Theft World is an album about stealing. I’ve stolen a lot, and I’ve been stolen from a great deal. Nothing interesting has been taken from me though, just the things that everybody seems to have, social security number, credit cards, etc. Not long after I turned 25, while at the Lost Lake Lounge in Denver on tour supporting our last album Hex Dealer, I got a notification on my phone that I had successfully checked into a Comfort Inn & Suites in Amherst, Massachusetts. I quickly logged into my bank account only to see a long list of charges on my credit card, as well as a couple thousand dollars missing from my checking and savings. The purchases seemed fairly mundane, a lot of hotels, huge purchases at Costco and Walmart, but one stuck out. A single thirty-five dollar purchase on the website Bandcamp. My heart dropped, and when I went into Lip Critic’s Bandcamp it confirmed what I was afraid of. Whoever stole my card had bought Lip Critic’s whole discography. It made me sick. It was as if the scammer was reaching out from some abstract place into the real world, saying “I see you.” Seven shows later on tour we were at O’Briens in Boston. The show was an especially feral and violent one and when we finished our set I ran over to the merch booth. A kid in the line caught my eye, a tall lanky white kid wearing a surgical mask and a Five Nights At Freddy’s zip hoodie with the hood on. When he finally got up to the table I asked if he knew what he wanted. I could tell by his eyes he was smiling underneath the zip-up. After a brief pause he recited my social security number to me. As much as it shook me, seeing him there in front of me felt harmless, like a little kid playing a prank on you, unable to contain their excitement and watch you realize what’s happened. I asked him if he’d talk to me alone and he instantly agreed. As soon as we got outside he excitedly admitted to stealing my information. He exclaimed that he “couldn’t believe the prize” he’d won. When I pressed him about why he had targeted me, he said because I had told him to. “You hid it well,” he kept saying, “but I figured it out.” I realized pretty quickly I was talking to someone who was not in the same world as me. He told me he was convinced that we had been leaving coded messages and patterns in our music that were all part of some massive scavenger hunt, and that he had won. In my head I was grazing through all the lyrics I ever wrote, all the songs we’d ever put out, trying to understand how someone could have come to this conclusion. The more I stayed quiet the more he filled the space with words, detailing the parts of this grand narrative and puzzle that I had supposedly made. After a few minutes I stopped him. I told him I had no interest in going to the police, and didn’t expect to get any of my money back. I asked him if he would be willing to tell me the story in full as he saw it, what he thought I meant in the lyrics, what patterns he was picking up, and how he decoded all of my personal information from the music. He was extremely willing, and after we packed up that night, we met him at a 24-hour halal spot. All of us set up audio recordings on our phones beforehand, and about 45 minutes later he had told us everything. None of it made any sense. We spent the trip home from Boston listening to the recordings in the van laughing and trying to make sense of what the kid had said. The more we listened to it the more entertaining things became, and we started to see recurring themes and characters in his rambling. He said he knew certain songs were from the perspective of “The ATM Man” and some songs took place on Earth while others were placed in “The Junk Space” and “The Grocery Store Casino.” I remember feeling a sense of jealousy that I hadn’t actually concocted this whole thing. The actual themes and ideas of the music we had made paled in comparison to this one kid's freakish interpretation of them. We got back to New York the next day, played our last show at TV Eye in Ridgewood, and the tour was over. A week later, Connor and I were at his studio starting to lay out our next album. A bunch of demos were already done and we had been feeling super confident about it. But something felt off then. All the tracks felt too safe, even boring. We had been over the moon about them in the months before the tour but now it all just felt weak. The session was massively unproductive in terms of music, but we couldn’t stop talking about the kid's story - my scammer’s story. It dawned on me later in the night: let’s make his album. Whatever this kid thought he was hearing, let’s make that. He had given it to us all on a platter. Every detail story boarded out in the recording of our conversation. We ended up shelving the album we had worked on in the months leading up to our headline tour and started from scratch using the recording of our conversation with the kid as our guide. Theft World is that record. Presented by Songbyrd All ages