The Lost Days – “For Today” [Video]

After meeting at a memorial for a mutual friend, Tony Molina (Ovens) and Sarah Rose Janko (Dawn Riding) started spending nights into mornings playing guitar and singing their hearts out to an audience of empty wine bottles in the East Oakland warehouse where Sarah lived. Both fans of each other’s respective musical projects, they bonded over a shared love of The Byrds and Bill Fox and leaned into their friendship as a much needed support in a time of dizzying grief. The days were marked in trips to Jackson’s Liquor store, the same spot Tony frequented while recording with his band Ovens a decade earlier, at a studio in the same neighborhood. The nights drifted by. The songs kept coming. They decided they wanted to record all they’d been pouring their hearts into and The Lost Days was born.

Over the course of 2021, Molina began penning the songs that would make up their first full length album. As Sarah Rose had moved to New Orleans, and the pandemic had kept the two songwriters apart, Molina would send song demos long distance to Janko, penned with her voice in mind. Inspired by the solo work of Bill Fox, The Byrds, Dear Nora and Guided by Voices, The Lost Days started recording what was to be their first full-length LP, In The Store, at friend Nick Bassett’s basement studio on his Yamaha MT8X 8 track. Tony would venture on BART from Concord to Nick’s house in Oakland to lay down basic tracks, and Sarah Rose would add the vocals and tambourine when she was in town. The album is an exercise in true DIY lo-fi analog home recorded tradition, with songs that are a unique blend of folk and pop, crafted with a love of Beatles melody and ‘65 era Rolling Stones instrumentation.

In The Store comes on March 17, 2023 on Speakeasy Studios SF, a new label run by friend Alicia Vanden Heuvel of the Aislers Set, which is fitting for an album recorded with friends and by friends, as Alicia and Tony were long term Slumberland labelmates and as Alicia produced & recorded the new Dawn Riding album “You’re Still Here” with Sarah Rose in her analog home studio.

You can order the album HERE.