Affection by Affection

Any social person who can play an instrument or has a flair for theatrics is going to find themselves in a band eventually, and if you come out of a small to mid-size town with an active diy contingent, you are bound to end up in dozens possibly upon dozens. You will be in bands that never record, bands that never even play one live show, or bands that may exist only over beers as a sort of shared theoretical idea that you will all get around to one of these days. Very occasionally though, you succeed. Not success in a critical or monetary sense, mind you; that’s a whole other thing. No, you succeed in being in a band that leaves some sort of evidence that you were there at a certain time, doing that thing: an artifact.

When starting a band there’s often an initial idea, or some expectation. Maybe it’s a genre you are going to work within, or you’re collaborating with a familiar songwriter. Sometimes you are just out to rip off some other band as best you can and see what happens. Affection was none of those things. It’s one of the few projects I’ve been involved in where I feel like everything sounded exactly like who we were. Andrew, Lloyd, and I all fell into it together without any real concept or thought of direction and, from music to lyrics, it just was us.

I can remember the era when we wrote these songs. I remember our giant old drafty white house and all the people that drank and danced through it for those few years. Like an old photograph can function as a repository of memories, personally this album is a repository in a sense as well, not so much one of memories but of feelings, my concerns trapped in amber: fears of a looming technological dystopian future, contempt for the distant wealthy that seemingly controlled everything in our lives, feeling trapped by pointless and unrewarding jobs, frustration with my friends, with myself. But somewhere underneath was an optimism that it was all something that could perhaps be sorted out, that the dystopian nightmare could be averted.

I was really in love then: in love with my friends, in love with our town, in love with potential. I thought we could, maybe, just maybe, beat the world, and in a sense perhaps we have. Time passes. Concerns change. Affection endures. This artifact remains.

—Jeremy Brasher, February 2021

"( )" wave from Little Rock, AR, circa 2003...

Andrew Morgan, Jeremy Brasher, and Lloyd Benjamin...