Andy Jenkins - Since Always Andy Jenkins

Andy Jenkins new album Since Always came from letting go—of self-perceptions, of expectations, of assumptions. Jenkins found space to trust himself as the guitarist for his own songs, and producer Nick Sanborn stepped into a new kind of production role, dreaming up ideas and filtering through them together. There was, in short, a very adult trust to it all, two fans working in tandem to make something; a record where the loss and love, compromise and gain of adulthood come into full view.

Both busy pieces of their respective but intertwined music scenes in Richmond and Durham, Jenkins and Sanborn had been fans of one another for years but had never formally collaborated. Jenkins had spent a few years gathering songs for the follow-up to his 2018 debut, Sweet Bunch; the new ones were intricately rendered odes to the assorted assurances and anxieties that can come with finding some measure of contentment as you cross into yours 30s. Don’t send demos, Sanborn suggested; simply drive the two hours down, and live in the studio for two weeks while spring drifted into the South. As Jenkins rolled through his tracks, Sanborn listened and allowed his imagination to run wild and flooded Jenkins with ideas—rhythmic shifts, keyboard flourishes, vocal effects. There was double-time piano, a mistake dropped into “Too Late” they both loved. There was the Vocoder selection during “Emptiness Is,” a choice that allowed the pair to hang so much of the song on bass and drums alone. There was the sequence that bubbles beneath “Leaving Before,” a mirror of the lyrical nervous heart.

When Amelia Meath and Flock of Dimes’ Jenn Wasner were palling around the studio, Sanborn asked if they would mind singing on a few tracks. That’s Meath on “Blue Mind,” sweetly trailing Jenkins’ lines about being under love’s spell like she’s offering an incantation, and Wasner rising through the static dawn of “Lovesick.” “Andy wanted someone to make decisions he would never make,” remembers Sanborn. “It was this mining operation we got to do together.” As the songs steadily cohered, though, Jenkins insisted it was finally time to drop his guitars. “I have never been a particularly competent guitar player,” he says now with a little laugh, but Sanborn loved the idiosyncratic way his strums sat against his voice, so he stalled. They’d need to wait for Jenkins’ longtime collaborator, an ace named Alan Parker, to come down from Richmond and replace those parts. When Parker did, he heard the same thing as Sanborn—yes, he was more technically proficient, but his overdubs didn’t have the same personality, the same narrative truth. Jenkins relented, so his guitars stayed and anchor the album.