Words by Sean Victory
“Now, patience; and remember patience is the great thing, and above all things else we must avoid anything like being or becoming out of patience” —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
This was the quote that kept returning to my mind as I listened to The Early’s two most recent releases, December ‘25’s Cusp EP and February’s I Want To Be Ready. At the core of Alex Lewis and Jake Nussbaum’s music is an even-tempered focus on the smallest details. The weight of each song accumulates slowly over time, blossoming upward in recurring motifs while expanding outward through sonic filigrees and textural ornamentation. The musicians are in no rush. They aren’t searching for a peak to climb. The pluck of a guitar string or the brush across a drum head is a micro-monument, an invitation to tend to the moment at hand. With patience and persistence the duo focuses on building individual bricks. By setting each down sequentially, we arrive once more in a newly realized Now—as if snapping awake—taking stock of all that seems to have suddenly changed.
Off Shelf: One of the most striking things about the music you create is the awareness of dynamics, and how that is interwoven with how dense or sparse sound events are as the composition progresses. It presents as a very organic ebb and flow. Is this something that occurs naturally when the two of you work together, or is there a roadmap you follow to arrive at the various peaks/valleys of a song?
Jake Nussbaum: Thank you for the compliment! I think the honest answer to your question is… both.
Alex and I do a lot of free improvising together when we practice, by which I mean playing without any structure at all. And we’ve been doing that for a very long time, six or seven years in this iteration of the band, and of course we have a musical history that goes back to high school, although our music in those days was much less about improvisation. With all that shared time improvising you begin to notice organic shapes that recur over time, even when you’re playing totally spontaneously. There are times where I’ll say to myself, “Oh, it’s this song again,” or it’s this structure or sound again, even if we arrived there without any plan or intention.
On the flip side of that, we compose with ebb and flow in mind. “Roadmap” is actually a really nice way to put it. We map out spaces that we are moving to and from, and often those spaces are defined by dynamic contrasts and melodic contrasts. And then we often try and challenge ourselves to improvise between those spaces as naturally and as patiently as possible. When you do that, you begin to pay attention to extremely subtle dynamic shifts, both in yourself and in the people you’re playing with.
So much instrumental music is organized around a climax, and I think we have really tried to find a way to make those more transitional, non-climactic moments feel spacious and rewarding in their own right. Subtle dynamic shifts are a way to invite the listener into that process. I think “Flossless” is probably the best example of this on the new album.
OS: When writing/performing these songs. How do you ensure you’re both on the same page, moving at the same pace, etc.? How have you sharpened that aspect of your creative process over your years of playing together?
Alex Lewis: As Jake said, The Early’s shared musical language has developed over many years of ‘shedding together. Before Jake moved to Chicago last year, we had a weekly practice in his basement practice space on Friday afternoons that we honored – minus vacations, illnesses, and other random life obligations – for nearly six years straight. I think it’s inevitable that you begin to hone a second sense when you play so much music with anyone. The aforementioned compositional roadmaps help a lot, but, at our best, we have this intuitive sense of pacing, dynamics, and energy that’s just evolved from so much music making together.
OS: Do you have a usual starting point for songwriting?
JN: Our starting point for songwriting almost always emerges from improvisation. We spend a lot of time processing our improvisations, either by talking through them or listening back to recordings and selecting highlights. We find a moment that feels exciting or fresh, and then we explore it again. Once we get a feel for it we start positioning it around with other ideas, trying – as you say – to make a roadmap. Sometimes it feels natural to place these things side by side, sometimes it feels forced and then we start looking elsewhere.
Occasionally we also try to apply more technical or practical challenges to these ideas. “Can we do a piece that utilizes a melodic drum sample?” “Can we do a piece that feels like it’s constantly transitioning from one element to the next without ever losing stability?” “Can we do a piece that integrates this new piece of gear,” etc.
The titles almost always come last, and it’s annoying and they tend to nag at us, because it’s like the last step in defining something that started out almost completely formless. Often we’ll just slap something on there as a placeholder. “Flossless” was called “Jam 3” or something like that for way too fucking long. “Hill Forms” was previously called “Bookesh,” which I think was a word that Alex just invented driving over to my house before practice.
OS: While working on this material, were there any pieces of art/music/writing that either directly or indirectly informed your creative processes?
JN: Well, maybe the all too obvious answer is that we named the album after Danielle Goldman’s book, I Want To Be Ready. Goldman is a dancer, choreographer, and performance theorist, and she has some really insightful ways of talking about dance improvisation as a dynamic relationship between discipline and freedom. The phrase “I want to be ready” refers to how much preparation and constraints go into readying oneself for a truly unpredictable and exploratory encounter. I think too many conversations around improvisation focus on the total freedom part, but Goldman’s ideas about preparation and readiness really stuck with me as a more accurate description of what Alex and I are trying to do, while also poetically referencing our various anxieties and concerns about the future in a more big picture way.
OS: What are some records you have been into lately?
