What do you do with an unread 2,000-page manuscript that captures the horrors of WWII through the eyes of a teenage Romanian Jewish girl? A manuscript that tells of solitary confinement in a Soviet prison, dodging Nazi gunfire, and enduring a miscarriage at 17—from jumping off a train. A manuscript that curses God but venerates nature and the stars, recounts a mentorship from a lost storyteller, and sits in an unopened box, untouched for decades, while the family refuses to talk about it.

The first thing Myk did was read it. The second was to share it with Dave.

The book begins in Bessarabia when Myk's grandmother is a 17-year-old bride-to-be, just two days before the Soviet occupation. It then flashes back a generation to her mother’s escape from oppression in Odessa to Romania, journeys deep into the Soviet Union, and eventually arrives in Poland, Israel, and Canada. The manuscript is raw—2,000 pages of typewritten ink, amended with Whiteout and handwritten notes. Her accent lingers in the odd spellings and old-world phrases. It’s a series of vignettes from a vanished world, yet the human nature within it is all too familiar—filled with cruelty, ingenuity, and near misses. It needs to be edited and published, but it’s so powerful as is. It’s a pot that’s been boiling over in secrecy for four decades.

During the pandemic, Myk was in Greenfield, Massachusetts, pouring over the pages while Dave did the same from Toronto. Over the phone, they shared their wildly different impressions—Myk, as a third-generation Jewish survivor of WWII, and Dave, encountering a firsthand account of a brutal history not his own. They spent hours unpacking its layers. They each saw so much, but from completely different angles.

One night, as they walked and talked on opposite sides of the border, Dave remarked, "You can see she was healing as she wrote. She faced her traumas, reckoned with the choices she made because of them, and came to terms with it all. She was seeing herself." This stopped Myk in his tracks. He had been so focused on the healing he himself was receiving from the book that he hadn’t considered what it had done for her in the act of writing. Like Moby Dick or Don Quixote, there’s a sense that she was improvising as she went, never looking back, just moving forward until her story was fully told.

In the summer of 2023, Myk and Dave reunited in Toronto. Without much discussion, they decided to channel their shared journey through the manuscript into music. They performed a series of intense, sweaty shows where they told stories from the book, interwoven with reflections and wild musical explorations—rock, folk, klezmer, jazz, and spontaneous compositions. Then they hit the studio. What emerged was deeply personal, raw, and alive with the same tension between beauty and chaos found in the manuscript.

Before recording, they called up memories from the book, calibrated their emotions, and hit record. This wasn’t about making a polished album; it was about releasing what had been absorbed. There was no setlist, no planning—just two musicians, serving as channels for something much larger.

You can hear them discovering as they go, improvising, and playing several of Myk’s songs, tunes he’s carried with him through various bands over the past two decades. Not because they fit the project, but because they’re part of him, much like his grandmother’s stories. He played them without announcing which would come next, like a village violinist at an all-night wedding.

This record is a manuscript in its own right. It’s far from pristine, and that’s the point. Like the original manuscript, it’s raw, jarring, and emotional, filled with joy, pathos, and a yearning for something just out of reach. You can hear laughter after takes, decisions being made in the moment, and a need to heal as well as destroy. You can witness two musicians, at the height of their abilities, seeing themselves through the act of creation.