Brendan Wright: Happy to be here. I'm Brendan. I've been making music under the name Tiberius for a while now — probably the last ten years informally, and then more formally after that. Tiberius is an indie rock thing. It has some confessional elements, some rocky elements. It can be really loud and noisy, or really soft and intimate. More recently it's leaned twangy and folky. It started as a solo project — just my personal songs and feelings — and in recent years has grown into a band and a family of different collaborators in Boston, Massachusetts, specifically the Allston-Brighton neighborhood. It's a lot of fun to write and play music with my pals. That's the bare bones of it.

Absent Sounds: You mentioned starting out on your own and then growing into a band. Was there anything that surprised you about playing with other people that you didn't anticipate when you were working alone?

Brendan Wright: It transitioned toward collaboration near the end of my college career, about five years ago. I'd always been under the assumption that it just wasn't possible for this project. I'd played in bands growing up and had been collaborative in that way, but with Tiberius I never wanted to hand someone a part and say, "You play this, you do that." I didn't want to be a boss. I was very particular about how I wanted things to sound, so I'd rather just do it at home on my own. Then a friend said, "Let me get some people together — let's just try it." I was really surprised by how everyone was so down to learn the parts, but also how excited I'd get when people brought their own ideas or put a little of themselves into what they were playing. As I got older, I loosened my chokehold on the songs. If it sounded good, it sounded good, and I was happy with that. The band has become a much more collaborative process, and I've really learned to trust these musicians and friends. Their ideas are often going to be better than mine, and I've seen the songs grow because of it.

Absent Sounds: I think the idea of control feels especially significant because — and I loved this in the album credits — this is a record about love, loss, and limerence. That's a vulnerable place to bring other people into. Within the process of documenting that pain, did you find it transforming in any way, being part of a larger collaboration rather than going through it alone?

Brendan Wright: I wrote a lot of these songs as a way of coping with a lot of change in my life. The first step was very solitary — making demos at home, doing a lot of personal reflection. Then I brought them to my friends to play and work on, and to work through some of those initial emotions about what the songs were actually about. As I played them more with the band and recorded them, a lot of those early feelings — the rawness and angst — became associated with fun times in the studio and the recording process. More positives than the initial inspiration, I suppose.

Absent Sounds: That makes sense. A lot of times when people make albums — especially about a specific period of their life — it feels like an attempt to preserve a time and place, almost like a memoir. I wonder: for this record specifically, was there a feeling or moment you really wanted to hold onto, even as the emotions around the songs changed?

Brendan Wright: There was a point while writing this record where I was really coming to terms with my identity — how it shifts in relation to the people and things around me, and what happens to your sense of self when those things change. I found myself reverting to something like being thirteen years old: still trying to figure out who you are, no blueprint, everything feeling intense and heightened and scary. I was letting things get to me that I would normally let roll off. I was extraordinarily raw. I think what I was trying to capture was that feeling — that rawness.

Absent Sounds: That resonates with me. I try to write down painful things just to get the rawness of it, and sometimes I find I'm being true to the emotion but not quite true to the facts. I think that connects to the first track, where you say "there's nothing wrong with the truth." That line stood out to me — it felt like there's a difference between truth in art and personal truth. What truth were you trying to make peace with?

Brendan Wright: This record was born out of a lot of intense feelings about some friends and relationships. Looking back, I felt a kind of disbelief at how much I had felt — how much I'd been at the mercy of my own emotions. I think there's some residual shame about the vulnerability of the record. There are parts of it I'm always going to feel a little weird about having written. But "there's nothing wrong with the truth" — sometimes things happen, you feel things, and that's okay. The only thing you can do is accept that you felt it and that it was real, and if you didn't like how it felt or how you acted, try to do differently going forward.

Absent Sounds: The idea I come back to is that when you feel shame about an emotion, you end up making yourself feel bad about feeling bad. I relate to what you're saying. Is there a song on the record where the emotion rang completely true when you wrote it, but doesn't resonate with you as much now?

