Four Corners

Many of us leave our hometowns and say to ourselves, “I am never ever coming back here.” When I was younger, I couldn’t wait to leave Colorado. I wanted to be as far away from the pain of my childhood–marred by poverty and the intergenerational trauma of addiction–as possible. Staying away was a personal survival skill. I moved to New York City at 17 and swore I’d be caught dead before moving back West. But life, of course, had other plans, as it so often does.

In May of 2022, I left for my first solo tour to promote Wild River, my debut LP reflecting on losing my father to opioid overdose in 2019. Halfway through the tour I received news that my mother had been airlifted to the ICU and put on a ventilator with post-COVID complications. I left the tour and flew back to Colorado to care for her, and I’ve been here ever since.

Four Corners is a reflection on the American southwest, the majesty and expansiveness of its landscape, its rich and diverse cultural heritage, and­–for me–the inherent loneliness of the other “home,” our first home, the one we are born into and do not choose ourselves. I started and finished this EP before I left on that tour in May ’22. I set out to write a song about each state in the four corners – Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah – and use it as a creative way to investigate my relationship to the region. Little did I know that it would be precursor, prep work, strange foreshadowing for my imminent return.

The opening song, “Arizona,” is a contemplation on my first trip to the Grand Canyon. I was on tour in my old band Chumped, on the road with Jeff Rosenstock, and experiencing the slow dissolution of my first love, an 11-year relationship with my high school sweetheart and then bandmate. Staring out at the canyon, I felt that devastating mix of possibility and pain. I knew that ending our relationship was the only way to become truly myself, but I knew that kind of expansion would require an intense amount of heartache and the slow erosion of who I thought I was.

“Diné Utah Homecoming Queen” was inspired by Mahala Sutherland, the first Indigenous person to win homecoming royalty at Southern Utah University. Her father attended a government boarding school where he was forced to assimilate and punished for representing Navajo or Diné culture. Her Diné mother was bullied by white children at school. Sutherland competed wearing a traditional jingle dress that her classmates helped her make and dancing an Ojibwe dance rooted in a father trying to heal his daughter by rallying the community to move together. According to the article about her in the Salt Lake Tribune, “She entered the pageant to showcase her culture in quiet rebellion to a time when her parents could not.” My godmother is Ojibwe and Cherokee and I saw the ways she had to relearn her culture and traditions–including making the jingle dress–to teach her own daughter. I was so moved by Mahala and this extraordinary choice, one that inspired her entire family and community, and by the story of collective healing in the wake of the pandemic.

I wrote the refrain to “New Mexico Blues,” the third song, in my sleep. I woke up singing “at least I can still dream of you at night,” and finished the rest of the song that day. The feeling of it is inspired by a night I spent in Silver City, New Mexico, in March of 2020. I was supposed to be on tour when COVID hit and ended up driving across the country witnessing everything shutter down instead. I stayed with an old cowboy in Silver City and we swapped stories by a fire under a crisp, billowing star scape. It was cold and eerie and felt completely surreal. This backdrop became my mindset while I wrote a song about feeling grateful that you can see someone in your dreams even though you will never see them again (at least in the same way) in your waking life. 

Despite the meaning I found reflecting on Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico, I didn’t grow up in any of those places, I grew up in Colorado and thus the thesis statement of the collection is the last track, “Colorado Sage.” When I play this song, I like to preface it by saying that everything in it is true. I really did grow up in a farmhouse on a cattle ranch in the Colorado prairie and we really did pay $100 a month for 25 years. It was infested with mice, and we could rarely afford to heat it all winter. My single mom always struggled to make ends meet.

We were poor and I knew it, but my backyard was 100 acres and in those fields of sage and buffalo grass, I could be anyone I wanted to be. I could dream and escape, I could run, and all I had to do was practice until I could run away for good. Now that I find myself back here, working to define life on my own terms despite the circumstances, I accept that Colorado has always been a part of me. I feel grateful for how the pain of my childhood softened me, how the loneliness of it pushed me to run and dream because the thing about where you came from is, no matter how or when you leave, no matter fast you run or how far you go, it never really leaves you.