This album could not exist without the contributions of black artists in America. 100% of the proceeds earned from digital sales will be donated to organizations in need such as Black Visions Collective. Thank you for your support.

Liner notes:

Background
One Million Things began in a journal. Like diary entries, these songs were deeply personal, based on very specific events in my everyday life, and intended only for me. The DNA of the album, and of Lyle to some extent, lives in the first and last tracks. “Pentagonal Corners” contains the earliest lyrical content on the album, borrowing directly from poems written during July of 2014 while I often sat on a section of stonewall by Jamaica Pond in Boston. The earliest musical material for the album also comes from 2014; the chord relationship in the bridge and coda of “Penultima” found its way into many of the songs I wrote around that time.

“Penultima” was first recorded for a solo EP I self-released in 2015, Brighter Shades (of bitter). The initial idea as I wrote these someday of Lyle songs was to present them in the same format—on a solo record where I played everything and then perhaps hired a band to play the songs with me in live situations. I was blinded by the belief that this was obvious because song-writing had always felt like my emotional burden, my responsibility, my secret. However, moving to Reno, NV in 2016, completely changed this mindset. Whereas music had been for most of my life a solitary activity, most of my relationships in Reno came from collaborative music-making. Over just a few years, as I wrote and played lots of different music (and began writing songs again) it became clear that these songs would only come to life if I wrote them with the intention that my friends would help me play them.

In my experience, music has a way of growing uncontrollably, unpredictably, when great musicians are involved. It grows and grows, often organically finding its way deeper into the original concept. Just a few years earlier I couldn’t have imagined writing this music with a band in mind, but the decision to play with a dedicated band represented a commitment to storytelling and honesty rather than obscurity. These memories, stories, and feelings were no longer confined to journal entries for myself, but instead became living things, confessions, to be decoded and understood by a broader group of people. This music, these memories, could not exist without the relentless musicianship and openness Julien, Andre, and Greg have demonstrated to me.

I believe that one of the most beautiful, and humbling, realizations a musician can have is that the music and words you’ve written have grown beyond your understanding of them. I may be the writer, but all the members in of Lyle are imaginative and skillful interpreters. I hope you can feel the expansiveness of the stories these songs tell.

Listening
When someone listens to one million things, I want them to feel as if they are following a winding trail of breadcrumbs, each crumb a morsel of a memory. Even the most detailed memory can never quite successfully imitate the inspiring event, the one the memory seeks to retain. Instead of trying to relay the specific details of past events with some sort of factual accuracy, the lyrics on one million things focus on the seemingly insignificant and precious details of events with the hope of relaying an accuracy of atmosphere, mood, emotion. The songs ought to feel like a dream or a collage, in which unrelated elements are given the opportunity to exist in the same universe for a while.

The Stories
Each song on One Million Things is a collage of the cut-up details of disparate memories reassembled in order to tell larger stories. I tell the stories this way because I feel it captures the way we build our identities, the way we carry our memories and experiences with us.

“Pentagonal Corners” refers to poetry from a journal entry about how lonely and distant I was feeling while sitting on a stonewall in Boston. “Nancy Reagan” is a song for my sisters and refers to some of the things that defined our relationship growing up together, while also contending with the time we’ve spent apart as we’ve grown older. “My Words (not yours)” is a playful take on the idea that technology can be seen as an extension of the self and was inspired by going through the notes I’d taken on my phone over several years and feeling as though I hadn’t written any of them. “Water Wears” is about the mnemonic devices I’ve employed to learn Japanese and how it has been a poor stand-in for travel. “Terrible Machine” is a collage of instances in which relationships of multiple types felt too difficult, as if the machine that keeps relationships running was destined to fail. “Days” and “Ichigo Ichie” are about my first time making a friend in another country, and a night of exploring we embarked upon. “Penultima” is about a second-to-last night with a dear friend gone wrong. Even the two interludes on the record are memories—"relic 1: My Words” is a reminder of how we played the song live for a long time, while “relic 2: Terrible Machine” is the electronic version of the song I programmed in order to teach the band the song.