SINCERELY

The Making of a Record

An Editorial on the Work of Thaddeous

There are records made to be heard.

There are records made to be remembered.

And then there are records made because, at a certain point, leaving an experience undocumented becomes impossible.

Sincerely belongs to that third category.

It was not conceived as a reinvention. It was not the product of a calculated departure from what came before, nor was it designed around the expectation of institutional recognition.

It emerged from collapse.

Not the collapse of an artist.

The collapse of a belief system.

There was a period in Thaddeous's life when an insurmountable amount of betrayal arrived simultaneously. Experiences that might have been survivable individually accumulated until they began to compromise the structures beneath them: trust, loyalty, certainty, expectation, interpretation, and the assumptions through which a person understands other people and, ultimately, himself.

The result was more than pain.

It was disorientation.

When enough of what a person believes is contradicted at once, rebuilding does not necessarily begin with answers. Sometimes there is no intact framework from which to begin.

There is only the need to preserve what remains.

That became Sincerely.

DOCUMENTATION

Thaddeous did not begin with a philosophy capable of explaining what was happening.

He began with a language capable of documenting it.

Music was the language he already possessed—the language through which experience could be translated into something tangible when ordinary language proved insufficient.

When the internal structures that once organized experience became unreliable, documentation became a form of orientation.

Not a solution.

Not an explanation.

A record.

That distinction is fundamental to Sincerely.

The album was not created because its author had figured everything out. It was created because there came a point at which pretending that everything still made sense was no longer possible.

So he documented.

The emotions.

The contradictions.

The memories.

The fractures.

The things that could not yet be reconciled.

The things that could not yet be understood.

And the things that remained true despite everything else becoming uncertain.

The music became a place where those things could exist without first requiring resolution.

WHEN THE INNER WORLD COLLAPSES

Betrayal is often understood as an interpersonal event.

But betrayal, when it becomes sufficiently extensive and simultaneous, can reach beyond individual relationships. It can begin to alter the architecture through which a person interprets the world.

What does loyalty mean when loyalty is violated?

What does trust become when trust itself becomes a source of uncertainty?

What does memory mean when experience must continually be reexamined?

What remains when the explanations that once made life coherent no longer hold?

Sincerely does not claim to answer these questions.

It documents the person standing inside them.

That distinction gives the album much of its character.

The listener is not presented with a neatly resolved narrative. There is no attempt to reduce a complicated period of existence into a sequence of convenient conclusions.

Instead, the record preserves states of consciousness.

It preserves the process.

The listener is given evidence of an internal reconstruction while it is still occurring.

THE ONLY LANGUAGE AVAILABLE

There was no external manual for rebuilding an inner world after its foundations had been compromised.

There was only the language already learned.

For Thaddeous, that language was music.

Writing became documentation.

Composition became organization.

Recording became preservation.

Performance became a means of giving the internal world an external form.

The studio became less a place to manufacture songs than a place where fragments could be placed somewhere outside the mind.

That changed the function of the music.

The work did not have to solve the experience.

It had to hold it.

And sometimes holding something long enough is the first condition necessary for understanding it.

THE RECORD

The title Sincerely is therefore more than a sign-off.

It is a declaration of method.

Sincerity, in this context, does not mean possessing complete understanding. It means refusing deliberate distortion.

The record does not pretend that every experience has been reconciled.

It does not manufacture closure where closure did not exist.

It does not transform uncertainty into certainty merely because certainty is more comfortable to present.

Instead, it attempts to preserve what could honestly be documented.

That intention is stated plainly in the accompanying letter:

“I didn’t write this to explain myself. I wrote it to be exact.”

That sentence establishes the governing principle of the work.

Exactness before explanation.

Explanation can be constructed after the fact.

Documentation carries another responsibility.

It must preserve what was actually there.

THE EXHIBITS

Sincerely is structured as eleven interconnected exhibits:

EXHIBIT I — SALUTATION
EXHIBIT II — INHERITANCE
EXHIBIT III — QUIETLY
EXHIBIT IV — ACCUMULATION
EXHIBIT V — RESIDUE
EXHIBIT VI — WITNESS
EXHIBIT VII — WEIGHTLESS
EXHIBIT VIII — STILLNESS
EXHIBIT IX — ACCOUNTED
EXHIBIT X — REMAIN
EXHIBIT XI — SINCERELY

The terminology is intentional.

An exhibit is not an instruction.

It does not tell the observer what conclusion to reach.

It establishes something for observation.

The structure therefore transforms private experience into an archival form without stripping it of its humanity.

Salutation begins the address.

Inheritance confronts what was carried forward.

Quietly establishes the importance of what does not announce itself.

Accumulation acknowledges the weight of what gathered over time.

Residue considers what remains.

Witness establishes the act of observation.

Weightless examines what can no longer be carried in the same way.

Stillness creates space.

Accounted confronts what must be acknowledged.

Remain considers what survives.

And Sincerely closes the record.

The exhibits are therefore not merely divisions within an album.

They form an architecture.

RESIDUE

The album is particularly concerned with what remains after an experience has passed.

Not simply what happened.

What remained.

Betrayal does not necessarily end when the betrayal is discovered.

Grief does not necessarily end when the funeral ends.

Confusion does not necessarily end when the event is over.

An experience becomes memory.

Memory becomes interpretation.

Interpretation becomes part of identity.

And eventually a person must confront the question of what should be carried forward and what should be allowed to remain behind.

