Dear Unknown

A quarantine record about everything you can’t contain

Introductory Essay by Grayson Hobnobskadrom 

Senior Executive Editor, Dad Rock section of Spun Magazine

Fits and starts

Hollow Bodies kicked off 2020 in high spirits. They released their third record, English and Guitar, on New Years Day and played a rollicking release show at the Sunset Tavern.

For the first time, venues reached out to the band to set up shows. Spotify reported that their number of followers increased from 7 to 12. Their friend Travis even described their music as “fun,” skyrocketing the band’s self worth. Was this what momentum felt like?!  Armed with a fresh set of upbeat tunes (including a cover of Hall and Oates’ Rich Girl that made audiences feel the yacht rocking beneath their feet), Hollow Bodies prepared to hit the road.

Alas, the English and Guitar tour shut down after a single show. COVID shuttered venues, splitting an already fractured country into jagged shards. Was it safe to shop at Trader Joes? No one really knew, but they screamed their opinion anyway.

What followed was a year of chaos in stillness. A year of sitting inside that racked up the body count and injustice of a world war. A year spent enduring intermittent employment, tear gas, and a lot of zoom happy hours that were not happy and limited to 45mins on a free account.

And so it was, as the country hunkered down to fight either plague or reason, that our trio picked up their guitars and penned the definitive ode to uncertainty: Dear Unknown.

Together, but separate

In the past, Hollow Bodies albums were essentially recordings of their live performance. Typically recorded over a weekend, they captured the in-room intensity of three musicians bashing through as many songs as possible before studio time ran out. The fast and dirty approach allowed the band to emphasize fun (Dominic), artistic growth (Chris), and keeping the per record cost below $2,830.47 so Anand could invest his remaining savings into a ROTH IRA (Anand.)

For Dear Unknown, however, the pandemic forced the band to adapt. Instead of developing songs through jamming, the group learned to embellish their tunes in isolation. They swapped phone demos and built on each other’s ideas over months. The additional time for reflection resulted in a deeper interweaving of each members’ style and allowed for the lyrics to address the unhinged events taking place outside.  

In contrast to the character studies of their previous records, the songs on Dear Unknown became a catalog of the emotional searching required to survive quarantine. “Take Your Time” languishes in the endless and un-answerable “what happens next” of trying to plan a wedding during a national crisis. The protagonist of “Any Day” breaks down while writing a resume when faced with the impossible task of trying to justify your self-worth in a world where your actions have no impact on unfolding disasters.

Other tracks tackle the absurd political upheaval of 2020. Balasubrahmanyan wrote the lyrics to “Spark” while working as a poll observer in Maricopa County during the 2020 election. He spent the tense days of early voting helping women in their 60s, the majority of whom were named Debbie, run a very organized election process. The song honors the dedication of people who devote themselves to the boring, everyday work of making society function instead of indulging in the easy emotional payoff of histrionic fear mongering. “Rise” was written after a right wing zealot drove into a crowd of racial justice advocates on Capitol Hill and shot peaceful demonstrators. 

But the heart of Dear Unknown are the songs devoted to the power of music itself. Hollow Bodies relied on songs to get through the day - writing to process their emotions and listening to the sounds of other people going through the same thing. “Only in that Song” perfects the band’s blend of shoegaze and country to celebrate how music can conjure the most important moments of your life with a chord change. (Promotional materials claimed the song “married dream-pop and country in a backyard ceremony with like 15 attendees max.”)

“You & I” overflows with the joy of making music with your friends, asking “are we drunk or are we the Replacements?”  

And of course the title track, “Dear Unknown”, meditates on the mystical questions that humans created music to ponder. Both Dewar and Cortese became potential fathers during the creation of the record and the song embodies the hope, fear, and fathomless grace of bringing a child into the fraught  landscape of 2020 America. “Dear Unknown, does your memoir have a name yet? Is the ending what we think?”

How do we record this?

When it came time to record, isolation also spurred a new approach. Because they were unable to record side-by-side, the band jerry-rigged a process where Cortese drummed each song without accompaniment so that the other members could add their parts later. Even though recording solo drums “broke his brain,” Dominic powered through - delivering philosopher rhythms that imagined the songs they would anchor. 

Dewar then took on all the guitar, bass and keyboard work himself. He built a twin amp set up that allowed his chiming strings to bounce between speakers and give a dreamy vibe to the tracks. The additional time for recording also gave him greater room for experimentation, resulting in a dynamic record filled with whispering lulls and widescreen crescendos. 

The final piece was vocals. Unable to get quality recordings at home due to motorcycles revving mad max style up Union Street, Balasubrahmanyan spent months searching for an isolation booth where he could record while maintaining COVID safety protocols. His first stop was the attic of Molly Michal and Chris Day’s Wallingford home. The friends who had helped with English and Guitar vacated their house for an afternoon so Balasubrahmanyan could sing without potentially spreading disease to some of the only people who liked his band. 

While he was able to track four songs, the set up became unsustainable when fall rains arrived and made it difficult for Michal or Day to camp outside. Balasubrahmanyan turned to engineer Jason Lackie, who had been helping the band stitch together their isolated tracks into coherent songs. 

But there was another complication. The pressures of the pandemic meant that Balasubrahmanyan, like many Seattle transplants, needed to move back to the midwest to be closer to family. With a departure date only a few days away, Lackie cleared out his vocal booth for a marathon recording session. Balasubrahmanyan sang vocals for the remaining ten tracks in a single night. 

Due to the rush of recording, Balasubrahmanyan improvised the lyrics to lead single “Young Warriors” after he and Lackie saw that Dewar had sent a demo of the track along with the other files for the session. The result is an off-the-cuff joy, riffing on streaming moguls who dream of monetizing their own rise to cultural ubiquity in a self-produced documentary. Hey, it takes a real genius to add a “+” to the end of a company’s name, am I right?

Dear Unknown...

With a year of turmoil and false starts behind them, Hollow Bodies had pulled it off. The record took back yard practices in the rain, mind-bending drum equations, and basically all of the stimulus money they got from Uncle Sam. Maybe that's what it takes to make a great record.

It’s sure as hell my favorite Hollow Bodies album - and I’m the Senior Executive Editor of the Dad Rock section in Spun Magazine.

Dear Unknown is the record where all the band’s strengths shine. The guitars woosh to life with Dolby-sized grandeur. The drums work miracles, steadying loops and propelling the band to their most cathartic chorus.

My favorite track is the last one they wrote for the record. Sunspots begins with a soft synth line, then builds and builds alongside an ascending melody. The flurry of sound grows as the song’s searching lyrics look for a place “where my soul fills a life with meaning.” Then, at the 3:30 minute mark, the song collapses - dissolving all momentum right when the listener expects an answer. It’s a moment so empty and profound, that it takes me back to the first days of lockdown when I had no words to express my fear and angst. All I had were headphones. 

And thank god for that.

Liner Notes

Vocals and Lyrics: Anand Balasubrahmanyan (Molly Michal co-wrote lyrics to “Ellie’s Daydream”)

Drums and Percussion: Dominic Cortese

Guitars/Bass/Loops/Synths/Organ/ Electric Piano/Mandolin: Chris Dewar

Backing Vocals: Molly Michal and Margaret Erickson

Harmonica: TJ Rakitan

Mix and Vocal Engineering: Jason Lackie (Fastback Studios)

Mastered: Ed Brooks (Resonant Mastering)

Album Artwork: Meagan DeGrand

Special Thanks: Molly Michal, Chris Day, Graig Markel, Ryan Kiley, Jason Miller, Krista Smith