AL: It’s March 2026 and I’ve unsurprisingly been on a kick with experimental and creative guitar music. There’s so many great and inspiring new records out recently. Here’s a few that come to mind: Tashi Dorji’s low clouds hang, this land is on fire, Bill Nace’s Bill Nace Plays The 2-String Taishogoto, Bill Orcutt’s Music in Continuous Motion, Daniel Bachman’s Moving Through Light, Marisa Anderson’s The Anthology of unAmerican Folk Music. I’ve also been enjoying exploring older releases from Jim Hall and Kenny Burrell. ..
JN: Knicks games and a small dose of March Madness.
OS: By choosing to improvise, what do you feel you gain in leaving a notional space open in the songs each time you perform them? What is the recording process like?
AL: Speaking for myself, The Early has become an outlet for expressing myself musically in a very natural and intuitive way. If there’s something on the guitar – or elsewhere – I’ve been thinking about, I always find that those harmonic or technical ideas have a way of expressing themselves in conversation with Jake. So while we strive to create compositions that audiences can become familiar with, I think it’s this freedom to react in the moment that make playing and listening to this music rewarding.
JN: We’ve both played in bands that deliver more traditional songs in the live setting. That’s an extremely fun but different kind of challenge. In The Early we try and leave even more room for chance, environment, and mood to affect each performance. Recording is the same way–we typically do multiple live takes of each piece, and then select the one we like most afterward. It’s in the tradition of jazz recording in that sense, rather than multi-track pop and rock, though we dabble in overdubs and post-production magic as well.
OS: On top of releasing I Want To Be Ready at the end of February, you recently released an EP, Cusp, in December. To my ears, Cusp seems much more textural and atmospheric than I Want To Be Ready. In creating these two records is there a through-line, a theme or ethos that you can see between them?
JN: The real story about these two records is that they started out as one. We did a studio session at Kawari Sound in March 2023 that produced all of Cusp, minus Patrick Shiroishi’s contribution, and the song “Flossless” on I Want To Be Ready. But we weren’t totally satisfied with what we came up with that year, and so we went back a year later and recorded the rest of the material on I Want To Be Ready, as well as some other stuff that we’re sitting on for now. We basically looked at this huge pile of music and started trying to piece together one coherent record. But we also knew we wanted to do vinyl with Island House – thank you Tim! – and we wanted to do something digestible that could fit on two 20-minute sides.
The more we mixed and matched, the more it felt like Cusp was a standalone thing – and it was recorded essentially as one single improvisation, plus Patrick’s overdub. It is definitely more textural, ambient, and even a little looser. The tunes that made it to I Want To Be Ready were more of a definitive statement of us as a band, as composers and improvisers, and something we could stand behind proudly on the vinyl format.
At our record release show at Solar Myth we played the entire album straight through, then brought on our buddy Matthew Lee who plays sax, and played all of Cusp. And it ripped! I acknowledge that I didn’t really answer your question about a theme or through-line. [laughs]
OS: Was there any particular piece of gear that bolstered your creativity or enhanced your connection to the music while working on these records?
JN: Alex’s embrace of the Korg minilogue synthesizer totally changed the game for us…
AL: I’ve developed a pretty idiosyncratic relationship with the minilogue. At first I picked it up to have a simple way of building beds of noise and drones under our main instruments, but over time I’ve found other ways of looping and manipulating its sounds with various pedals. It’s a weirdly important part of our current sound. Also, for the pieces on I Want To Be Ready, I landed on a specific guitar pedal chain that involves 3 different loopers that all have slightly different capabilities. This basically gives me the ability to intuitively build and take away threads of musical ideas on the guitar in ways that I think feel organic and seamless.
JN: I began live drum looping experiments about four years ago using microphones and pedals, and finally got it to a place I felt good about for this record.
OS: Would you care to share a bit about your history? You’ve been playing together for a long time. Do you have other outlets you perform with, or are there other sonic spaces you’d like to explore outside your work as The Early?
AL: We grew up together in Montclair, New Jersey. I think we’ve known each other since the second grade. We’ve basically been close friends forever and, as Jake said before, we started playing music together in high school. Jake went to Wesleyan and played in bands there. I went to Northwestern initially to study classical guitar, but ended up majoring in music theory. After college, we reunited for a couple years, 2010-12, in Portland, Oregon and then reunited again in Philly in 2017.
In addition to The Early, I’ve played guitar in an alternative rock band called Flat Mary Road for many years. I’ve also contributed to many other projects and just have a general interest in continuing to play guitar in new and interesting settings and configurations.
JN: I play in an experimental trio called Seven Count that orbits around trumpet, drums, and guitar. I’ve started to do more improvised stuff here in Chicago, but am still so new to the scene and getting settled.
OS: What is on the near horizon for you? Any upcoming plans you would like to share?
JN: We have a record release tour coming up at the end of May that we’re very excited for. We’ll be sharing all these dates with the duo of Michael Slyne and Russell Linder from New London, CT called Bent Light. We also have some friends working on analog remixes of different parts of the album, and some unreleased material that features other friends and collaborators, a few covers, that kind of thing. So we’ll probably release one or two small things in the next few months. And our big priority is getting our new material together and heading back into the studio to make the next one.