It soon became clear the album was already pretty far along. “The bulk of the work was done before Bill passed, but we didn’t have access to it,” said Derek Almstead, a longtime Elephant 6 fixture who’d joined the Olivias in the late 2000s and now lives in Pennsylvania. “There’s all these little secrets we didn’t discover until we got the hard drive back.”
Gradually, some songs were finished, mixed and mastered. On the morning of Nov. 29, 2024, the band released the album’s first two singles, the same songs Schneider had taken to NeSmith years earlier: the bright, catchy, Doss-penned “Garden of Light,” and “The Same Place,” a ghostly, string-laced meditation conceived by Hart. Later that same day, Hart, who was 53, died of a heart attack.
“It was devastating,” Schneider said. “But because at this point the band was so close to actually being finished [with the album], it didn’t collapse the second time.”
Completing the album without the band’s leaders was complicated, though.
“It was a rescue mission,” NeSmith said. “It wasn’t trying to write new songs. It was trying to rescue what it was.”
NeSmith, Almstead and Ron Kwasman, a musician and close friend of Hart’s, became the project’s production triumvirate. Schneider kept tabs from afar.
“There was a real intention to not add a lot,” Almstead said. “If something was going to be added, it needed to be something that fit naturally with what was already there or something we talked about that just hadn’t been done yet.”
