I Give My Friends Flowers, the project of Asheville, North Carolina producer and songwriter Jacob Klein, has shared “Feel Like,” a new single with an accompanying video. It’s his first new music since Dogstar 1, the debut album he released earlier this year, and he calls it the last song from that record’s world.
Klein wrote “Feel Like” after Hurricane Helene flooded Asheville and the ecosystems around it. It was the first song he wrote after the storm, on a piano rescued from the damage, at a point when he was somewhere between recovery and whatever would come next. The track opens with a warped guitar sample from a friend who had spent the summer before the flood in the studio, working on his own record.
The arrangement sets indie drums and guitars against synths, and the result is atmospheric and quietly hopeful. The hook circles a question it never finishes: “what’s it feeling that like / what’s that feeling that like.” Klein says the phrasing is “grammatically unstable on purpose,” a reach toward a question that won’t quite form. “The song doesn’t answer,” he says. “It holds the question open, closing on ‘after all we’ve been through…'”
“Feel Like” began as a demo that didn’t make the cut for Dogstar 1. For the finished version, Klein went back into the studio with Mike Johnson and Harrison Wargo, who co-produced the album with him. Harper James mixed the track in Brooklyn, and Chris Gehringer mastered it at Sterling Sound.
Klein co-directed the video with Yehuda Katz. Drawing on surrealist film and the natural world, it follows a groundskeeper who offers to help Klein find his lost shadow and reattach it. Katz says the two worked all four elements into the film. “I wanted it to feel like standing in your backyard at dusk and realizing you don’t recognize it anymore,” Klein says.
Klein started making records at age 10, growing up between his father’s hi-fi audio shop and his mother’s garden. By high school he was opening on tours for Mac Miller, Selena Gomez, and Maroon 5. He went on to study at Duquesne and Belmont, apprenticed with Jules Shear and Larry Crane, and spent most of a decade producing and engineering in Nashville, Pittsburgh, New York, and Asheville.
Dogstar 1 is a 12-song record named for Sirius, the Dog Star, and it moves between dream pop, alt-pop, electronic soul, and lo-fi folk. Klein wrote it through a hard stretch: the flood, years of caring for family members, losing friends too soon, the death of a young dog to cancer, and the end of a relationship that had lasted a decade. He describes the album as the first half of a story about a world that keeps changing while looking almost exactly the same. Blank Tapes, North Carolina’s local music webzine, has written that the project’s soulful vocals and lo-fi production make for “a worthy listen, especially if you enjoy the likes of Toro y Moi or Bon Iver.”
The project’s name came from a David Hockney interview, and the idea behind it is a simple one: tomorrow isn’t promised. Klein frames “Feel Like” as a doorway into what comes next. Sirius, he points out, is a twin star.
Learn More
I Give My Friends Flowers on Bandcamp
I Give My Friends Flowers on YouTube
Photo credit: Parker Pfister
