Rishikesh Hirway

I was stuck somewhere around 2012.

The last 1AM Radio album came out in April of 2011, actually almost exactly 15 years ago.

And that was my fourth album and I'd been doing it for over a decade.

And it felt like the project and my music had kind of grown in this slow, incremental way.

And maybe that was normal, and maybe that's fine and healthy, but I really got in my head about it, because for the last few years, I had finally kind of achieved having music be my living.

What I had dreamt of, being a musician full-time, I had gotten there a few years ago.

And as exciting as that was, it also changed my relationship to music and what my expectations were and sort of what the pressure was, because now I'm just trying to pay my bills with it and not just like the bills today, but also could I pay the bills tomorrow and the month after that?

So I felt like I really needed this to work beyond just from an artistic level.

I was like, well, this is now my job.

How am I going to do this?

And I

put a lot into the fourth album in terms of expectations of like okay maybe this could be the one that goes maybe this could be the one that that changes what tier of artist i am or something like that and then that didn't end up happening we got to do cool things and i got to play some great shows but it felt like an incremental change as opposed to an exponential one

So that just felt like I couldn't see a way forward after that.

I couldn't see a way forward rather to that exponential changes.

Like I just put all of that.

It took me four years to make that album from the previous album.

Maybe that's it.

Like maybe I can't do expect anything else.

Maybe I can't do any better than this.

And it's just going to continually be just like an inch forward, an inch forward.