Sincerely inhabits that interval.

It is a record of residue.

THE IMPORTANCE OF STILLNESS

The album's restraint is deliberate.

When everything inside becomes loud, the instinct can be to make the art louder.

Sincerely frequently chooses the opposite.

There are things Thaddeous came to understand that did not benefit from volume.

There are truths that do not require urgency in order to become real.

There are experiences that become less precise when forced into spectacle.

So quiet becomes part of the composition.

Stillness becomes composition.

Space becomes composition.

Absence becomes composition.

Silence becomes part of the documentation.

The restraint is not an absence of emotion.

It is a refusal to exaggerate emotion for the sake of being understood.

The work trusts that something can carry weight without demanding attention.

THE ARCHIVE

The physical language of Sincerely extends this philosophy beyond the music.

Parchment textures.

Formal typography.

Exhibit designations.

Seals.

Signatures.

The Black Letter insignia.

The presentation resembles an archival document because preservation is one of the work's central concerns.

The physical object appears as though it has already entered the archive.

Something that can be held after the immediate circumstances of its creation have passed.

Something capable of existing after its author is no longer present to explain it.

That distinction matters.

The purpose was never simply to communicate what Thaddeous felt in a particular moment.

It was to create something capable of carrying evidence of that experience beyond the moment in which it occurred.

The album becomes an artifact.

The artifact becomes a record.

The record becomes independent of the circumstances that produced it.

BLACK LETTER

Black Letter provides the institutional vocabulary surrounding that idea.

Its manuscript-inspired visual language—parchment, seals, formal typography, archival presentation—extends the philosophy established by Sincerely into a larger creative framework.

The work is authored by Thaddeous.

The work is preserved through Black Letter.

One creates.

One preserves.

The distinction is intentional.

The institution does not need to speak over the artist.

The artist does not need to disappear into the institution.

The two functions can coexist.

NOT A CONFESSION

The letter accompanying Sincerely explicitly rejects the language of confession.

That rejection is essential.

A confession asks to be received as revelation.

Sincerely asks to be received as documentation.

The distinction removes the obligation for the listener to absolve, agree, sympathize, or even understand.

The letter states:

“I’m not asking for agreement. I’m not asking for response. I’m not asking to be followed.”

The statement is not detachment.

It is authorship.

The artist relinquishes control over what the audience does with the work.

If something is useful, it may be kept.

If it is not, it may pass.

The record does not require consensus in order to remain what it was made to be.

THE PURPOSE OF DOCUMENTATION

Ultimately, Sincerely asks a fundamental question:

What does a person do when the internal framework they once depended upon can no longer support them?

For Thaddeous, the answer was not to immediately replace one belief system with another.

It was to document.

To observe.

To write.

To compose.

To preserve.

To allow the fragments to exist long enough for their relationships to become visible.

Music became the container.

The record became the temporary architecture.

And perhaps that is the deepest function of the work.

It did not rebuild the inner world for him.

It gave him somewhere to put the pieces while rebuilding became possible.

THE 2027 PULITZER CONSIDERATION

The record eventually traveled farther than the circumstances that created it.

Sincerely has been accepted into consideration for the 2027 Pulitzer Prize in Music, bringing the work into the 2027 Pulitzer cycle.

That development is significant, but not because recognition was the purpose of the record.

It was not.

There was no institutional audience present when the work began.

There was no jury waiting for its completion.

There was only the necessity of documenting what was happening.

The work existed before the recognition.

The composition came before the consideration.

The archive came before the institution.

That order matters.

The Pulitzer consideration therefore becomes another chapter in the life of Sincerely, rather than the explanation for its existence.

A work that began as an intensely personal act of documentation has entered a broader cultural and artistic conversation.

The circumstances that produced the record were private.

The completed work is no longer confined to them.

It can now be encountered as composition.

As documentation.

As an archive.

As a work of musical authorship.

And whatever ultimately follows, the significance of that transition remains: something that began as a means of preserving an internal experience has become a work capable of being considered within one of the most established American frameworks for recognizing artistic achievement.

The record did not become meaningful because it entered that framework.

It entered the framework because the record already existed.

SINCERELY

The completed work does not claim that every question has been answered.

It does not claim that every betrayal has been reconciled.

It does not claim that the past has become simple.

It does not offer manufactured resolution.

Instead, it offers something more difficult and more honest:

a record of what was experienced, what remained, and what could be expressed through the only language available to its author.

Music.

That is why Sincerely exists.

Not because everything finally made sense.

Because, for a time, almost nothing did.

And when the structures that once explained the world became impossible to rely upon, Thaddeous did not manufacture certainty simply to replace what had been lost.

He documented the uncertainty.

He turned experience into sound.

He turned sound into structure.

He turned structure into an archive.

And he left the archive intact.

Not as an explanation.

Not as a confession.

Not as a reinvention.

As a record.

The work does not ask the audience to live inside the author's conclusions.

It asks only that the record be encountered honestly.

Because the ultimate achievement of Sincerely is not that it explains what happened.

It is that it refuses to falsify what remained.

Everything before this taught him how to speak.

This is him choosing what to say.

— This Editorial is brought to you by Black Letter Publishings. All rights reserved in continuity and formatted contextualism are owned and solely regulated by Black Letter and only Black Letter. Any duplication of this publication without Knowledge and or Authorization from our team will result in legal action against anyone intending to commit perjury upon this documentation.