Anthony Savino - Back Before the Fall (2021)

In early 2020, I started recording the songs that would become Back Before the Fall. After the first few sessions, news headlines began popping up regularly about a pandemic. Soon there was a panic in the air. The day after I finished tracking, the city of Providence shut down.
I didn’t know that these songs formed an album until months later, when I first listened back to the mixes. In addition to my recurrent themes of work, money, and consumerism, there were other threads running through these songs: the shock of the events of 9/11; the effects of the 2016 presidential election on family relationships; the uncertainty that comes with losing a loved one. These stories all stood in the doorways between chapters, a surprising reflection of what was happening around me in real time. The old ways were definitely gone, but the future was still uncertain.
The first song on the album picks up where my last album, Good Job, left off: the plight of the worker, set to a strummed guitar. A full band comes in on the second song, and reappears throughout the album. Some of the songs were written on the upright piano that's heard on the album, which was left in Rhode Island when my partner and I ended up moving in the spring of 2020. Hearing its heavy creaks and dark tones brings me back to the before-times, when there seemed to be less uncertainty. Naturally, many of these songs have taken on new meaning since the events of that year. The Old Me is about an experience I had at the mall before the pandemic, but now it also has a layer of nostalgia since shopping and dining out have changed so much over the last year. With commerce and public space beginning to reopen, the before-times will soon be solidly behind us. But time will continue to mark its befores and afters, like it always has.