Julien Chang

Home for the Moment is a collection of four songs I wrote and recorded between December 5 and December 12, 2022. It had been six months since I left Princeton and returned to Baltimore, during which time I also released my second album The Sale. I had just returned from touring, moved back into my childhood home, and rebuilt the basement studio in which I recorded my first album, Jules, when I was seventeen. Although written in such a condensed period of time, and under such an unusual concentration of effort, I could not help but allow these songs the conceptual noncohesion that they required to properly communicate the confusion and contradiction of the time. So this EP is an expression of many things, and it serves many purposes for me. It is first of all a reflection on the restlessness and ambivalence of this transitional period of my life–that is, the period between finishing school and whatever comes next. I wrote it from a position “stuck” in between my past and future, and I was therefore irretrievably, obsessively, preoccupied with both. Regular work on this EP gave me an opportunity to create some solid ground in the middle. It is also an attempt to incorporate the language and concepts of critical theory, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis–the focus of my undergraduate studies–within my practice as a musician. I didn’t want to leave this task to the lyrical content alone, so I also experimented with more formal and compositional means by which to work out these ideas, an inclination which inspired a reinvigorated interest in counterpoint, harmony, and arranging. These four songs are a candid document of a special moment in my life, and although they are concerned with the complications of this “in-between” time of one’s early twenties, they are also imbued with the confidence and excitement inspired by deep love, long friendships, and energetic community. To say it another way, it is about Baltimore, my home, and the people who live there.