Minneapolis, MN - May 5th, 2025
I was walking along the Mississippi River with a friend last night when the conversation turned towards how my new record was coming along. Then the question, the one I’ve heard so many times since 2017, found it’s way into a prolonged pause between steps - “What does I&R stand for?”.
Truthfully, I’ve never fully had an answer, it started as an intentional obfuscation. When I was making my first record as I&R I had spent the better part of two decades playing in bands. I have a clumsy Quebecois last name who’s pronunciation is musical to a French speaker and awkward to say when sounded out phonetically in English. I’d take this moment to apologize to my family for laying it out like that, but they too have been plagued by endless phone calls from telemarketers making a Pollack painting out of the syllables.
So after far too many lists I chose a couple of letters and an ampersand, meant to capture duality, to leave room for a future in which the songs I created weren’t a solitary experience. I can promise that even in the years of lockdown, making Keep The Sun In Your Eyes entirely on my own, the work that pours out is always shaped by friends, lovers, strangers playing their favorite song with the windows down while they drive by at 3:00 AM. I wanted a vehicle to make art that wasn’t isolating - that always had room for a collective.
I’ll attempt to land the plane on this one by being explicit, there’s no one meaning for I&R. It’s about contrast, contradiction, trying to exist in the space between spaces. Balance. Maybe if I had it to do again I’d try for something easily conveyed in a loud bar, but I made a promise back during those first sessions for Bankrupt City that I would start a project and see it through the years with me. I guess I was destined to be a person who has to say their name a few times before it sinks in. Of the burdens to bear and the gifts to carry, a few extra seconds of communication are alright by me.
But for those that need it, here’s a starting point for your own wandering:
Imagined & Reality
Independent & Recurrent
Interval & Random
Ice & Rain
Intentional & Reactive
Impress & Repel
Improve & Repair
Idle & Run
Ignore & Remember
Maybe it’s just the letters of my home state flipped around or the INRI that hung over the altar at my childhood church. No shade to anyone’s belief system, but it low key stressed out my young brain. The subconscious is a tricky thing I claim to have no secret mastery over, but I suppose I’ll keep trying anyway.
With love,
Josh