Cataldo

“Let’s begin at the end of a bad year, with bad things at my back…” So begins Prison Boxing, the third full length recording from Seattle’s Eric Anderson. Recording under the name Cataldo, Anderson marries clever wordplay, lacking in pretension, to immediately arresting indie pop with an effortless grace. This record is, as many are, about a relationship ending. Prison Boxing. Feeling trapped, inescapably someone's opponent while also their comrade. Though, really, that’s more prologue than preoccupation, more a setting for the real drama: a reckoning of what you are when you’re alone.

Most of Prison Boxing was written shortly after Anderson’s move to Seattle and the subsequent end of his romantic relationship. Not long after, a close friendship also came to a close. That all three lived together intensified the blow. The directionless fog of a new city compounding the feeling of loneliness and alienation, Anderson poured himself into his art and writing as Prison Boxing began to take shape.

During the tail end of the writing period and the subsequent recording things turned around as they inevitably do. Eventually, person by person, Anderson built a community (what he calls “life’s sacred experience – happening upon people you care for and who care for you.”) That community came together around the recording of Prison Boxing, with past tour mate Laura Veirs, Luke Bergman from Thousands, Nelson Kempf and Keely Boyle from the Old Believers, Colin Richey and Sam Anderson from Hey Marseilles, and Sean Lane from Fences all making appearances (Veirs’ husband Tucker Martine mixed the record.)

Prison Boxing, then, is something of a contradiction--a warm, uplifting heartbroken record. Or perhaps it's contradictory only to the extent our personal histories are a contradiction, a conglomeration of moments of great joy and great sorrow. It's a document of how we must all pick ourselves up, and through the shared strength of our adopted families of compatriots, not forget life’s sadder parts, but claim them, own them, and transform pain into, well, at least bitter sweetness.

Or as Anderson puts it “I have such happy memories of making this record about such an unpleasant time…I think that disparity, the peculiar warmth of this album’s melancholia, is what makes me proudest now. I hope that feeling isn’t something I’ve imagined. I hope it’s an ornament that seems intrinsic and essential. Like an engraving worn with the characteristic patina of something truly old.”