Ivan from Ivan by Travels With Brindle

"Ivan" was the first song I wrote for this album project. Midway through reading Elif Batuman's The Idiot for the second time, I got a prompt from a songwriting group to write a song with a single-word title that began with a vowel. With Selin's emails to Ivan in my head, I wrote a pop song inspired by her correspondence and the ways Ivan was about to disappoint her.

This has been through a few iterations. When I had a mentorship with a local singer/songwriter, they advised me to write a single-word chorus for this. I did this suggestion one better and wrote a chorus around the word "correspondence" in Turkish, Russian, and Hungarian--the languages Ivan and Selin speak in The Idiot. I had hoped to release this as a postcard, and I ended up playing this at a faster tempo to get it to fit in that format. (This hasn't happened yet.) I had been thinking about the band the dB's when I played this at a faster tempo, but mixing engineer Christian DeKnatel instead made this sound like a song you'd hear on the TV show The Adventures of Pete & Pete.

Made possible by a grant from the Malden Cultural Council.

The percussion line is a Tomy Tutor Typer toy typewriter, ably played by my frequent collaborator Hilary Lahan.

Under the name Travels With Brindle, Boston-based songwriter Chelsea Spear got started as a busker on the MBTA, playing ukulele covers for a diverse audience. She later began writing her own music, developing the ethereal-yet-gritty style that can now be heard in the tight melodies of her most recent EP, Greetings from Rocky Point. She is writing her second EP.