Brendan Wright: Honestly? The whole record feels pretty removed from how I feel at this point in my life. It was written about two years ago. The songs are of a very particular time and place, and at this point I feel genuinely moved on from that. I feel good about having expressed the emotion, but it's not representative of where I am now.

Absent Sounds: That's interesting, because a few of our questions are about the spatial quality of this record — how certain songs are very pointed to a specific time and place. That brings us to the second track, "Sag," and the Allston-Bushwick pipeline you mention. So — if Boston were to disappear tomorrow, how would that impact your life?

Brendan Wright: If one song on this record still resonates today, it's probably "Sag." That song is about wrestling with the idea of greener pastures — "greener pastures" ironically being the concrete jungle of New York. Boston, for me, is the people and community I have here. I love the place, but the reason I'm here is definitely not the city itself — it's because of the friends who have become my family over the last five or six years. I'm hugely influenced by the musicians and people around me. If Boston disappeared tomorrow, I'd be heartbroken — unless that network of people mapped onto some other city in its place.

Absent Sounds: There's also a line in that track — "why do I keep trying, why do I try to keep on trying" — that I wrestle with a lot. Even if it's not exactly what you meant, I feel like there's a particular kind of pain in effortful hope. Trying means you're still in it halfway. My co-host actually wrote something about this — not about the end result, but how there's change and transformation in the act of trying itself, separate from whether it succeeds. That's what the line brought up for me. What's your relationship to that — going up to bat again in spite of the exhaustion?

Brendan Wright: When I was writing that song, I was hyper-focused on how I was being perceived in my community — not even how I was actually being perceived, but how I *thought* I was being perceived. Especially with a solo project, I think you can conflate your personal wellbeing and your worth as a person with how you're seen as a musician. That can get pretty toxic. The lines between identity and creative success blur in a way that becomes really uncomfortable. I was measuring my value on a system I shouldn't have been on. The "trying" in that song was really: I have to stop trying *with this thing*.

Absent Sounds: What does the measuring stick look like today?

Brendan Wright: If I'm happy creatively, and if I have a community of people I can turn to just to be pals with — that's more what I'm looking for now. Prioritizing friendships and relationships above other things.

Absent Sounds: There's this idea I've been sitting with: if you chase butterflies, they'll keep flying away. But if you build yourself a garden, the butterflies will come to you.

Brendan Wright: That's really sweet.

Absent Sounds: Everything you just said feels like it flows directly into track three, "Felt." There are a few songs on this record that feel like they're about dragging your feet — movement with weight to it. It's my favorite track. I'd love to hear about it and what sensations you wanted to leave listeners with.

Brendan Wright: This track was about distraction. Throughout the whole record, I was in a place of real insecurity, and instead of sitting with and addressing those insecurities, I was looking for any distraction I could find. Around this time I was starting to date again after a while of not dating, and the song is partly about that — stepping into distraction. It's interesting to go and meet a stranger, spend a few hours in their life. Because you don't know them, it's almost like stepping into someone else's TV show: you get to know their stories, their world, and it alleviates whatever's going on in yours. And then you leave that meeting and you're back with your own problems again. Using other people to escape from yourself for a little while.

Absent Sounds: One of those levels, to me, seems to come through in the story you insert mid-track — the woman who drove across the country. I'm guessing that might be someone you encountered during that time?

Brendan Wright: Yeah. I met someone who told me a really fascinating story, and I took some creative liberties with it. It felt like those moments in a TV show where the camera quality changes and you step into this other place — you don't really know if it's real, but it doesn't matter, because in that moment it's real to you. And it happened to fit into the larger theme of trips and places that runs through the record. A happy accident — it ended up previewing some of the journeys that come later.

Absent Sounds: It might not be real, but it is your reality.

Brendan Wright: Yeah, exactly. You get it.

