The God Awful Small Affairs is one of those bands that wraps their arms around you and squeezes till you give in to their open and lovely emotionality. Right as our great quarantine was hitting, their heart and soul, Missy Preston released an EP of acoustic beauty recorded in a thirty minute session at Columbia College on a two track. The result was an emotive outpouring that resembles all the livesteams we’re currently taking in from our sequestered lives. Preston was kind enough to answer some of our questions from their current quarantine spot in Utah, where they had planned to end their acoustic tour that just wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps it was fate that Red Gate Woods would be what that tour could have been…

MP: Missy Preston

You recently released your first solo EP, Red Gate Woods. What made you step away from your band mates for this one and embrace the essence of these songs? And The recording process sounds like you were making a demo, but were so satisfied with the results you went ahead and released it?

MP: Big answer. You ready?

I didn’t go into the studio at Columbia College on Valentine's day with an acoustic EP in mind. A month prior to the release of “Red Gate Woods: Love Songs and Intrusive Thoughts,” (and a month and two days before I would skip town to cart my need-no-one artist father across the nation during what felt like the beginning of the end of the world ) I was in a Lyft, guitar in tow, running late (per usual. I’m truly sorry to everyone who puts up with me) to re-meet a half-stranger and do whatever we could do with 30ish minutes of 2-track.

I remember it being the coldest day of the year, and bringing tea, and being positive that at any minute one of the many cool looking humans inside the building would recognize me as a cowboy-chord intruder and kick me out. That, of course, did not happen. Instead, I made the acquaintance of the talented and respectful Hunter Funk, who shook my hand (a luxury now, lord), and spent the next hour with me, separated by glass, laying down 5 swift and encompassing tracks that would later become the EP. To us at the time, it was his school project and me pushing myself to do beautiful and partially terrifying things. I've been practicing this year saying ‘yes’ to things that scare me and when Hunter reached out via facebook after our brief meeting post a nacho treehouse show, asking if I would like to record a song on two track in one take, I first made him promise not to be a murderer, and then said yes. Or maybe I said yes and then was reassured he wasn’t a murderer. 

I hadn’t done anything celebratory on Valentine’s day for several years. A very good friend passed away suddenly 4 years ago close to the holiday and I normally spend the day drunk, sad, and nostalgic. I promised myself that this year I would do something different. So when valentine's day was the day the studio at his school was available, I took it as a sign and decided the session itself should be led by whatever the heck my heart was feeling. My heart felt like singing those 5 songs. And Hunter aptly caught them in all of their mess and worry and anxiety and greatness. I couldn’t be more grateful to him. 

I walked out of the session an hour later thinking: “I hope one of those songs turns out.” In that moment, I was so happy for how soft I had been with myself. I wanted to catch exactly how I was feeling that day and to do that I wanted to not chastise myself for any mistakes or any moments my voice felt constricted. I sat on my favorite seat in the back of the Pink Line thinking: “If just one of those songs is something I can be proud of, it’ll be a blessing and I could use it to promote my acoustic tour.” I floated home feeling loved by myself and dreaming of the cross-country solo tour I would take in 2 months time and the single I might be able to release beforehand.  Both of those did not happen.

When the Sword of Damocles really did fall, I became swiftly jobless, tourless, and concerned in a heightened way for my family. The echoes of disappointment almost outweighed the worry, briefly. I had been growing this future in my hear. A future that involved me playing the songs dearest to my heart in people’s living rooms across the nation before joining forces with my best friends and bandmates to take those songs in the opposite direction, through New York and Canada. It’s selfish, I know, with people dying and the world collapsing to mourn an event that never even existed, but I do feel it. And then Hunter handed me the recordings and I though: “Heck, this is the closest thing anyone, including myself, is going to get this season to a TGASAs acoustic tour.” I kept thinking, in another universe, another dimension somewhere, I’m meeting strangers and making music late into the night. I’m smiling as I play the wrong chord in someone's basement in Colorado or Moab or Missouri. In this universe however, it was recorded onto 2-track in psychic anticipation of the alone tour that never was. Big cheers to all the great friends I didn’t get to meet this year. I hope our paths cross in this universe someday. Feel free to listen to the songs and make up fake conversations we might have had. I sure do.

The second fold of this wonderful premeditated gift, is it was able to fund my great rescue. So many amazing humans reached out and purchased or shared the EP and I was able to feed my car all the way to OKC and then to Utah, to deposit my father in the land of running water and family. It will soon help feed my car as I make the lonesome and much anticipated journey back to Chicago to collapse into my own bed and wish away this nightmare world I seem to have stumbled into. 

These tunes feel deeply personal. What drives you to create? 

MP: I understand my world in plans, lists, and logic but feel an all-consuming fire. Every song is me: a big idiot, trying to piece together fiction, dreams, pictures, shower rants, unsent letters, and gut emotions; to hopefully, either exercise something from my mind, or change the light source enough so that I can see it more clearly. Its super messy and mostly I’m just lucky people like to listen to my therapeutic goobly gook. Each song is a labyrinth of weird. Take the title track “Red Gate Woods'' for example. An odd apocalyptic smoothie of performative love and disintegrating loneliness. We start in a dream I had that shook me up, where I drove nails into my feet at a family picnic, travel through a section that I initially thought would be a commentary on false femme-presenting performative vulnerability, to a place of exhaustion and a real desire to find understanding and companionship, back out the way we came, ending on this subverted power-struggle. Gobble. E. Gook. But I think it helped me work some stuff out. Or at least it felt good to get it out and to sing it real loud. When the band takes these songs and adds their power behind them, it takes on a whole new world-building feel. (ugh. I miss my dudes so much.) We just started playing “Red Gate Woods” as a full band and I can’t wait to do it again. 

What brought you to Chicago? You grew up in Utah correct?  

MP: I was born in Utah but spent most of my life in Oklahoma City. My family is Latter Day Saint (Mormon) and most of them moved back here after I was settled in Illinois.

I moved to Chicago several years ago for the classic reason - young, tumultuous love that ended just about as soon as my feet touched 312 soil (oh boy.) But funny enough, moving here without friends, a safety net, or a real life plan was the catalyst that threw me into the DIY scene and encouraged me to start sharing my music. I fell head over heels for the scene and for the art in this city. Started a band. Decided this was what I wanted to do forever. Until I turn to dust. Forever and ever and ever amen. 

Once we all recover from this period, and you get back from Utah, what's the first thing you'll do in Chicago? 

MP: Lie on my floor with my friends and cry and then go dancing and then play every bar that will have me, with their bleach urinal late night smell…and drink some good bourbon…and go to my favorite laundry mat…and go on big silent walks with people while holding their hands…and re-think my participation in capitalism...