My wife just released her album!

In her first full-length offering since 2020, my wife Erin Corbett has just released The Tree, The Rot, The Bloom. Erin has been working on this thing for the entire time I've known her^[1] in varying capacity, and it's so good to be able to listen to it in full.

This album has a lot of different textures and emotional colours to it. There's moody, grieving darkness (Vocoder Pop), quivering love and devotion (Where The River Goes, Garden Girl), and joyful exploration of gender and sex (Lace, Evening).

Erin is a brilliant sound designer, which is apparent in the intricate crystalline and oozing structures she's built for these songs. The record feels like a transition between two emotional worlds, where there's the fearful, grief-stricken and horror-tinged first leg followed by the intimate, rabbitlike curiosity and explosive joie de vivre of the back half.

I got to be a somewhat important part of the recording and writing process, which I'm super stoked about! I had a hand in the production of a couple tracks (Where The River Goes, Lace) and wrote the lyrics for Garden Girl as part of this improvised live performance! There were a couple funny moments in the recording process that feel like they would be fun for me to document, so I've written about them here.

At some point, Erin was saying that the album didn't have enough fast and bombastic moments, so I told her to throw down a breakbeat and make something fast right then and there. We started tinkering with a synth called Falcon, and sampled some old styrene choral records. Over the course of a couple weeks, we went back and forth over what key the song was in because of weird dissonance between the melody line and the sampled choir; I was hearing one thing, she was hearing another. Eventually I decided something must be fucked up in the tuning realm, and in a final moment of frustration she opened Falcon and found that she had... tuned the synth 71 cents sharp. Upon fixing it, this demo became Lace.

I was on a train heading home from Kitchener when Erin sent me the first iteration of Where The River Goes. I remember playing it over and over and crying a bit, thinking "someone wrote a love song for me?"^[2] At some point later in the process, we felt something extra was missing from the harmony, so I suggested prominently featuring the ninth when the verse comes back in, because it felt "yearning" and wistful which paired well with the woodwinds Naomi recorded for the song.

It's so nice to be able to hear this album as a fan now. In my eyes, it represents a deep transformation in Erin over the years as she has built confidence, independence and a strong sense of self. I am so proud of her <3

If you're in Toronto on March 27th 2026, you can come see her play the record in full at the Tranzac Main Hall! My band Waxlimbs will be on the bill, along with Xukasia and Girls Rituals.