How did you document and process a big life change?

While living in Nova Scotia, I made hundreds of hours of field recordings. I captured these recordings without knowing they’d become an album about moving to Canada. Producing an album of any kind wasn’t on my radar. I recorded the audio snapshots as sonic memories for myself—maybe for some interesting audio samples for future sound design experimentation.

After we moved back to Seattle, I reflected on those sonic memories to process the aborted decision to move to Canada and the sadness of leaving Halifax. Conversations I’d forgotten, ambient sounds of places that gave us joy—the audio felt like plot points in chapters of a single story, not just snapshots.

Music from The Books, Leafcutter John, Kayla Painter, Kate Carr, Matthew Herbert, Matmos, and AGF helped me see how audio, like my Nova Scotia recordings, can be musically meaningful. Inspired by their work and others, I took an unconventional approach to making the album (though I don’t know their particular artist processes).

Instead of starting with melodies or chord progressions, I stitched together some evocative recordings into short narratives. To pair with these mini-stories, I found musical flotsam I produced in Halifax—tracks from my short-lived Halitrax podcast, tutorial projects, and mandolin noodles I recorded at home, never thinking I’d use the audio. I arranged ten draft compositions from that material. Six compositions had enough potential to put more effort into it—at least the amount of effort I wanted to give to the project. So “Regretfulnot” became a six-track album.

Each track in the album is a patchwork of memories, stitching together the sounds of life in Nova Scotia with the music that emerged from living there, which is where I committed to learning to produce electro-acoustic music. While the process isn’t one I’ll repeat, the result is an accurate emotional representation of what it felt like to live in Canada and leave Halifax. It will resonate with many people who have had to process big life changes.