Absent Sounds: Track four — I wasn't sure if this was coincidental or intentional, but it rhymes with "Sag," and the image of "pretzel sitting" comes back, along with other threads from earlier in the record. I found it very interconnected. There's something in this track that feels not sacrilegious exactly, but more like a painful, childlike sense of spiritual residue — the childhood belief in love, the way certain things wear off or go a little flaky with time. There's also the guilt and shame that keep surfacing throughout the record, which I think ties into how certain people, especially within traditional faith, carry a lot of guilt toward themselves and others. What are your thoughts on working through that within this track?

Brendan Wright: Shame is something I've had to come to grips with more as an adult. I come from a very Irish Catholic family — my parents aren't particularly devout, but certain ideals got baked into my upbringing around guilt and shame. I don't think that was ever my parents' intention, but it was there. I carried a lot of shame around things like promiscuity or casual relationships — or this idea that every interaction has to be some grand, capital-L version of Love. I can be a capital-R Romantic person; I idealize things. As an adult, that's put me in some conflicted places. I have a fully developed brain, but these older things make it hard to fully embrace who I am. This song touches on some of that deeply rooted shame. I also want to say — it's fascinating to have someone sit with this record and draw out connections I didn't even realize were there. A lot of it was clearly operating at a subconscious level. Thank you, genuinely, for taking the time to listen this closely.

Absent Sounds: That actually connects to something you just said — being a capital-R Romantic, and having to let go of that. Because in "It Has to Be True," there's a deep ache to it: the disillusionment with the beauty of life, looking for something beautiful and finding a hole instead. How do you balance that — being the balloon *and* the string? Not always in the clouds, but holding yourself down a little too?

Brendan Wright: That's a really good line. I think what I'd find later in this record — and this album was written in roughly chronological order, unintentionally — is that there's a lot of beauty in radical acceptance of what is, rather than searching for what you think it's supposed to be. At this point in the emotional arc of the record, I was very much looking for the beautiful thing I imagined rather than the beautiful thing that was actually there. That's something I've tried to work on. But we all get caught up in that, no matter how mature we are. It's part of being human.

Absent Sounds: I find it really interesting that you said that about this specific point in the record, because there's a line — "I'm the one who loves" — that reads almost like a mantra. Something really poignant about naming yourself that way, identifying as the lover, even when it isn't reciprocated.

Brendan Wright: At that time, "the lover" was a central part of my constructed identity. I always had to be the one who loves.

Absent Sounds: Do you feel like you've shed that? Or are still shedding it?

Brendan Wright: Maybe. Possibly.

Absent Sounds: Track six — this one felt like another coordinate of significance. What's your relationship to Moab?

Brendan Wright: I was on a trip when this song started. I'd had a bit of a creative block, and this was one of the first songs that started to come out on the other side of that. I happened to be in Moab at the time, so I wrote "Moab" in my notes app and the name stuck. The song is about letting go — trying to let go as much as possible. That can be painful, it can be cathartic, and sometimes it's both. I wanted to write a four-chords-and-sing-your-heart-out kind of song.

Absent Sounds: I really loved the back-and-forth you do in it — "I could, but I couldn't / I can, but I shouldn't." It reminded me of this concept I've been sitting with: the window of tolerance. When you're letting someone go, how much of their orbit — a mutual friend, a possession they left behind, a place you both knew — can you let into your field before you crash out again? Do you know your own emotional tolerance level well enough to identify that threshold?

Brendan Wright: Yes, I think so. And this song is basically crashing out, honestly — this whole record is kind of crashing out the record. I think I generally have a pretty large window of emotional tolerance, but having a large window isn't always a good thing. I can withstand more than I need to. Being able to say "I know I can take more, but I don't have to" is something I've had to learn — I don't deserve that. And there's a point, with certain relationships or friendships, where it's better for both people to just step back. Sometimes trying to solve every problem is more destructive in the long run.

Absent Sounds: I used to think that if I didn't finish the argument, if I didn't drink the pain all the way down to the dregs, I hadn't fully completed the action. I think that's also what comes up in the record — "to the bone." I kept thinking, *you're sucking the love to the bone, like marrow.* Which sounds really painful.

