. : : May 17th, 2005 : : .

You know that album that you hear at just the right time in your life? The one that hits you in the feels every song, from top to bottom? The one that you listen to obsessively for weeks / months on end, almost exclusively?
 

There’s been a few of those for me, but one of the biggest was 2004’s Album of the Year by The Good Life.
 

The Good Life is often diminutively noted as Cursive‘s front man, Tim Kasher‘s side project. One where, for the first two albums, he explored with keyboards and drum samples; lo-fi productions that sound like they were recorded intimately in bedrooms, whispered so as to not wake a roommate or neighbour. A sharp contrast to the angular, aggressive emo of his other band.
 

But the band’s third album took a hard turn into folksy Americana. Album of the Year is a play on popular phrasing — rather than an award or accolade, it’s accounting for a year of an all encompassing and then self-destructing romantic relationship.
 

The subject is not exactly new territory for Kasher; Cursive’s Domestica is famously the only-slightly fictionalized story of his divorce, released four years earlier. But the years between seem to have opened him up to a more balanced, reflexive view that replaced anger with regret.