Testo Part III – Del Water Gap: 2012-2013 (Commentary)

So, going back a few years more, in 2012 I moved to New York City and became really good friends, and later musical collaborators, with a friend of mine named Holden. Holden Jaffe and I met growing up. I went to an all-girls camp in Maine, and he went to the brother camp and we used to sail against each other on Sundays and we recognized each other when we went to college because we were in thе same, like, 30 person group in our music program at NYU. So wе walked in and we were both sort of just like, "How do I know you?" and we got to talking and realized we had a lot of similar taste in music and we had both put out collections of songs in high school and were fans of each other

We decided to start a band, and we were a duo, but we had this amazing band. Will Evans on bass. Charlie Shanker on drums. From 2012 to 2013 we must've played fifteen shows in the span of five or six months which in New York now I know is not a good thing to do because you blow your ability to draw fans if you wear out your friends. [Laughs] But it was just fun. It was the first time i ever felt cool in my life and it was the first time I really felt permission to dream. You know, being in a band is about being part of something bigger than yourself and getting to feel like your creative sensibility is contributing to a greater whole

You know, we used to run rehearsal in the downstairs laundry room in the NYU dorm and rehearsal would be like as long as we could play until we got kicked out. Some days it would be, like, in Holden's dorm room. I remember once Charlie Shanker like trying to play drums while sitting on a twin bed so he was like bouncing every time and we had a horn section at the time and we had the entire horn section on the opposing twin bed and I was sitting on the desk playing banjo and like it was just fun

And this song "New Song" it's literally never gotten a title. It's always been "New Song." Even as Holden and I were speaking about putting this song out it was still in out brain called the "New Song." Um, this was the last song we wrote together. We both felt so powerfully about it. Every time I'd see him in the years afterwards we would both sort of be like, "Remember that one song?"
We were freshmen in college at the time. We were both 18. It was recorded by a group of seniors who needed a, like, freshmen band for their, like, senior engineering project. Somehow someone kept the audio and we had Andrew Sarlow mix it. It was the only one out of all of these songs that we actually had stems for, was able to get a proper mix. Um, and the song was played once at, like, the year-end concert at this venue called DROM. It was not great

Um, you know, Holden and I are still such good friends and fans of each other's work. He decided to keep the name Del Water Gap and still uses it today and is making some of my favorite music that exists. Uh, we decided at the end of this freshman year that we both were really powerful solo artists and as much as we loved being in a band that we had a lot more to discover about what our individual artistic lives looked like