Brendan Wright: That's another one of those lines I'm not sure where it came from. It just came out.

Absent Sounds: I wanted to mention a line in "Redwood" too — "you don't love me anymore / I don't think you ever did." We both just went: *oh.* That was my second favorite track on the record.

Brendan Wright: I think that line speaks to a feeling rather than a fact. Everyone's felt that at some point — so hurt by someone or something that you feel completely devastated. Listening back, I think: *damn, I was upset.* I know someone in my life who's a big exaggerator — she'll say we waited in line for three hours and I'm like, it was maybe forty minutes. And she says, well, it *felt* like three hours. That line is like that. Speaking to the emotion rather than reality.

Absent Sounds: I also think the tree in that song functions as a stand-in for intimacy. Which made me think about how we store people in us, and how the pain of someone sorting through you is also reflecting the pain of an earlier, younger version of yourself. What made a redwood the image for that track?

Brendan Wright: I had recently seen redwood trees for the first time in my life. Have you ever been to the redwoods?

Absent Sounds: Never.

Brendan Wright: They're enormous. You can step inside them. They felt very spiritual, very protective — like the gods of the forest. Something about the redwood said: *you can step inside and I'll be your home. I'll protect you.* That was the first draft of the idea, I think. I'll be honest, I hadn't thought about it much until just now. It's a good lesson I keep having to learn: the harder I try to be deep and prolific, the flatter and duller it sounds. The things that feel right in the moment — just going with it — are often the ones that mean the most to other people. Someone else says "I think it meant this," and I'm like: I just thought it was a big tree and that was cool.

Absent Sounds: I love that, actually. Some of my favorite songwriters always have these incredibly specific, mundane details in their songs. It means so much precisely because it's not trying to be obscure.

Brendan Wright: Yeah, exactly.

Absent Sounds: That pairs with another tree track — "Painting of a Tree." How is this tree different from the redwood?

Brendan Wright: I was going through some loss at the time, and I talked to a man I worked with — an older guy, a bit kooky. Sometimes he'd say something and I'd think, *what are you talking about.* Other times he'd say something and I couldn't believe how wise it was. I asked him one day how you deal with heartbreak. He laughed and didn't say anything. A while later he came back and said: "I've been thinking about your issue." He told me that an artist can't paint a tree unless they've fully looked at — fully examined — every aspect of it. I didn't exactly know what that meant at the time. But I started writing a song about coming to terms with all the loss and relationship changes I'd been experiencing as part of the human condition. It also came at a point where I was trying to just slow down — stop distracting myself, stop running, and actually sit and be in my body. Nature was really helpful for that. Not the magnificent, magical redwoods, just regular everyday trees on the road. That might be the difference between the two: the redwood as the tall-tale tree; "Painting of a Tree" as the ordinary oak you walk past every day.

Absent Sounds: I hear that sense of fully knowing loss in tracks like "Losing Your Bike Fright" as well. And then there's "Barn," the closing one, which feels so vulnerable that sometimes with songs like that I think: I could never sing this. There are songs that feel like they're commanding you to *move on already, don't think about it* — which I completely disagree with. But it feels like you did the opposite. You really captured what it means to feel the fullness of something. I didn't fully appreciate how much love I'd felt for something until it was gone, and I think that's most people's experience. Do you think it's possible to appreciate things without having to lose them first?

Brendan Wright: I think yes. I try my best to take moments to really reflect on all the good in my life — the good and the bad. Taking stock of the relationships you have, choosing to be appreciative of what's in front of you, letting people know that, trying to see the best in everyone while you have them around you. And I think that can also help you lovingly release the people who aren't serving you anymore. Rather than big falling outs, you can just choose to spend a little less time with them. It helps you prioritize. I just feel so appreciative that you listened to the record, took the time to think about it, and asked all of this. You definitely got me thinking. Thank you.