Habits

The first single from Adeline Hotel‘s forthcoming record “Away Together”

A brief overview. Dan and I went to school together until 2009, reconnected during college (through a spontaneous twitter direct message) in 2012, and lived together after graduation with a small break between 2013 and 2015. This small break was when Dan moved from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh to focus on music and his life in a brand new setting.

As a supportive friend, I didn’t share with him how upset I was that he left. It wasn’t that I felt I was being left behind, or that I had any say in it. It was that, after watching Dan make his first full record here, I couldn’t understand why he needed to leave. (Note: This was immature of me). He had done that once here, in New York, and surely he could do it again. I recognize that this was naive, and selfish, but I also recognize that I so badly hoped to stay close to those experiences because they affected me and other people around me immensely.

I realize now I was upset not because my friend had moved away, but because this place that I/we built up so spectacularly hadn’t turned out they way I/we had expected. I was jealous too that Pittsburgh (PITTSBURGH) would be the place that Adeline Hotel would find its meaning, and not here.

I wan’t to clarify that, while I think it could be viewed as selfish to write about another persons work by talking about yourself, I offer the possibility this is what Habits is asking you to do. It is so impossible to talk about happiness let alone to put it into a piece of art. As Dan described to me, happiness can be so fleeting, and often by the time you capture it on paper, the source of it is gone. Whether it is it’s purpose or not, I took instruction from Habits to examine my happiness and ask “how do you intend to preserve it”. This isn’t a self help task to get you to pat yourself on the back, but a challenge to the notion that just because a feeling isn’t constant, or doesn’t linger forever, doesn’t mean it can’t be celebrated and learned from.

What Dan does with Habits is balance a simple question posed with a detailed, image rich description I’ve come to know from his music. Using the vivid memory of his experience, he asks about yours. In true Adeline Hotel — but truer Dan Knishkowy fashion, Habits looks you in the eye and, likely very quietly tells you, “I was happy, and theres a chance I may still be”. And there’s nothing you can do but ask yourself why the hell aren’t I?

It’s obvious to me now how lucky we are as friends and listeners that someone would temporarily upend their life to change their perspective, to search for happiness, to deal with sadness, and manage to come back to us. It would be incredibly rude for me to resent the time Dan spent in Pittsburgh. And in the end, I’m writing this five blocks from Dan realizing that out of Pittsburgh was born the pretext for this bit of happiness and the ability to see the potential of happiness for the future sewn into a song like Habits.

MS

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