I woke up around noon, disoriented, half-dreaming. Music was playing — unfamiliar, fully formed, the kind of sound you assume belongs to someone else’s life. For a moment I thought I was still asleep, hearing music I wished I’d made.

Then it hit me: Ruban Nielson was already awake, in the studio, listening to what we’d made.

We both knew it. There was something inevitable about the music — like it hadn’t been created so much as uncovered. We listened on repeat, laughing, shaking our heads. One track brought up a shared image: an evergreen forest by a lake at sunset. Ruban suddenly looked up, eyes wide, like he’d just been handed a message.

“I’ve got the title,” he said.

American Eagle.

The name landed the same way the music had — clean, obvious, impossible to argue with. The American Dream: hot dogs, Cokes, sunset drives. We both lost it, tears in our eyes from laughing hard for minutes straight.

We swam in his pool. The conversation never stopped. The flow stayed constant, nourishing, effortless. Then Ruban said it again — the line that had already become a principle:

“Let’s make more that sound exactly like this.”

So we did.

Two days later, the record was finished.

We imagined the music living in in-between places — old motels with buzzing vacancy signs, abandoned gas stations at dusk, vast parking lots lit by sodium lamps where engines idle and lives briefly overlap. Spaces built for movement, not comfort. Bleak, anonymous, quietly human. Music that could sit inside that loneliness without trying to fix it — beauty carrying a low hum of danger underneath, calm without anesthesia.

That night, around eleven, Ruban asked if I wanted to go for a walk. He’d found an old local Palm Springs newspaper clipping — nothing online — about a Native burial ground disturbed by a cement foundation for a project that never got built. Whatever it was, it wasn’t meant to exist.

We walked through the desert in silence and conversation, at peace. The flow never left us, even as we talked about old ghosts. The past had finally lost its grip.

Back at the house, Ruban sent the music to his manager, who had just had twins — no sleep, total chaos. The idea was simple: see if the music could help.

It did.

The response came back clear and immediate. He loved it.

And just like that, we’d accidentally named the genre:

music to calm dads down.

That felt right.

FEAR - the joint album from Jared Mattson of The Mattson 2 and Ruban Nielson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra - was recorded in June of 2024. All recording and mixing took place in Palm Springs. Mastered by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios in London.