "Boom Pop Sizzle" and "Whoa-Oh Weekend" sitting in the middle doing the heavy lifting. Then it wobbles, the way every real one does, and it lands somewhere better than it started.

That's the whole trick. I didn't write ten songs and then go looking for an order. I found the shape first and wrote toward it.

The title comes out of a line in "Receipts," and it's the closest thing to a thesis I've got. You can't frame a summer. You can keep the ticket stub, the sunburn, the receipt in the glovebox — but the thing itself won't hold still long enough to hang on a wall. Every song on here is somebody trying anyway.

A few notes for anyone who cares about the small stuff:

"Gone Coastal" names Midnight Pass, Point of Rocks and the Daiquiri Deck, and all three are real and within a few minutes of each other. If you know Siesta Key you already know that stretch. If you don't, that song is a map.

"Every Sweet Thing" is the last track for a reason. It isn't a big finish. It's the quiet after — the part where you're already remembering it while it's still happening. Ending loud would have been easier and would have been wrong.

"Ticket Stand" and "Out of Focus" are the two I nearly cut, and they're the two I'm gladest I kept. Both are about the ordinary hours. A record that's only peaks isn't a summer, it's a highlight reel.

Every one of these ten has been out as a single already, so if you've been following along you've heard them all. Sequenced together they do something different. That's not me being precious about it — put it on from the top and you'll hear what I mean by the shape.

Thank you for listening to any of it. Genuinely. It's a strange thing to make something in a room by yourself and then find out people put it on in their cars.

Go save your receipts.