It is not enough to say that The Hotelier have grown older, or wiser, or more of anything. We can trace a progression, if we like, from the explosive empowerment of It Never Goes Out to the ashen disillusionment of Home, Like Noplace Is There. We can follow an awakening of youth in suburbia attempting to learn what is right, and what is ours, and what is possible and impossible, and maybe we can’t save each other like we thought we once could. We’re awake and we’re tired and we want love in our lives again. And so we find ourselves now in Goodness, in the woods outside of the suburbs, trying to re-learn that love.

But we seek a space outside time. Once in a while we can feel it, like a clearing. Where our histories and our rhetorics blend into languages spoken and unspoken. Where the greatest awe comes upon us for the overlooked, the simple, the incomprehensible. Where things glitch as they solidify, repeat as they evolve, scream as they whisper. Where always and forever above us, in all of its natural, unnatural, supernatural love, shines the moon. Goodness is not this place — goodness is nowhere — but we are following it to where we have to be.

After all we’ve gone through, how young are we? What is age softening in us, what is it hardening in us? Are we getting better? Worse? How could we ever know, when capital forces us onward away from ourselves? Will the woods consume the suburbs; will the suburbs consume the woods? In the gaps between these monumental questions, in the tiniest details, in the infinitude of cycles outside of time, there is Goodness. We begin there.