released April 19, 2024

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All songs written & performed by Nature's Neighbor

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Mike Walker - electric guitar, vocals, lyrics

Cee Dertz - electric guitar, backing vocals

Will Kyriazis - nord e-piano, synthesizer

Terrill mast - rhodes piano

Lee Ketch - electric guitar

Adam Salsberg - bass

Seth Engel - drums

Jed Lingat - bass

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Recorded & mixed @ Pallet Sound in Bridgeport & Ohmstead in Humboldt Park by Seth Engel & Russell Harrison

Album artwork by Mike Walker

Mastered by Seth Engel

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Nature’s Neighbor has always been more of a studio / recording project rather than a live band. I’m not sure that I can really even refer to NN as a “band” in the traditional sense. In our 10 years of existence, NN has only ever gone on one tour and have played less than 50 live shows. Due to my relentless drive to create new music, I would say that recording has been much more important to me than playing shows. I usually get much more fulfillment from the feeling I get after creating a new song than I do playing it in front of other people. But that is not to say that I don’t enjoy performing live.

It was always hard for me to get a proper line up of a NN live band together. There have been about 6 or 7 different incarnations of the NN live outfit over the last 10 years and all of them usually last for just a couple months at the most. I suppose that is due to the fact that almost everyone in NN is involved in so many other separate bands and musical projects. Seth has been the drummer of NN since its inception and I would never want anyone but him behind the kit when it comes to playing live. Terrill and Will are my guys on the keys, but they both live in different states. Especially now, with me living in Japan, there seems to be little to no hope of the true line up of the NN live band playing a show near you.

That is why I felt it to be extremely important to capture the sound of the NN live band in the studio. This little EP is made up of songs from two separate incarnations of the NN live band. The first lineup is NN circa 2019, during the Wind City Airport era. The second lineup is from early this year and is comprised mostly of musicians that performed on our new upcoming full length LP Projection. These two eras of NN fit together like bread and butter. Both Wind City Airport and Projection feature some of the most raw NN songs stripped down to their most bare essentials. I see the two albums as companion pieces and so combining the live versions of these songs on this EP felt very natural to me.

Both of these live sessions were filmed by our talented friend Rob for his YouTube channel Puddle Splashers, a YT page that serves as an archive for mostly midwestern DIY bands from the 2010s and 2020s. Due to never really being able to play consistent live shows as a full band, I thought it was very important to document the sound of those two separate line ups in the studio and capture the band on film for the sake of posterity. Special thanks to Rob for always being willing to turn up in the studio with his DSLR camera and capture our performances so that they can be preserved for anyone who is interested in seeing how we could “cut it live” as they say.

The 2024 session was extra special for me because it was recorded and filmed during a two week trip I took to Chicago to visit family for the holidays. The songs we performed that day in early January were all from the upcoming LP that I had written and recorded entirely in Japan. It was a long distance recording project. All my parts were recorded in Japan, Seths drums were recorded in Chicago and Terrill and Jed’s parts were recorded in Virginia. Despite this approach to recording, the songs on the album feel as though we were all able to play them in the same room as a band. So of course I wanted the chance to really do that once I came back to Chicago. So I put together a session at Ohmstead in Humboldt Park for early January. Jed and Terrill flew in from VA to Chicago, I picked them up from O’Hare and we then drove to a practice space in the West Side to meet Seth and our new friend Lee Ketch, who was helping flesh out the arrangements by joining in on electric guitar, to rehearse for a few hours. Then we went into the studio the next day to record the live versions of the songs and it was an incredibly emotional experience for me. To be able to perform these songs live in the same room with the guys that played on the record was such a special moment that I will always cherish and I’m so glad we were able to get them down on to tape.

Despite not playing live nearly as much as we should have over these past ten years, I actually really love doing it. I started singing publicly when I was 12 years old and performed live for audiences big and small countless times before it ever occurred to me that writing and recording my own original material could potentially be something that I’d enjoy. I have had my share of bad gigs where there was no crowd or a huge crowd that witnessed me completely blow it, but I’ve also had moments of triumph and transcendence in front of a live audience that left me with an indescribable feeling of having successfully communicated my deepest inner spirit to total strangers. And that is a beautiful sensation that can only be achieved through live performance. There’s also just something beautiful about the sound of a live performance captured in a moment that happened only once and then disappeared into the air like a wisp of smoke.

If you come to Japan, you have a small chance of seeing me play these songs live in solo form, but I’m not sure if NN will ever perform together as a band ever again. And that is why I wanted to put this EP together, so that you can experience the sound of the NN live band in all its unrefined glory.

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