New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Matt Wanamaker found himself in Afghanistan in early 2013. Following the breakup of his long time band, relationship troubles, and a layoff, he escaped to the Navy to surround himself with orderly work and anonymity. Eventually he found himself at war, filling his days helping to build hospitals and runways. However, the nights off back at base were lonely and quiet. The holes left by boredom and solitude slowly renewed a focus on writing, and he found that he couldn�t escape the melodies forming in his head.
After receiving a care package with a handheld cassette dictation machine, he began committing these ideas to tape, singing into it while banging on a metal chair to keep the rhythm. This evolved into nights filled with marathon recording sessions, breaking only for incoming Taliban rocket attacks. All of his feelings, from initial excitement through fear, heartache, isolation, loss and guilt�.feelings that otherwise would have been kept inside or relegated to a dusty notebook, suddenly poured out into the form of song. Occasionally he would borrow an acoustic guitar from the USO, but usually it was just Wanamaker singing alone in whatever tent or shipping container he happened to be staying in that night, often whispering so he wouldn�t wake anyone. He sent those tapes home to friends and former band-mates back home so they would know what he was going through, and they overdubbed their own parts on to most of them as a way to keep his spirits up. Years later those friends convinced Wanamaker to share the tapes, and the end result, Fighting Season is as much an album as it is a journal of those long months away from home.
Mothball Fleets are collections of rusting Navy ships that are no longer needed, but kept afloat in case they may be needed later. In a similar way, the relationships rebuilt by the overdubbing-by-mail process brought once shelved musical collaborations back to life. Wanamaker, nicknamed Maps by a young niece who couldn�t pronounce his name, named the collaboration for this concept. It is a celebration, but also the statement of an artist moving on and reestablishing the groundwork for future expression.
The songs on Fighting Season offer an instant likability with the cozy cohabitation of subtly complex melodies, spurts of lush orchestration, and creaky mistakes that are allowed to show through. An unlikely troubadour, Wanamaker�s familiar-at-once rasp and wry delivery keep his tall tales relatable.
Although it can be as sonically eclectic as the emotions felt during its creation, Fighting Season remains centered on a particular lo-fi aesthetic, prompted by the time and place for which it was recorded as much as by when it was embellished. This homemade aspect shows itself in places, but is more often hidden by the melodies and stories that Wanamaker managed to produce all alone at night�within a shipping container somewhere in Afghanistan�just trying to stay alive.
