Fishboy was started on a bedroom floor by a cross-legged teenager singing nonsense into a Radio Shack microphone to the rhythm section of a ceiling fan. Twenty years, several albums, mics, ceiling fans, and rhythm sections later, songwriter and frontman Eric Michener has delivered the band’s career best. Written by singing into apps while commuting between Denton and Dallas for a year and some change, WAITSGIVING is a collection of interwoven first person character songs inspired by the true events of an expired local time capsule. As characters are revealed, a multigenerational story unfolds about parenthood, patience and the timelessness of music. The album, still just a collection of voice memos in the spring of 2020, reached topical urgency in a pandemically paused world. So Michener used the break from his commute to put the mic back on the bedroom floor, take a pair of pliers to his out of tune piano, mail order some extra long cables and get to work. With emailed bass by Brooks Martin, cloud shared solos and horns by Samuel Escalante, and drums plus mixing by Matt Pence, WAITSGIVING is the band’s most musically sparse but lyrically dense record to date. A heartfelt story dedicated to those who wait.

FFO: AJJ, The Mountain Goats, Nana Grizol