What I love about Kasey Anderson is what you will undoubtedly grow to love about Kasey Anderson as you sink into the world of this record, and I say world in a way that is urgent, and not flippant. There is a world within The Places We Lived and the magic of that world is that it is already yours, in a spiritual sense, at least. Kasey is the kind of writer who writes of a place with deep specificity, but leaves a wide enough doorway for you to enter, to find something familiar. In that way the We in the album’s title has already wrapped you in its arms. The streets the writer walks are streets that are not, wholly, unfamiliar to you, just due to how brilliantly the streets are rendered within the record.

And more than the songs, of which there is much to write, I love Kasey Anderson not just as a writer and song-maker (though there is much to write about that affection, too) but also as someone who works and makes with a real depth of intention. The Places We Lived is not only a labor of love, but it’s a collective labor. Friends are present within the work. A tapestry of people from Kasey’s life over the past two decades came together to make this record possible, to give it a good life. Kurt Bloch, and Eric Ambel, and even the writer of this very album bio that you are reading, among a large host of others. And this, too, is why the album feels like it is an invitation. It sounds like a miracle long in the making, with a bunch of people also chasing the same miracle. Because it was. The album began in April of 2019, and then stopped, and then began again in 2020, and then stopped, alongside the world itself. And then began again in 2021, and then began again, and then began again, and now you get to experience it as intended. In the process of making this record, there was loss, renewal, grief, and pleasure, and it all vibrates within the work, radiates from the songs.

Kasey insists that this is it, the end of a career – or at least “career” in the traditional sense of a musical career in which one releases albums and tours and promotes and commits to the entirety of a cycle. And so it is fitting that The Places We Lived nods back towards Nowehere Nights, a 2009 album steeped in the same kind of storytelling: deeply personal, open, and vulnerable. And so, on the way out, and album that acts as a sort of sequel, one that faces the passage of time thoughtfully, and the joys and anxieties of moving down a road that is being built as you move upon it. But at least you get to move upon it with your people alongside you. I suppose that’s the message at the end of it all. It’s a long road, life is very long. But the good news is we get to do it, and the better news is, we get to do it together. And so we take a step, and see what happens.