If you let me I could talk about this record forever.

Lost in Time is the most personal and vulnerable I've ever allowed my outward self to be. [KIVA EDIT: that last sentence is no longer true lol see Hamstring Pop] It doesn't exactly tell an overarching story, but captures exactly who I was at the time and what was obsessively running through my mind.

I wrote the first track in March of 2019. It's almost a kind of bridge between the songwriting style of the EPs and this album. Structurally it is more music than singing, and the lyrics are extremely minimalist - that's the EPs there. The opening instrumental also resembles the eerie atmosphere of Heart Attack, but instead of bursting into a disturbing cry for help it resolves peacefully and quietly. What then follows is the vulnerable but somehow uplifting mood that dominates the rest of the album, the sort of "I'm sad, you're sad, let's be sad together."

Somewhere around that time I knew I wanted the album to be called Lost in Time even though I did not have the title track yet. I imagined the songs would be much shorter though, and that combined together the track list would form a short poem.

In April I was focused on finally getting the cover for Heart Attack and releasing the EPs. In late April though, that's when I wrote the long Gasoline Blues. At first I was nervous, because I felt I didn't have it in me to play the blues - I was afraid sounding like an impostor. But then I went ahead and wrote stanza two and three, and after that I knew almost exactly where the song was going. It took a couple days to write. I believe it was the first and only time I utilized the skills I picked up from screenwriting in songwriting.

A couple days after that I wrote Without Florida. I either don't have much to say or too much to say on the subject, so I'll keep it concise: it was something that was on my mind for a very long time.

Just a couple days into May, right after releasing Green Food, something catastrophic happened in my life. I can't go into detail, but it's what lead me to write Lost in Time: because of what happened, I went out hiking to try and clear my head - there was so many things running through my mind. What I tried to recreate on the title track was how I felt that day on that hike. The first three stanzas set the scene of the hike, the middle of the song represents all I can't put down into words, and the last three stanzas capture some of the stuff that I was thinking about. It took two to three weeks to write.

Unceremoniously, the last song I wrote was Lost in. I wanted a transition song after Florida and for it to kind of set up the "out in the real world" atmosphere of Gasoline, so the song is just about putting on a shirt; more specific, it touches on how hard it is to do anything when the mind is so depressed, even something as menial as putting on a shirt. The music in that song is the oldest piece in my released discography. I wrote in high school, then dug it back out for this record and put lyrics on top of it.

With the album written I needed a cover. I did not want the album cover to be a bottleneck like it was for the EPs. So I went to my local library, opened up Microsoft Paint, and spent 40 minutes poking little holes into a black canvas. I ended up liking what I created. I looked at the date: the 21st of May. I decided then that the summer solstice exactly one month away would be a good day to drop it. Ok, one month to record and release.

I recorded it all in Nina's closet while our relationship was falling apart. I tried recording elsewhere, including outside at a park for the title track, but the closet fit best. For that reason alone, I feel the record is a time capsule.

I feel like some themes in the album go beyond the lyrics. At least to me, what I hear in the whole record is the anxieties of never being noticed, that all my efforts in life will be lost in time but never found in the first place. I could go on and on - not because I think this LP is some perfect thing, but because it is so personal to me - but I'll sum it up like this: to me, this record is the feeling of sitting in a room so quiet that the sounds of routers and computer fans and other sounds in our modern world seem to rise in volume and become a symphony to our worried thoughts. At least we're all in this together. Hello to the ones who have found me lost in time.

[KIVA EDIT: I made some slight edits today on 7/23/2023. It's my day off. I might as well say two things while I'm around this page: the version of Gasoline Blues you hear here is not the original recording from that one month I recorded, but is actually a redo I did in January of 2020. It was a conflicted thing, because even in that month while I was going through an musical (and entire) crisis and I knew already my next project was Hamstring Pop with it's full production sound - even then I was looking back and wanting to make changes on work I already accomplished. To be fair, the redo is for sure a better take. Refer to the original take on the Lost in Time video I have on my YouTube channel, Kiva Da Costa. The second thing I have to say is that all these long write ups I wrote from Heart Attack to Booger were all written around March or April of 2020 I believe. The crisis I just mentioned of course extended and became amplified at that time, and while my mind was racing towards the future and a lot of change, I was obsessively looking back at everything and interpreting what I could still relate to. In a way, I think the write ups were a way of me expelling all those thoughts. Like I'm reading the write ups now for the first in a long time (again I'm becoming interested in my old work) and I'm like huh I forgot about that lol the thoughts had left my brain for a while. Anyway love u xoxo KIVA OUT]