Gavin Castleton

Home is about healing from massive heartbreak

In August of 2006 my relationship of six years was in shambles. My girlfriend had moved out of our house in Lincoln, RI a few months prior. Things had been unraveling for a year, and we finally agreed to try life outside of each other. I was calm when I told her I wanted to write an opera about our relationship and wanted her to write the dialogue for her character. I'd hoped to deliver an accurate and objective depiction of our relationship from beginning to end. In September I left for what would be an emotionally-charged month-long tour with Facing New York. On that tour I recorded snippets and sketches of melodies and rhythms for the first few songs of Home on a digital dictaphone. When I returned to RI, the breakup was blurry. We were together again and not together. I suffered frequent panic attacks. In early 2007 I began arranging the instrumentals for "Bugguts," "Coffeelocks," "Warpaint," and "Stampete." By spring I had begun the arduous task of grafting our jointly-written lyrics to those instrumentals.

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Remaining friends throughout the breakup process proved impossible. As she drifted away, my behavior grew more and more erratic; I could not weather or share her enthusiasm for this new single life. By the end of summer we weren't talking and lyrical collaboration was out of the question. I spent all my time as a recluse in that house in the woods, meticulously drafting the instrumentals for Home while its narrative grew darker and darker. When I realized she had a new romantic interest, the love story metamorphosed to a horror movie. I wrote lyrics for "Layers," "Unparallel Rabbits," while picking through the litany of mistakes I'd made in our relationship - I was on a mission to improve myself.
I prepared demos for nine of the songs and began rehearsing a rhythm section. I was stabilizing; dating and working steadily. From Thanksgiving to Christmas, I tracked drums, bass, guitar, and organ with Rob Pemberton in Providence. On Christmas Eve my ex showed up unannounced at the house and I destabilized. I left Lumas with Erin J. Muir and flew out to Portland, OR to be with family.

I flew back to the east coast in the summer of 2008 to track African percussion, flute, french horn, bari and tenor sax, violin, viola, cello, and double bass with Rob Pemberton. Being back in that house and headspace was clearly afflicting - I began to hallucinate about the ladybugs that were infesting the house. In June, I threw away most of my belongings and left Rhode Island for good. Our departure was delayed due to a blown head gasket (everything seemed as if it was conspiring to keep us there) - but the minute it was fixed I filled the car with my few remaining belongings (clothes, recording gear, computer) and left.
We drove 39 hours across the country (through a tornado even) to Albany, OR, where I spent 18 days tracking grand piano and editing all the recordings in a remote room below my aunt's house. I lost 15 lbs and spent very little money. In June, I flew back to the east coast for a tour with Ebu Gogo. When the tour was over I stayed at Rob's house for a month, tracking vocals and mixing the album. Lauren Coleman flew out from California for five days to record the female lead parts. Brian Cass also joined us to help share the production work load.

I was still writing lyrics to "Beetlemeet," "The Human Torch," and "Credits" during the final week of mixing. The message - the function of the album had shifted so many times throughout the last two years that I was struggling to clarify it. The end of the album finally revealed itself to me one morning in that last week when I woke up on the studio couch to our duet at the end of Warpaint. I wrote "Credits" that morning. "The Human Torch" was the most stubborn --- I didn't finish the last lyric until the final morning of mixing, and I couldn't get a good take for hours, I was a tearful mess.

We mixed and remixed the album right up until a few hours before the mastering date (which we'd rescheduled several times) at Battery Studios NYC on July 10th. I invited my ex (who I hadn't seen since Christmas) to the studio to listen to the album, and she came. I'd never heard it all the way through. I thought it would be the happiest hour in the whole process for me, but it surely wasn't.

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