OK people! I'm releasing my first single on Dec. 6. It's called “Lucky Breaks.” Actually, a nuance: it's releasing on all the big streaming services that day, but actually, I've already made it available on my website and you can stream or download it from the main page. You came to the right place!

This song grew out of my work on writing music to pitch for TV and film. I wrote it to submit to a brief asking for songs that would fit on a playlist with artists like Wilco and Slow Pulp and Dope Lemon; all of the songs given as references had this sort of semi-charming, self-deprecating bleakness about them. I wanted to try to capture my own version of that emotion.

So I wrote “Lucky Breaks” about the feeling of impostor syndrome that comes with being an adult. How did I get here, and how it it possible that I'm the person in charge of my own life? I was asking myself, "what would my teenage self think of my life today"? 

There are a lot of things about my life so far that would have really impressed teenage me. I've traveled all over the world, eaten ramen on the top of mount fuji, gotten my picture taken at the south pole, etc etc. 

There are some other things that teenage me assumed I would have done - skydive, write a novel, get a Ph.D. - that I never have gotten around to. 

So have I exceeded my own expectations? Have I let my younger self down? And how much do I care what a long-ago teenager thinks of my life right now? So this song lives in that place of self-reflection.

Oh: This song didn't get chosen for the TV/film brief. But I was still proud of it and I thought I should share it with the world. In particular I felt like this was the first song I've made that really sounded polished enough to be considered “radio ready.” When I decided on Tallfellow as my artist name, I needed to release a song to claim my profile on Spotify and Apple Music, etc, and this one was naturally on top of the pile. 

A note about the cover art. This is a photo of the heat-resistant tiles on the underside of the space shuttle Discovery. I took this on a visit to the Udvar-Hazy air and space museum outside Washington, DC. There was something about these tiles that I felt really connected with the voice in the song. They are scarred by their incredible circumstance of having survived re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere from space, but also they were still intact, just hanging out and doing their kinda boring job of absorbing heat, and now not even doing that really.