• Remind Me to Remember

• Stay Up

• Come On Doom, Let’s Party

• Eulogy For The Lucky

• Misconceptions On Forever

• I Need A Placebo

• Ruthie

• Rock N Roll Man

• Your Apocalypse Was Fab

• Hymn For The New World

• Emily Wells, composer/producer

• Michi Wiancko, arrangements

• Andrew Cyr, music director

• Christopher Botta, engineer

• Jaclyn Sanchez, assistant engineer

• Katie Hyun, violin

• Grace Park, violin/Concertmaster

• Emily Brandenburg, viola

• Michael Katz, cello

• Evan Runyon, double bass

• Laura Weiner, French horn

• Daniel Castellanos, Assistant musician

• Andrew Cyr, Artistic Director/Conductor

After seeing the image of Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains in the Paris Review I cut it out and put it up in the studio to be in conversation with the work. These songs are about the human being interacting with the natural world. They wish to embrace as much as they wish to critique. I love how Rondinone’s work accomplishes this -- the interruption it poses on the vast silent desert, its playful fearlessness. I want for the songs to be of the same cloth. Thank you Ugo Rondinone for your inspiration & to the project producers of Seven Magic Mountains

This is the first of a three song triptych written in a friend’s cabin upstate. I took myself on an eight day self created residency with some gear, big speakers, my dog and a commission deadline. I lost myself there, listened to so much music loud in the house, David Bowie felt like a visitor on the day of the big eclipse. I listened to old country, and to soul music.

I started a playlist called “For now, Forever” which became a bible over the course of making the record. I needed a sonic home to rest in when i’d gone too deeply into my own rooms of making. I read in a camping hammock out by the pond in the woods each day. I tried to meditate. There was no such thing as silence. I was in the company of gods — mortals who make things with their hands and bodies and voices, Immortals who know how to live and die in a harmony like breathing.

The woods spoke to me each night when the bugs turned out, giving over to their desires, just like they should. I wrote. I cleansed myself in baptism of song each day. And each day the wildness I’ve learned to quell made its way up through my belly, into my chest, my throat pressed. And each day I encountered a form of friendship with all those who had been artists before me, all reaching out to touch this thing we don’t name unless we call it god. You heard the cry and you want to cry back. The “friends” are artists and what they’ve made… it’s just there for us.

My enormous gratitude to Michi Wiancko for getting all the way in the water with me & giving yourself to each of these songs. Thank you to Kate Nordstrum & SPCO’s Liquid Music Series for giving this project life & inception. Thank you to Metropolis Ensemble & to Andrew Cyr for always seeing me, sometimes before I see myself, & making this album possible in so many ways.

Thank you to Jacob Plasse for loving these songs in the tender way that you love songs & helping me to move about them with clarity. To Chris Botta for your enormous capacity to listen, to be inside of it, & to give + your eagle ears. I Neve a Placebo! To Shayna Dunkleman for incredible performances, your golden heart + those 3 fantastic days in my studio.

To the artists of Metropolis Ensemble, you have elevated this record & torn a hole in the ceiling of my ideas of making. To Daan De Bruyne, I’m so lucky. To Ginny Suss, yes forever! To Terrorbird. To Rich Nichols, you are still orchestrating your magic. To Emily Nemens for making album cover dreams come true. To Amanda Horn at Nevada Museum of Art & to Jonathon Lo for graciously lending me this image that I adore. Metropolis + Emily wish to thank Drew Vogelman & Ben Kane, Jennifer Salomon, Francisco Fullana

Thank you to my friends for moving through the making with me. It’s a dance because I have you. To my family for breathing life into the lunacy of being an artist & keeping the heart beating through living a life of it. To my Goddaughter Marlow.

To my listeners, thank you, I hope you know how much I need you. And always, to my companion in life & art, the first & last, Samantha Nye. This album is dedicated to Olympia Wells. The most generous soul I ever knew. 2003-2018.

• Written & produced by Emily Wells

• Chamber Ensemble arrangements created by Michi Wiancko in collaboration with Emily Wells and commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble & Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music Series.

• Andrew Cyr: Music Director

• Chamber Ensemble arrangements performed by Metropolis Ensemble:

• Chamber Recordings at Electric Garden Studio, Brooklyn, NY - Sept 7, 2018

• Engineered by Christopher Botta with assistance from Jaclyn Sanchez

• Additional instrumentation recorded by Emily at her studio in Harlem, NY - June 2017 - Oct. 2018

• Emily on synths, vocoders, drum programming, electric guitar, vocals + live drums: Hymn For the New World & Eulogy For the Lucky, violin: I Need A Placebo

• Live Drums/Percussion by Shayna Dunkleman - recorded Sept 28, Oct 1-2, 2018

• Michi Wiancko plays violin on Your Apocalypse was Fab

• Mixed at Fer Sound by Christopher Botta and Emily Wells - Oct. - Nov. 2018

• Additional mixing, editing, advice & insight from Jacob Plasse - Sept. 2017 - Nov. 2018

• Assistance w/ vocal comping + critical listening by Samantha Nye - June 2017 - Dec. 2018

• Mastered by Heba Kadry at Timeless Mastering - Dec. 2018

• Album Cover: Installation view of Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains, 2016, Las Vegas, Nevada. Coproduced by Art Production Fund & The Nevada Museum of Art. Photograph by Jonathon Lo.