Fiver – Fiver Trois presents Cleaning House

PLEASE NOTE: this is is a special pre-order offer. Any packages featuring “Cleaning House” will ship on or before July 10, 2026

In 2020 I consulted with a psychic who gave me a ritual for purging my apartment of stuck energy. I’d become backed up, moving from one place to the next, inheriting my dead friends’ keepsakes, curb shopping, accumulating far too many cursed things from other people’s pasts. I was told to put everything that previously belonged to someone else in one room, to trace a chalk circle around it all, and say the spell. I piled the contents of my life high to the ceiling and did what was prescribed. Then I put back what I wanted to keep. Whatever I didn’t want I was free to let go.

Writing this record was a similar process, albeit 5 years later, and this time the house was my head. The pandemic had left me with 3 untoured records of repertoire that still very much speaks to me (and actually speaks quite well to this moment). In 2022, along with many other friends and paradigms, I’d lost metaphor. I could not see it coming back. And because I am wary of the toll diaristic songwriting takes on the singer I had all but given up on song.

Music remained: Almost every weekend since 2023 I’ve commuted two hours across the made up border that divides Mi’kma’ki into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to play music with drummer Nathan Doucet and bassist Jeremy Costello. Our influences are disparate: Jeremy is ever marked by Jon Anderson and the music of Yes, Nate was blasting Chris Dave and Doechii, and I was mostly listening to Jeff Parker, Mulatu Astatke and Ahmad Jamal. Together, we meandered to wordless musical dialogue, meeting eachother with an attentive responsiveness I’ve only ever experienced through music. We called ourselves the Trois.

Suddenly in 2025, I began the process of Cleaning House, and found the many moods of the past 14 years had littered my mind with some nagging melodies and unfinished phrases, some molten feelings that had hardened and deserved to be enshrined, and some wilting tunes that awaited reinvigoration by new players. Along with the return of metaphor and songwriting came the ongoing delusion that I am innovating on the progressive edge of Country Music, and so naturally, when it came to recording, I sought a pedal steel player. I cold called Dani Crowther of Townie fame to be the fourth to our Trois. Who knew the young one had so many kinds of chops? You’ll also hear fiddle player John Showman of the Lonesome Ace Stringband play on the songs RJD and Elemental Progression.

I produced Cleaning House using the formula I’ve come to follow: rehearse for a long time, record to tape for a short time and mix it with urgency. Thank you to Gavin Gardiner for engineering and mixing the record, to Howard Billerman at hotel2tango for maintaining such a fine studio, and to Phil Demetro for mastering the record.

There is an idea circulating that the job of the artist is to respond to the moment. This moment: I watch it roll like a slow storm cloud of poison gas, as Christian Nationalists continue their centuries long crusade, border imperialism administered by technocratic psychopaths tears my loved one’s families to shreds, and renewed land grabs by oligarchs are dressed up as economic security. The dead bodies of people are broadcast on a horrorshow stream funded by corporate tyranny and our inattention, now the nukes again, my friends incarcerated for saying no to militarism, my friends dropping dead from a poison drug supply, a two tongued settler state speaking the words of reconciliation while banker daddy continues his ecocide. Down the road they’re nation building with another american owned gas plant in the Chignecto Isthmus, and back in my old city, people surrounded by millionaires and vacant buildings are freezing to death one season and boiling to death the next. All these things are the extension of logics that I have been writing about explicitly and implicitly for 18 years. The crusade may shred time, but the old verses don’t expire. In this economy there is no point in rewriting the same song. I save my slogans for the signs, and here I offer you my humble poetry to set you beside yourself. – Simone Schmidt