I suppose the songs on this album began when I was in college in Chicago fifteen years ago (whoah). I was deeply into folk music and writing bizarre folk songs that I would play at coffee shops and bars around the north side at any opportunity. There were many of us doing it around that time. Anyway, I got really into the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln and started writing songs about it, linking to events in the present. Obama was on the rise and soon would be elected. "Crook", "Robert the Fifth", and "Martin Luther King Day" were all songs from this batch of music. The songs were more musical and harmonic than a lot of the other stuff I was writing at the time and so I struggled with what to do with them as a solo performer. It felt like they called for a deeper, orchestral musical structure and just not something I could have done at that point in my life. They went on hold and I graduated and started a few bands that had much more symphonic and larger musical qualities to them rather than folk-sounding. I decided to break from folk music.

I had planned to reignite these Civil War songs for my Chicago band Minor Characters third full length album, because the country was completely broken by the end of the last decade and we felt we needed to write about that. But we broke up and I moved to Los Angeles. So I decided to make it a Fur Trader album. I demo-ed all of these for a while and wrote a lot new songs to accompany the old ones. Then my friend and producer/engineer Beau Sorenson called me in spring 2019 and asked if I wanted to come up to the Bay Area and record at Tiny Telephone San Francisco. He had a few open days that summer and thought it would be fun to work together again (we had made a few Minor Characters albums together). So it gave me reason to bring Bronco to life. I wrote more songs and went up and recorded at the now closed Tiny Telephone (sadly, due to Covid) with Beau. I played everything on the album (except a few things) so it was somewhat of a marathon of recording. We set up stations for piano, guitars, and drums and I would just go from one to the other. I really love working like that. You kind of record all the skeletons of songs and then figure it all out later. Which was good, because at the time of recording Bronco I was also working on the first Fur Trader album, Last Year's Model, and trying to get that collected into an album. So after the San Francisco session of Bronco, it lived on a hard drive for a year and a half. I finished Last Year's Model just before Covid hit in March of 2020, and released it in August of 2020. During quarantine that year, I decided to begin working on Bronco finally. I recorded a ton of it in my garage, adding to the foundation of songs Beau and I had made in San Francisco. "Martin Luther King Day" was recorded in my garage, and that was the last piece of the record. I had it basically finished.

Then the absolute darkest day I think I might have ever experienced happened on January 6th, 2021. Traitors and seditious Americans (?) stormed the Capitol. I don't even have the right words for it, actually. You saw it. You know. Anyway, I wrote "Chattanooga" about that day after seeing the Confederate flag being waved and hailed inside the American Capitol. It's the same story, right? The same war? I don't know. That was the last piece of the album, apparently. So I sat with it for a while and allowed it to breathe. I got married, moved homes (just down the street), started what feels like a new chapter in my life and then sent Bronco to get mastered back where it began: Chicago.

Andrew
September, 2021