Mike Savino, the multi-instrumentalist and songwriter behind Tall Tall Trees, had big plans for getting through the pandemic with his sanity intact. He built a recording studio in the basement of his home in Asheville, North Carolina, setting himself up to lay down the tracks for a new album. To help see them across the finish line, Savino invited his longtime friend and member of indie rock mainstays WHY? Josiah Wolf to help him out. But everything changed once they set up their gear and started playing together.

Rather than fight the creative tide, Savino and Wolf went with the flow. What came out of these sessions at Savino’s home studio, affectionately called GalleyTapes, was Stick to the Mystical I, a playful collection of songs that pulls liberally from the pair’s collective influences — folk, jazz, pop, hip-hop, noise rock — and ties all those strands together into one delirious psychedelic bundle. Savino, with his heavily modified 6-string electric banjo dubbed the Banjotron 6500 is a master of looping textures, creating the perfect foil to Josiah’s explosive improvisatory drumming.

The bulk of the music on Stick to the Mystical I came about in spontaneous bursts, some of them built from first-take improvisations that they would then shape into the finished material heard on the album.