So Little, Close to Nothing

Released December 5, 2025.

Boston-area songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Joshua David Thayer announces the release of his new album, So Little, Close to Nothing, a 10-song collection that examines what it means to keep moving through a world that never quite returns to equilibrium. The album follows closely on the heels of Thayer’s acclaimed 2024 debut, It Will Still Keep Feeling Rough, which Freakscene described as “searching, sorrowful and sometimes bewildered… at its core a triumphant album,” and which The Whole Kameese praised as “a musical treasure trove filled with well-crafted songs that touch both the heart and soul.”

Where his debut was rooted in processing profound personal loss—particularly the passing of his father—So Little, Close to Nothing looks at what happens after grief stops being an event and becomes a condition: something lived with, carried, integrated. “I don’t think anyone ever really moves past or through grief,” Thayer says. “You just take it on. You become everything you were before, plus that experience, and it’s up to you to figure out what and who you are afterwards. I think this naturally leads to thoughts about your place in the universe, meaning, history, legacy, and those thoughts have fueled the process of this record.”

The album’s title comes from a line in “Keep the Sun on My Back,” a song that directly confronts the smallness and transience of human life. Across the record, Thayer turns that humility into a creative stance: memory as emotional catalyst, instability as artistic fuel, and small revelations as meaningful as seismic ones.

Recorded largely in the basement of his Medford, MA home, Thayer performed nearly every instrument himself, with drummer Jason Smith contributing at 1357 Recording Studio and collaborators Mark Alan Miller (mixing) and Nick Zampiello (mastering) shaping the final sound. Sonically, the album expands on the raw urgency of his debut with richer textures, doubled guitars, layered harmonies, and a deliberate sense of space—without sacrificing the edges that give his work its immediacy. It’s an exploration of the grandness that can be found in the minute moments.

Tracks like “We Won’t Relent” showcase Thayer’s forward momentum: a propulsive, jangly anthem about refusing to cede emotional ground. “Pulled and Pushed” grapples with scrutiny and contradiction, while “Get Down” reframes a muddy teenage misadventure into a meditation on friendship, memory, and the distortions of nostalgia. Elsewhere, the atmospheric “Rules of This Game” traces the desire for change without resolution, and the emotional centerpiece “Do You Want to Change Your Life?” wrestles with breakdown, acceptance, and the fear of stasis.

The album closes with “It Makes No Difference,” a powerful reflection on mortality and meaning—what it is to leave even the faintest mark on the world before light fades.

“Once the floodgates opened, I leaned into this as what I do now. I can make things on my own, for myself, and that’s okay and valid,” Thayer says. “As a bass player, I always felt I wasn’t meant to be in the spotlight, that I didn’t have things to say that mattered. And that meant I didn’t start making my own songs until I was 50. Now there’s an urgency in that. I want to catch all that I can, while I can.”

So Little, Close to Nothing finds Thayer deepening his voice as both a writer and a self-producing musician—expanding his sonic palette while sharpening the emotional clarity that defined his debut. It is a record about carrying experience forward rather than getting past it, about learning to live inside the imbalance rather than waiting for it to resolve.