Still | Thanks: An Origin Story
Like we had done every couple of weeks for a few months, Eric, Patrick, and I met in Lancaster to grab dinner, drinks, and talk music. I tried to focus mostly on the first two. I thought I’d had my fill of the latter.
But these two were persistent. A little too hopeful, especially after a couple beers. And me? A little too pragmatic, a little too prescient of the next time we’d meet here and have a similar conversation, with no real steps towards writing music together taken in the interval.
Why not? On the surface, that cliched truism “life is busy.” But personally?
Deep down, I remained convinced that I’d tried this all before. Independent recordings, touring, LA, Nashville. Sleeping in a bus, rehearsing for hours in basements, garages, churches. Starting a corporation, tracking merch sales and gas expenditures, making just enough money to pour into the next project/tour/purchase. Finding other work in order to pay the bills, deciding to move on to other things, other lives.
In that fall and winter of 2013, my friends wanted to talk beginnings. I desperately wanted to avoid the endings.
If hindsight is 20/20, foresight is the middle schooler squinting to see the screen in the front of the room and insisting she sees just fine, thank you. She wants to say her vision is clear, but really, she just doesn’t want to visit the optometrist and get her eyes poked by that blue light.
I thought I knew the inevitable futures, but really, I just couldn’t take the possibility of risk. Even that first step of starting to write required a vulnerability that I was nearly incapable of recognizing in myself.
I avoided the uncertainty of what I loved, citing busyness to cloak my own fear.
And so, like most middle schoolers, I squintingly persisted down the path of least resistance until I was convinced by (in this case, positive) peer pressure. Oh and also, our drunken angel.
One night in the spring of 2014, the five of us were sitting in a booth in one of Lancaster’s Irish pubs. A wedding was happening a couple doors down, and in wandered a rather inebriated middle-aged couple. Without introductions, they asked if we were in a band. At that point, the answer was, technically, no. Yet all of us exchanged a knowing look, that kind of table-wide eye contact and telepathy that occurs in bad sitcoms where characters respond in ways only made possible with a script.
“Yessss,” we answered. “We’re called Gale*.”
And so, it was spoken into existence. ______** enthusiastically asked us question after question about what our music sounded like, what instruments we played, how we knew each other, etc. Since we were now old friends, we accepted the couples’ invitation to crash the wedding reception and her offer to buy us drinks.***
A couple weeks later, the beginnings of Pioneer were hatched at a studio in Nashville and an old church building in West Reading.
For years, I’d only been thinking about where I’d been. It took a lot of persistence, encouragement, and work from these guys to pull me out of the past. I saw, once again, the value of writing, recording, and playing music through lenses other than my own, convinced by the musicians around me that something present could be created still.
So while it might seem somewhat self-aggrandizing to start this series of album credits with a congratulatory statement to, well, ourselves, I know that I wouldn’t be a part of this without these guys. So thank you.
it starts and ends with me
-HG
*House Gale, nowadays. Thanks, doom metal band from Arizona who didn’t exist on social media when we initially checked the name. It’s TOTALLY your fault that it took us over two years to record and release some music. It’s certainly NOT our own procrastination. Be our friendly nemesis, please.
**None of us remember her actual name, because we immediately started referring to her as Drunken Angel. There might be some light to mild heresy in that name, but our intention was to capture 1) the spirit of some of the impressively poignant & encouraging things she said to us at just the right time we needed to hear them and 2) she was quite tipsy.
***This is a WHOLE other story, but I have to state that this night included the groom, whom we had never met, introducing us to some of the wedding guests as his friends. Later, he danced on top of the bar. For the second time that night, I thought I had stumbled into some over-the-top 90s sitcom.











