On last week's episode of West of Twin Peaks Radio, MJ interviewed multi-instrumentalist/singer-songwriter Zach Elsasser from the East Bay indie project Affectionately. Zach has been a frequent collaborator and touring drummer with Jay Som (aka Melina Duterte, a former East Bay high school classmate), and works with numerous other Bay area bands and projects. He's just released his second solo LP titled Then This Happens, a marvelous expansion beyond the bedroom sounds of his first album that has been topping our charts.

MJ: Was Brentwood where you first met Melina Duterte or Jay Som? Did you play music together back then?

Zach: Yes! We went to high school together. We were in jazz band. She played trumpet, and I played drums. We would hang out all the time in the band room, sometimes after school, and just listen to music. One time, we used the Mac computer that was in our band room to record the silliest, dumbest, worst-sounding song we ever came up with because it was just in the moment, we were just bored after school. But we hung out all the time, and she introduced me to a lot of music that I have been inspired by. We had a band outside of high school that was not Jay Som. That band was called Summer Peaks.

MJ: I'm reading the liner notes for Then This Happen, and you say, "It took me five years from 2020 to figure it out. Things I never intended to really play or share live." Why?

Zach: I had always recorded music on my iPhone, and in 2020 I bought a good laptop to finally record music, and a lot of the songs that I decided to start writing were like experiments on what type of music I could make on a laptop. Now I have microphones. Now I have a good way to record everything...We were in the pandemic. I had all the time in the world to write this album, and I wasn't even thinking about an album. I was just writing songs; songs without lyrics. I could make these things as complicated as possible and spend as much time as I needed to on them, and that's kind of why I said that. Because some of these songs I was really not intending to share. There were more like "what can I do with a digital audio workstation?"

MJ: It's really interesting that you said these started off as instrumentals. How did the lyrical portion come about?

Zach: I dread the lyrical writing part. I think it's so hard, and maybe that's just my teenage self coming out, being like, "I don't want to write an essay. I just want to get an A." [laughs] That's how I felt then, and that's how I feel sometimes writing lyrics. Some of the lyrics come really easy because I write them alongside the music, and some of them are...I have this very impressionistic idea of what I want the song to be about. I'll be like, "How does this song feel like when I play it, and what do I hear when I'm playing the song?" And that's where I'll base the lyrics off of.

But the lyrics of all of these songs came afterwards. The first song I recorded on my laptop was "Within, Within Me," and that one was easy to write because it was more about how I navigate all of these feelings that I'm sifting through. I was in Jay Som in 2019, and in 2020 I was moving to be doing more of my own thing, and then COVID hit and I was like, "I don't really know what I'm doing anymore." I was like searching for the meaning of what I want, and that's the only one I wrote lyrics for at the very beginning.

After that, I had just zero inspiration. No thoughts were in my head to write any music...[then] I went through a big emotional downturn in 2021 and I was trying to figure out what I'm going to do with my life. Everything was changing so fast. And I wrote a song, the first song that I actually released after my first album, called "Bug," that was the hardest song I've ever written in my life. I literally couldn't figure out how to write the words. I was like crying figuring out how do I make these words come to life. Everything was changing, all of my relationships were changing, and I wanted to write this song because it means a lot to me, but I was having such a hard time saying how I felt. It was such a huge emotional day for me to write that song, and when I finished it, I was like, "Okay, I think I can write words."

Words are hard for me to write because I feel like the only ones that come to me are these very emotional ones, and I'm doing my best to avoid just how hard it is to experience those things. But I wrote that song and then released it, and that was the moment were I was like, "Okay, I'm starting to figure out what it is I want to say now."

Listen to the rest of their chat and deep sonic dive, plus two full hours of fresh music from the Bay and beyond!