Claud Six is an artist from Portland, Oregon who has been releasing music for over a decade, whether it be as a solo artist or as a member of groups like Jellyfish Brigade, BCxLD, Hives Inquiry Squad, Shut-ins and the Colony, and R4PC4MP. In 2022, he gave us an excellent set of solo releases, In Case We Shouldn’t Make It and Just in Case We Make It. Now he’s back with a short EP, Good Thing the Long Days Keep Me Awake at Night.

For all of Claud Six’s output, it was recently brought to his attention by a couple of people in his life that he didn’t sit with suffering, despair, or sadness for very long. As a doer and an optimist, Six often looked for tasks to reach a goal and to find the silver lining in a situation. Given the past couple of years, and this past winter being the hardest stretch for Six, he finally decided to take the criticism to heart and sit with his gloom for a minute and write it out. For the project, he teamed up with producer Apato, who is able to provide the perfectly beautiful and gloomy soundscape Six needed to communicate these feelings. So yes, this is a sad project, but it’s also a beautiful and soulful one, where the words and the emotions are given space to breath, and put into context because sometimes this world just keeps throwing shit at you and it can be too much, even for an optimist and a doer. The other good news is that while Six is finally staying in this space for a project, it’s a relatively short one, so he’s not just dwelling in the sadness and milking it for all its worth. He’s letting the feelings sit for a little while, acknowledging them in his music, and then letting go.

Good Thing the Long Days Keep Me Awake at Night is a different type of project from Claud Six, but it makes for a nice complement to his bigger body of work across all of his different musical endeavors. Sometimes you just need to sit with sad feeling and acknowledge it, and that’s exactly what Six did with this EP.