The EP titled ‘A Nice Neighborhood to Have Bad Habits In’ by Ryan Yingst is centred on the more difficult aspects of life and includes songs on such topics as addiction, loss, family disagreements, love, fear and hope. Instead of condemning these experiences, the EP allows them to be present and looks for lessons in them. The outcome is a personal body of work in which the difficult subjects are turned into songs that provide sympathy rather than criticism and at the same time leave room for reflection and growth.
The song ‘Canary in the Coal Mine’ reflects a major turning point in Yingst’s life and was written after he had left Nashville and was wondering if the city matched his own ideas about music; in contrast, ‘If I Don’t Have You’ adopts a playful attitude towards unhealthy love and is influenced by Yingst’s 90s rock style. Johnny Richeson plays drums and Stefan Kuriga plays bass, thus giving the recording a sense of Yingst’s live performances and offering a more light-hearted contrast to the EP’s more sombre sections.
One of the most moving songs on the album is ‘The Tallest Trees’, which focuses on the experience of loss and the difficulty of going on after the death of a partner. The song was inspired by accounts of people going through that situation during the COVID period and also reflects Yingst’s own encounter with mortality. It was first recorded as a live-in-studio performance featuring guitar, vocals, drums and cello, and later had keys, bass and harmonies added as overdubs. In this recording Erin Busch plays the cello and Gusten Rudolph handles the drums, which gives the song a special position in the album.
“We Were Once Wild” is distinguished by the way it combines its songwriting with its arrangement; the song started after Yingst’s parents separated in 2021 and was later brought back again as a result of a wave of nostalgia, employing strings and a complete acoustic guitar part to create a sense of nostalgia, tension and growth. In other tracks, “Dopamine” looks at addiction from the point of view of the addictive substance itself, having been inspired by a discussion about recovery and temptation. Throughout the EP, Yingst transforms her personal experiences into thoughtfully crafted songs, enabling difficult situations to become reflections on memory, change and discovering meaning in hardship.
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