Stellar Jays' debut full-length album Early Winters available everywhere you stream your music! The music on Early Winters was written throughout 2022 in sessions in Seattle and Winthrop, WA, while the lyrics were penned predominantly at altitude. “I end up doing some of my best songwriting on airplanes of all places” explains Siems, who travels

Stellar Jays' debut full-length album Early Winters available everywhere you stream your music! The music on Early Winters was written throughout 2022 in sessions in Seattle and Winthrop, WA, while the lyrics were penned predominantly at altitude. “I end up doing some of my best songwriting on airplanes of all places” explains Siems, who travels frequently for his day-job in international development. “It’s something about being alone with your thoughts at 30,000 feet. The first lines of the song ‘Early Winters’ came together while looking out the window over the Arctic Circle on the way home from Kenya.”

With the bones of the song charted out and the lyrics in hand, the band would rehearse in the historic Old Rainier Brewery in Seattle to work on arrangements and bring the music to full bloom. Early Winters was recorded and mixed at Earwig Studio in Seattle in just under a week, at the dawn of 2023. Don Farwell (Foo Fighters, Ginger Baker Trio) engineered and mixed the record. It was mastered at Resonant Mastering by Rachel Field (Pearl Jam, Brandi Carlile).

Thematically, Early Winters is a meditation and rumination on perception and misperception, both micro and macro. “It’s fascinating to me how two people can look at the same situation and have totally different feelings or experiences, whether that’s in a relationship or when looking at the country and our shared history” says Siems. Themes of personal relationships - love, marriage, divorce, and dynamics between parents and children - run through the record. A number of songs also wrestle with America’s complicated past and politically-charged present, reflecting on how divided peoples’ perceptions can be. “There’s just such a huge gulf between what I thought America was and stood for and what it turns out we are.” Siems explains. “Or it’s more like we’ve always been this complicated tangle of history, factions and cultures that today seems to be pulling more apart than together, and I wonder whether things will have to get darker still before some distant dawn.”

Yet, for the emotional and philosophical gravity within, Early Winters offers hope of an early spring. Stellar Jays are firmly rooted in a shared, profound love of energetic live rock and roll. There is joy to be found in the creation of music, and that joy is palpable in the ringing chords and catchy hooks of the record. “We collectively spent enough time depressed and crying in our beers during the pandemic” says Siems. “We’re hoping this album just delivers a bit of the happiness we had creating it to anybody listening.”