Me Not You first popped onto the indie scene in 2016 and we have been hooked ever since. In those three short years, the NYC duo – comprised of Nikki Taylor and Eric Zeiler – have graced us with two fantastic EPs – Reckoning 1 and Reckoning 2 – but the desire for a full-length album was strong amongst fans. Luckily for us, the band’s debut, Already Gone, drops today and it is a powerful one.
Displaying the duo’s musical and personal growth throughout the years, Already Gone, encapsulates the essence of channeling grief and joy into one’s art. In honor of the band’s album release, we asked singer Nikki Taylor to delve into the writing process of Already Gone and the journey she took towards making this the band’s best release yet. Enjoy and don’t forget to pick up the album here today!
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The journey of our debut album Already Gone started in the spring of ’18. We had just come off a long tour with Gary Numan, and immediately went back into the studio to begin writing. At the same time I found out that my grandmother, who I was very close with, had been injured and was rapidly taking a turn for the worse. As a result, I spent much of that spring and summer traveling between my childhood home in upstate NY and our studio in NYC — I would go upstate and be totally immersed in caring for my grandmother, and then head back to the city to write.
“Battle Hymn” was one of the first songs we wrote for the album. My whole life, my family has been centered around my grandmother’s kitchen table… it’s where we spent most of our time, eating, drinking coffee, playing games, and chatting. When she first became ill, we all still sat around that table like before. You could kind of pretend that nothing was wrong, even as the path ahead became increasingly clear. The lyrics “To the naked eye / we still look the same / but underneath our skin / everything has changed” are about starting out on that difficult road, and the whole song is a kind of mantra to steel myself for the battle ahead.
When my grandmother passed away in the summer of ’18, I really wanted to memorialize her in a song, which became “Moving On.” I had begun keeping notes of jokes she told because she always had a fantastic sense of humor; even in her last few weeks, she was still keeping everyone laughing. For example, instead of talking about her death, she said she was waiting for the aliens to take her back to her home planet. Or, she always thought it was funny that her online bank account meant her money was “in the clouds” and she said when she died, her money would finally come raining down. So even though it’s a sad song, it’s a testament to her joie de vivre, and I’m really happy with how it came together.
The same week that my grandmother passed away, I found out I was pregnant, which was just a really intense emotional whiplash. I felt like I was careening from grief to joy, and the song “I Don’t Blame You” was a result of trying to navigate all these emotions at once. I wished my grandmother could have known I was pregnant before she died because she would have been overjoyed, but this song is what I imagine she would have said to me had she known — to be optimistic, to look ahead to the positive things in life, and not to dwell in grief.
Ultimately, most of the album was written against the backdrop of these two major life events, some more overtly than others. “Not Fine” is about the experience of going back to “real life” in NYC after being with my family upstate, and feeling like I was still somewhat going through the motions of everyday reality while my heart was still somewhere else. “Sun Will Rise” became somewhat of a sister piece to “Battle Hymn” – while “Battle Hymn” is looking ahead to the battle to come, “Sun Will Rise” took me through the dark night with the promise of better times ahead. “Does Anybody Out There Care” was written when, on top of everything else, my husband and I found ourselves temporarily without a place to live for a month, and I just felt like the universe was conspiring to throw my entire life into chaos; the lyrics are about needing to give up a sense of control and just go with where life was taking me, hoping to come out at the other end of the riptide.
We took a break from writing when I gave birth to my daughter and finished writing and producing the album in the spring of ’19. In addition to the emotional upheaval of that year, we also had some other things on our minds, like the state of our country, which we wrote about in “America”, and first love, which we wrote about in “I Remember” and “Hold My Body.” We had a piece of a vocal for a song that we had initially started that previous summer called “Already Gone” and we re-worked it as an intro for the album since it really summed up what the album was about for us emotionally.
I’m so happy with how this album turned out because it really was a chronicle of the most significant year in my life so far — through the death of my beloved grandmother to the birth of my daughter. Ultimately it feels to me like a testament to joy and grief coexisting together and I hope that others can find hope and even solace in it as well.
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