baby, it's cold inside

celebrating the reissue of an ambient deep cut

In 2006, I got my PhD, got married, and moved to California to start a post-doc. I started exercising a lot more. I started eating better. I didn’t miss the eastern seaboard autumn or Massachusetts weather. I had a network of friends who had settled out there before me. I loved the LA lifestyle.

But then, why was I so depressed? It gets dark at 4 in Los Angeles December, and the temperature plummets after sunset. The uninsulated ranch houses in the sprawl don’t protect you from the chill.

A few days before heading out for Christmas with in-laws in Virginia, I recorded a new song in my makeshift home studio. I called it baby, it’s cold inside, and emailed my bandmate Isaac, “I've got to work on making things creepy and not just melancholy.” That wouldn’t happen. But that session’s name would inspire us to record one of our more successful albums. Melancholy would remain our sound, and to our surprise, it resonated with a lot of people, who were probably also brooding in their late twenties.

And this album still resonates. We’re beyond thrilled to announce that Berlin’s Keplar label is re-releasing baby, it’s cold inside remastered on vinyl. It comes out today. Go get your copy!

Originally released in 2008, this would be our second album with the curatorial wizards at Barge Recordings. Our first album with Barge, life-sized psychoses, came out in April 2007, and the Barge guys convinced us to do a little tour to promote the record, booking shows in Boston, Providence, and Brooklyn. I flew out to Cambridge for a few weeks to prepare.

It was the first album we tried to record in Isaac’s apartment, a run down second story walkup in Cambridgeport. Isaac and his partner Ari had separate bedrooms, but Isaac’s room was more of a multipurpose oversized closet fondly dubbed “the bedroom tomb.” It had a loft bed and was packed to the gills with records, music gear, a screen printing setup, film equipment, and stuff gathered off the street. When I moved to California, I left one of my baritone guitars, a direct box, and an overdrive pedal with Isaac. They were buried in the bedroom tomb too.

The bedroom tomb was decidedly more lo-fi than my home studios, but this was part of its charm. Bad cabling or unpredictable electronics or just awkward sitting brought a lot of weird serendipity. We hadn’t made music together in months, but we sat down and things started flowing. Over three sessions in one week, we captured our next record.

On the first Friday, we recorded fucking milwaukee’s been hesher forever, a dreamy accident of one of the built-in delays of Ableton Live. On Sunday, autoshow day of the dead emerged from an exercise of tension around a piano loop. And then the rest of the record came together the following Friday the 13th. We spent an evening leaning into the noisier end of the spectrum, experimenting with more distortion and more grit. The result was a little more warm shoegazer distortion than cold post-rock arpeggios.

We’d go on to play some of these songs during the tour, trying to recreate the vibes. This was the first time we tried to capture the initial improvisations in a live experience. Over the next few months, we threw the many different iterations into a single session, moving pieces around and sending each other clips via YouSendIt and email. Eventually, we patched together baby, it’s cold inside.

Sixteen years later, Keplar emailed us out of the blue. Since it seemed like most music had moved to short-form social media, Isaac and I had been pretty delinquent at checking that email account. Though they reached out in June, it wasn’t until August, when I logged in to get a recovery code for a music distribution website, that we saw the email. We thought we had missed out on a great opportunity. Fortunately, the folks at Keplar were enthusiastic to push this forward, and you can grab a physical copy today.

We hope you like it! The fun years still has an infinite back catalog that we’d like to release eventually. Our motto has always been “from quantity comes quality.” We’ve never convinced ourselves to embrace the social media mindset of constantly posting, but maybe it’s time we do. In that spirit, we’re releasing the original, wistful solo piece on our bandcamp. I’m not sure if anyone other than me and Isaac have even heard this before. We hope you dig it. And who knows, 2025 could be the year we dust off our archives to see what’s still cold inside.