Quietly by NTVTY

Christmas Day 2013, there was a knock on the door. Two men asked if our housemate was at home. When I said he wasn’t, they forced their way into the house. One of them put me in a sleeper hold while the other ran into the housemate’s bedroom looking for a bag of cash he had been saving for his wedding. As I struggled on the floor of my living room, arms locked around my throat, I became fully convinced that I was going to die, and I was struck by how ordinary the experience felt. There was no tunnel of light. There was no highlight reel of my life playing. There was just me, on the floor of my living room, a stranger cutting off the air to my brain.

Then, suddenly, he let go. The dark ring around my vision began to subside. I came to in time to notice the sound of the invaders’ feet rushing out of the front door (and into the freshly fallen snow, which laid some conveniently easy-to-follow footprints). Shortly after, my wife came up from the basement on the phone with the police. The coming hours were spent making statements and IDing suspects, but it was all a blur smeared across the inescapable thought that one second, I was dying. The next, I was not.

Around the same time, SPACESHIPS was on a bit of a hiatus: Ben was busy planning his wedding, Wes was working seventy hours a week. I was left alone with a massive perspective-shifting event, an acoustic guitar. In a few short months, an album formed out of the ether. For the last six years, the album has existed in the abstract. I had performed it in whole several times, but recording faced a number of obstacles: mostly in the form of other musical projects that took priority, and the theft of my laptop when it was half finished (luckily, Moth & Rust was already backed up).

With the pandemic putting a pause on most of my other projects, I figured it was finally time to put this record to tape. So here it is. I hope you like it.

South Bend Post folk from SPACESHIPS' Nathaniel FitzGerald. Hushed, ambient music for thinking about dying.

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