Before it was Caldera
by Gregory Hoskins
If there is such a thing as a beginning of this recording, it is likely in an all-but-empty Mercedes Sprinter I dubbed ‘Black Mamba II’, somewhere between LA and Portland at the end of our 2019 tour.
The scenery outside the tinted windows is drought scarred one hour and snow bound the next. The band has flown home, it’s just SJ and I , and though the relationship is no longer new, we are still learning how to talk to each other. We fill the hours with fretting over the set list of a last minute thing we will do when we get to Portland, and we stumble— innocently enough—into a discussion about love that ends in a semi-tense stand off just as we mercifully pull off the highway into a motel parking lot.
‘Well, I think the kind of love I’m talking about is available to everyone,’ I say, sure of myself.
‘No, it’s not,’ he shoots back, just as sure.
Not to worry. The tension will melt as morning rolls around.
The year will melt likewise into the next.
Tumult is coming. Contagion and quarantine is coming.
Discord, disconnect, world-wide drama is coming.
A couple new records, a new film, and the years melt again. Whisperings of a new tour turn into serious road time, the notion of making another record attaches itself like a burr.
This love thing, and the perceived differences in our understanding of it, sticks with me.
“We will make a record of love songs,” I say.
“It’ll be a make-out record,” he says.
In the early dark winter of 2023 we spend a week of evenings on the farm, sketching out a handful of chord progressions. We decide to take advantage of a generous offering from Richard and Linda Gibbs that has been on the table for 5 years: to use as we see fit their beautiful Woodshed Recording Studio in Malibu for a week. We arrive with our little sketches, and leave with slightly more fleshed out things.
Meanwhile, Nathalie lovingly midwifes and shoehorns a world tour together. Fifty dates across 4 continents, just SJ and I onstage, no band. We make a place every Night for a couple of the new pieces. Endings of courtships and the courtship of endings travel with us. Tremors in the foundation travel with us. Goneness travels with us.
It is the last show, early December. A little ragged, we stand in the wing of the stage making last minute adjustments. Stuffing my ear with the monitor earbuds for the final time, I marvel —privately—at the road we’ve travelled. Not just that year, but the previous 10, too.
“Time surely passes,” I say out loud.
“Time is passing,” he corrects, and we walk on.
A few weeks later:
A diagnosis comes to him, with it a shrouded future. The topography of, capacity for, and responsibility to a loving friendship unclear.
Another few weeks later:
My mother dies and I, her youngest child, am embarrassingly dislocated, suddenly unloved in the most particular way.
What do you do with gone-ness? What do you do with unwelcome news?
You go to the studio.
You press ‘record’.
You try to remember what you were on about in that van all those years earlier.
You forgive yourself for being wrong.
Gradually, you learn you have not made a record of love songs.
You’ve not made a record about love, either. Not for it. Or against it.
What you’ve done is made a record in the shadow of love
while making room for Endings to gracefully appear.
Unsure the entire way, at some point there has to be a ‘good enough’.
It’s a sorrowful moment. All the ‘could be’s’ spent. You relent.
That is Caldera.
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Guelph, Canada, May 25, 2026.
