After meeting at a memorial for a mutual friend, Tony Molina (Ovens) and Sarah Rose Janko (Dawn Riding) started spending nights into mornings playing guitar and singing their hearts out to an audience of empty wine bottles in the East Oakland warehouse where Janko lived. Both fans of each other’s respective musical projects, they bonded over a shared love of The Byrds and Bill Fox and leaned into their friendship as a much needed support in a time of dizzying grief. The days were marked in trips to Jackson’s Liquor store, the same spot Molina frequented while recording with his band Ovens a decade earlier, at a studio in the same neighborhood. The nights drifted by. The songs kept coming. They decided they wanted to record all they’d been pouring their hearts into and The Lost Days was born. The Lost Days recorded their first release, Lost Demos, with Kit Center at his home studio and mixed it at another friend Nick Bassett’s house in West Oakland. In April 2021 the demo was released on cassette by Oakland label The Long Road Society, eventually making its way into the hands of Spanish label Mapache, who pressed the five-track release on vinyl with the addition of a previously unreleased song. Over the course of 2021, the two kept writing and sharing songs. With Janko moving to New Orleans and the pandemic keeping the two songwriters apart, they worked long distance, sending demos back and forth. Inspired by the solo work of Bill Fox, The Byrds, Dear Nora and Guided By Voices, The Lost Days started recording what was to be their first full-length album, In The Store, at friend Nick Bassett’s basement studio on his Yamaha MT8X 8 track. The album is an exercise in true DIY lo-fi analog home recorded tradition. Molina would venture on BART from Concord to Bassett’s house in Oakland to lay down basic tracks, and Janko would add vocals and tambourine when she was in town. The comfort and familiarity of friendship and the intimacy of home recording allowed the two to craft traditional and yet deeply personal pop and folk songs. Writing that addresses alcoholism, depression and complex relationships are lovingly brought to life on the ten tracks (in thirteen minutes) that make up the album.
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