Adeline Hotel writes a different kind of divorce album

Dan Knishkowy recites the opening lines to Mount Eerie and Julie Doiron’s “Belief pt. 2” without pausing for thought: “I believed in love and I still do / I’m not going to seal up my heart.” Knishkowy listened to the song repeatedly while writing Whodunnit, the new album from his Adeline Hotel project. He was, like Phil Elverum, writing through a divorce. Those lines signaled a refusal to submit to the anger that characterizes most break-up albums.

“He’s coming to the realization that losing himself doesn’t mean he needs to walk away with cynicism about partnership,” Knishkowy says now on a call from his home in Brooklyn. “I was trying to think about it like that. We don’t have to look back at it as a series of mistakes. It can be a learning process for what’s next. I found that interesting compared to Blood on the Tracks, where Dylan is so bitter. I wanted this to not feel that way. I’m happy it didn’t in the end.”

Whodunnit, out today via Knishkowy’s own Ruination Records, is defiant and unwavering in its open-heartedness. This is a “divorce album” (Knishkowy uses the term more than once) that opens with its protagonist asking, over a luxuriously slow acoustic guitar and without a hint of sarcasm, “How did I get so lucky?” On a smoldering and hypnotic song called “Grief,” he revels in the idea that “this taste of life is all mine”; two songs later, on the airier “Joy,” he seems to fall in love with the world around him. Towards the end of the record, Knishkowy repeats lines that come over like a mantra: “I will let your flowers grow / I will let myself go.” This is not Blood on the Tracks.

Adeline Hotel started as a singer-songwriter solo project but took on a new form for 2020’s Solid Love, around a band that included the endlessly curious guitarist and songwriter Ben Seretan, and Office Culture’s Winston Cook-Wilson on piano. Since then the members of the band have cycled in and out, and the sound has changed accordingly: the plaintive acoustics on 2021’s Good Timing, the piano-led minimalism on the same year’s The Cherries are Speaking, and the rich and freeform instrumental compositions on 2023’s Hot Fruit.

Whodunnit borrows from all of these albums without sounding like any of them. Here, the band works around Knishkowy’s finger-picked guitar; Cook-Wilson’s piano is its perfect compliment, ducking in and out of Knishkowy’s melodies. There is an openness and warmth to Adeline Hotel’s sound that can only come from improvising among friends. That spontaneity is there in the songs’ foundations, too; Knishkowy credits producer Katie von Schleischer with giving him the confidence to embrace stream-of-consciousness writing, capturing an idea at its rawest. And unlike on previous albums, where Knishkowy’s vocals have usually been almost muffled, an accompaniment rather than a lead, his soft and half-whispered voice is clear at the front of the mix here. It is, as he told me, part of that “spirit of optimism” that he wanted to run through Whodunnit, a refusal to give in to misery and malice.

When did you realize that this album was going to be different?

I think for me, to feel like an album is worth making, I need to surprise myself a bit. The last one was all instrumental and very meticulously composed. I just felt like I didn’t have that side of my brain going anymore; it felt kind of done for me. So I just started writing so much in this stream-of-consciousness way, which felt very different than the previous record. I was going through some pretty intense personal stuff, so it had an urgency to it. It was very much like ‘first thought, best thought,’ kind of didn’t even really think about how it fit with my larger catalog. I made it with some of the same people, so there’s a nice through line in terms of the personalities sonically, but everyone was trying different things than how they’d approached the last one, which I think feels really fun to hear come together.

What does that stream-of-consciousness process look like for you?

From a practical level, it’s about getting some of the self-conscious tendencies out of the way, taking away the thought of how this is going to be received. Often, especially with lyrics, I just have the recorder going, and I’ll play and sing and then kind of see what it is and sculpt it down to make the song structure a little more conventional. But with this, what came out was, by and large, what became the record, especially the songs Whodunnit and ‘Isn’t That Enough,’ which had dozens of verses. I looked at it and was like, “Should there be less?” But it just felt true to the subject matter. That felt like what it was like to process the material of the record. So to sculpt it later kind of felt like it’d be doing a disservice and wouldn’t be as honest as just letting the stream of consciousness be.

The album is obviously written about the dissolution of a marriage. How far were you from that, time-wise?

I think I wrote maybe three or four of the songs before, but in the midst of feeling that impending, and then really, really in it. Most of the songs and the demos that I recorded for them were just the week I moved out of my house. I was recording and writing every day. There’s a rawness to it where I wouldn’t have even had the distance to think about editing them. It made sense to me at the time, so that’s just what it was. I really appreciate that now. I put the record away for a bit after it was done, and before it was coming out, I hadn’t really listened to it in a while. I kind of thought the record was darker than it was. When I started listening back while it was coming out, there’s a lot of joy and freedom in it, which was really nice to hear.

It’s interesting to hear you say that there was more optimism there than you thought. What were the most surprising moments on the record?

I think in the last song, ‘Possible Lives,’ there’s a line: ‘Spending all my time picking out possible lives out of a lineup.’ There’s such excitement in realizing I can do anything I want. It’s so freeing to not feel limited by decisions you made or dynamics you let crystallize when you were ten years prior. The record ends with the line, “I was lucky, so lucky,” and starts with “How Did I Get So Lucky?” I was definitely feeling not just relief, but excitement for what would come next.

Have you always been an optimist?

I feel like sometimes I think of myself as the opposite, but I guess what I learned from this record is, yeah, maybe. I definitely feel a sort of problem-solving or solution-oriented impetus. Maybe that’s why the songs were just written in the moment; it didn’t feel paralyzing with cynicism. It just felt like, here’s an opportunity, let’s run with it.

Were there moments where you felt tempted to capitulate to bitterness?

I think so, but it didn’t really feel that interesting to write about. Capitulating to that would be a catharsis in a way to get something off my chest, but it wouldn’t feel like moving. It’d be a stasis — “This is something that happened and I don’t like it” — which is not interesting in a growing way: “What can I learn from this experience?” I want the album to grow with time, and I feel like that bitterness is a way to stay stuck, so I definitely wanted to avoid it. There’s like two songs that didn’t make the record; maybe they were stuck in that context too much.

Your vocals are clearer and further to the front of the mix here. It seems like it was quite important to you to have your voice so clear and upfront.

Yeah, I think so. Some of that is just losing the self-conscious tendency to feel like if I’m not doing something cool on guitar, it’s not worth it. I’ve had that feeling, but I feel good to have moved past that. I was willing to let the instruments be something else rather than the forefront. It was hard for me to do that; I’ve always kept vocals a bit low. But I felt like, in the spirit of the optimism of the possibilities here for me as a person, one of them would be being comfortable being heard, both literally and metaphorically. To not take that opportunity or to shy away from it would be betraying the personal lessons in the lyrics. At times I was like, “I don’t want this; it feels uncomfortable.” But I had to do it. It felt like a necessary step, and I’m glad I did because I feel really good about it now.

Have you written much since you finished work on Whodunnit?

I didn’t for a while, but I’m back to it.

Why do you think you didn’t for a while? What made you pause?

I think part of it was practical. After I finished recording this, we were putting out Hot Fruit, so I had to switch gears and promote a record and play some shows. I didn’t really have the energy for it. Also, [I was] trying to understand what I felt compelled to be writing about, because this sort of snuck up on me. I hadn’t been in the practice of sitting down and writing with intention. I’ve been writing two different things: one is a songs record that’s picking up where this thread left off but in a much different way, subject matter-wise. Then I’ve been working on this long instrumental piece which might have some lyrics involved, focusing on themes well outside of this. It feels refreshing to surprise myself in a different way.