It’s Over Now began in the wake of an event that permanently altered my life. When my father, Rick Gelaznik, died suddenly in February 2025, something fundamental shifted inside me. Grief didn't arrive as a single emotion—it transformed the way I experienced love, memory, music, and even reality itself. The songs that followed became a way of documenting that transformation, not by explaining it, but by living inside it.

After self-releasing the DIRTY CHURCHES cassette albums Stuck At The End Of Time and Amplified Rainbow Theory, I was ready to set out on another sonic journey. This time, however, the music was charged by loss. Working almost entirely on a cassette 4-track, I began recording fragments of songs, field recordings, voice memos, improvisations, and imagined sound worlds that slowly grew into It’s Over Now. The limitations and warmth of tape became an essential part of the album's emotional language, preserving each performance with an intimacy that digital recording never could.

In early March, while the album was taking shape, I met songwriter Isaac Gillespie, who invited me to his Tuesday Songwriter Circles at Owl Music Parlor. That community became a creative lifeline. Every week I found myself surrounded by remarkable songwriters, sharing new work and challenging one another to dig deeper. I began writing songs, chants, poems, and performance pieces specifically for those gatherings, and many of the album's defining moments grew directly from those sessions. "Torch Song," for example, emerged from one of Isaac's writing prompts.

At the same time, my compositional practice was expanding in other directions. My chamber work TIN FOIL, based on the poetry of Joyce Mansour, had recently been performed by the S.E.M. Ensemble, opening new possibilities for how text, sound, and structure could interact. That spirit of experimentation carried into this record through conceptual works like Diary of Days, in which Melissa Bonetti Luna recorded one word for every day of March as voice memos that I collaged alongside autoharp recordings by H. Leon Harris and simple bass arpeggios. I also began developing guided improvisational performances with Alex Gray, Zachary Mezzo, Marji Shemanski, and myself, combining synthesizers, violins, saxophone, drum machines, and fragments of science-fiction film dialogue into sprawling pieces such as "We Are Painters" and "Voice of the People." These works blur the line between songwriting, improvisation, sound collage, and performance art, reflecting the creative environment that surrounded the album's creation.

Then, during the summer of 2025, another profound loss arrived. My beloved cat, BB, was diagnosed with cancer and declined rapidly. Caring for her during those final months left its own imprint on the music. Songs like the title track, "It's Over Now," and "Reach Into the Sky" carry the weight of that experience—songs filled with desperate prayers, healing mantras, and quiet attempts to make peace with impermanence.

By the end of the year, I looked at the stack of cassette tapes on my desk and realized I had unknowingly documented an entire chapter of my life. It’s Over Now isn't simply a collection of songs—it is an analog journal, assembled in real time through heartbreak, community, experimentation, and performance. Every hiss of tape, every imperfect take, every spontaneous collage preserves a moment exactly as it was lived.

I'm deeply grateful to be working once again with CMNTX Records following the release of my Falling EP, and it feels especially meaningful that this album is being released on cassette—the same medium on which it was conceived and recorded. Listening on tape brings you closer to the physical process of its making and, I hope, into the emotional world it inhabits.

Though born from grief, It’s Over Now is not an album about despair. It is about surviving loss through imagination, finding unexpected community, and discovering that even in the darkest seasons there remains beauty, tenderness, humor, and light. I hope these songs invite you into that world, and that somewhere within them you find echoes of your own.