Koley and I began collaborating in 2010. I saw his band A, B, and The Sea play a short acoustic set in January and was smitten. Their manager, Steve Brodsky, reached out to see if I would be interested in producing a couple of songs for them. Koley and his partner from Wisconsin, Joe Spargur, each demonstrated immense talent. Koley was outside of that though. He was unlike anyone I had ever met. He could get a new song in his head, and he would know the complete picture, the structure, the words, all of the chords, and the harmonies without picking up a guitar.

Over the course of the next couple of years, we made just four songs together at Different Fur in San Francisco, which was sort of their home base.
It was always such fun, and I still hold Let Me In, one of those songs, to be among my proudest musical moments.

Starting in 2012, Natasha and I spent a couple of years in New York, and then Modest Mouse toured in support of Strangers to Ourselves. Koley and I spoke infrequently during these years, me always in motion and him settled back in the Midwest to be close to his parents during a family illness.

Back in Los Angeles at the end of 2015, with a modest writing space in Culver City, I reached out to Koley to see what he was working on. He sent me a raft of demos, songs ranging from good to extraordinary.
He was in Minneapolis, so it took some time, but he finally made it back to California for a week in early February 2017, and we started work.

Keep on Giving Love was the first song we made. He brought it in as a Bo Diddley thing and I told him I thought we should bring some 80s coliseum vibes to it. We built it all out together quickly. We got that song and Sway, Sway, Sway basically done over the next four days.

Our friendship turned into something more closely resembling a brotherhood that year. Though we were 2,000 miles apart, we were in constant contact, sharing songs we loved and ideas for more.

Koley moved back to Los Angeles while I was on tour with Modest Mouse in the fall of 2017, shortly before Natasha and my son was born.

We started getting back into the swing of things in February, 2018. We made Ghost of a Girl and put together demos and ideas for somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 songs.
He was my most natural collaborator I've encountered. Everything was fun and moved fast. Always. If one of our references went unrecognized, we would cue it up for the other and it was met with recognition of validity. There was so much joy when we were making music together.

Shortly before I left for Modest Mouse's Spring 2018 tour, we finished this EP, and had the demos and aesthetic mapped out for the next two.
This first one was designed as a super slick, maximalist pop endeavor. We both loved hooks and arrangements.
The next two would have been quite different, each of them.

Our plan was that we would release 30 songs in two years, playing local shows along the way and then open the door to working with other people, writing, producing and potentially bringing other people into the world of Koley.

I flew home one Sunday during that Spring tour and got a text from Koley saying he was back in Wisconsin. His time in Los Angeles hadn't broken the right direction for him and he needed to head home to sort some things out.

The last time we saw each other was at a Modest Mouse show in Green Bay, in September 2018. It was a sad week, we had just cancelled two shows. Koley lifted my spirits so high. It was a necessary reset. We made loose plans to reconvene back in Los Angeles in 2019 to give shape to everything we dreamed about. I will never forget saying goodbye to him for the last time next to a giant football outside The Resch Center. As surreal as life.

I missed a call from Joe Spargur very early one morning the next Spring and I knew it couldn't be good. Koley had passed away in a car accident the night before in his home town of Winneconne, WI. My heart was broken. Shattered.

I may have recovered from his loss. But I'll never get over it.

These are the only four songs we completed. I often have dreams about making more music with him. But I feel fortunate we finished these.