Their story starts in Hartford, where members orbited each other at The Hartt School, one of the country’s top music conservatories. After finding each other and solidifying their line-up in 2008, they began writing music and found that their surroundings played a huge part in their creative energies. While writing their debut album Old Time Speaker, they bounced between the buzzing urban community in Hartford, where Henderson says melodies and chord progressions come naturally, and a remote Maine town, where they holed up to focus on lyrics. When they went into the studio in 2009, they went, as Henderson says, to “a place we’d never been before with a producer we’d never met to play a bunch of songs we’d never played before.” The producer was Chad Copelin (Ivan & Alyosha, Ben Rector), who would go on to form a solid and lasting partnership with the band.