Shoemaker, Anna - Back to Pennsylvania

Back to Pennsylvania, started (as so much great art does) in the beginning stages of a breakup in Brooklyn. Anna was weighted down by a sense of stagnation that required the kind of restart only returning home—to your childhood bed and bedroom, your parents backyard—can provide. So she went back to Pennsylvania. She sat at her hometown bar with her dad and his friends. She walked the sidewalks of her childhood. She spent time with her friends whose paths never quite diverged from that traditional, tale-as-old-as-time children’s chant—love, marriage, babies in a baby carriage.

Despite all the shakeups of her life—no more New York, no more boyfriend, an impending nationwide tour with Joe P, frequent writing trips to L.A.—Anna still felt static. But it was on one of those fateful writing trips to L.A. that she regained a sense of motion, writing the record’s titular single. And what was supposed to be a single songwriting session with producer Gab Strum spun itself into 10 tracks reckoning with her new phase of life.