“Happe Days on Plymouth Drive” is simply put a record I made in memory of my grandmother, Theresa B. Monfett (nee Happe). It would be futile for me to sit here and attempt to write how important she was to me and my family with any possibility of brevity. Those who are close to me or who were at least close to me in the past know that the way I am most comfortable with telling people how I feel about them is through music, whether it be the songs I write or the mix CD’s I’ve made them. This record is a combination of those two mediums. Though I cannot say I am supremely confident in my ability to construct songs, I am confident in my ability to find the perfect songs to reflect upon my relationships with certain people, places, and times. Because Grandma was so important to me, I wanted to make her a mix CD that transcended any of the other ones I had made in the past. Hopefully, this record attests to that. I chose and wrote the songs starting in the time period where she was first beginning to be frequently hospitalized and finished them about six months after I had moved into her home with her surviving husband on the block which I originally called home, Plymouth Drive. Though this record is very personal for me and at times extremely specific to my experience, I wanted to use it to reach out to my family and friends, who I have witnessed over the past few years, endure crushing losses of people important to them. Everyone has to learn about grief the hard way; there’s no way to prepare for it. That being said, I hope that though the album often highlights the aspects of despair and anger over the circumstances, it also highlights the extreme love we have for those we’ve lost and how they survive in that love even if we can find them nowhere else. The reason I started to play music in the first place was to hope that someday I could help make other people feel the way I did when I heard music that spoke to me: like I wasn’t alone. This album is the conversation we can’t always have but need to. I am grateful to all of my friends and family that have been supportive of me during what’s been the hardest loss to accept. I hope in making this record, I will rectify that a bit, and that this will let someone who needs to know that they aren’t alone that they’re not.

-Andrew Krolikowski

In loving memory of
Theresa B. Monfett (1927 – 2011)

PS – I typically have very strict rules about how a mix CD must fill the full capacity of a CD. Clearly this record is not 80 minutes long. So, if you are interested, here is a list of other songs that spoke to me just as much as some that I chose to cover. I hope these are helpful to you. They were helpful to me.

Bob Dylan – “Desolation Row” and “Shelter from the Storm”
Arcade Fire – “My Body is a Cage”
The Clash – “Lost in the Supermarket”
Radiohead – “Codex” and “Supercollider”
Talking Heads – “Heaven”
Neil Young – “Sugar Mountain”
The Ramones – “My Brain is Hanging Upside Down”
Tom Waits – “I Don’t Want to Grow Up”
Tom Moran – “Mr. Brain”
The Smashing Pumpkins – “For Martha”
Leonard Cohen – “So Long, Marianne”
Lou Reed – “Perfect Day”
Vision Through Sound – “When the Son of a Bitch Comes Back”