This Weariness That Waits - Ida's WIll You Find Me at 25

Maybe we’re too young

And I think about that a lot. Specifically with regards to not only listening to music but also understanding it. Or comprehending it the way it is intended to be. Or appreciating it. Because there are things that do resonate with you immediately upon your initial listen. But that is not always the case. There are things that take time. Maybe a year. Maybe longer. Maybe never. Maybe it just wasn’t meant to be. It wasn’t going to work. You can’t make yourself, or force yourself, to like something. Or truly appreciate it. Or understand. 

And that’s okay. It took me time to realize that. 

There was a time, when I was a teenager, and this would happen—I would try to find my way through a specific album, or an artist’s canonical work, and when it wasn’t connecting, I would think that maybe I was just too young. Maybe I needed more time to grow into it. When something similar has happened to me as an adult, I’ve framed it under the guise that it’s just something I wasn’t quite ready for. And maybe I will be in time. Or maybe I’ll never really be ready. 

Maybe over time, you open yourself up, and can begin to appreciate, or understand certain elements of an album, but in doing so, there are still things that keep you at an arm’s length.

Maybe we’re too young.

I have owned, in total, three different copies of Ida’s fourth full-length album, Will You Find Me. I currently have two of those copies. The first, though, was a used compact disc, purchased in the autumn of 2005, from Moondog Music, in Dubuque, Iowa. I don’t think much has changed about the store in the two decades since I moved away from Dubuque, making my way north, and further through the Midwest. Moondog is still in a strip mall, next to an ice cream shop, and it was, during the years I was living in the city, a small and kind of dingy store—the smell of incense so potent that it would never truly come out of the packaging of whatever you had purchased. 

I spent a fair amount of time, and money, of course, in Moondog when I was a college student in the city—catching a ride into town with a friend, or acquaintance, that had a car, and pleading with them to make a stop so I could browse for a few moments, maybe leaving with something safely tucked into a plain brown paper bag. In the year I spent in Dubuque, after college and simply as a resident of the city, I spent a lot more time in Moondog, and more money than I should have. I was working a job that I never should have agreed to take. It paid very little, and I was living in a rundown basement apartment. It was what I could afford. 

I tried to spend as few hours there as I could—specifically in the winter months, when the temperatures, both inside and out, were unforgiving. 

Maybe we’re too young.

The used compact discs were near the front half of Moondog Music, and what I remember was walking into the store, with the stench of patchouli descending upon me, I saw the cover to Will You Find Me, faced out in the rack amongst the other used titles, housed within a bulky, clear anti-theft encasing, which would eventually be unlocked by the cashier when I brought my purchases to the register. Originally released on the Tiger Style label five years prior, the album cover featured four close-up photographs of each band member, focusing on their right eyes and the bridges of their noses. In the top left corner, the band’s name, in what has become it’s trademark scripty font; on the bottom right, the title, written out in all lower case, with no punctuation, blurring the line between making the album’s title a question, or an ask, and a declaration or a statement. 

Will you find me.

In the film High Fidelity, John Cuasck, as the film’s protagonist, record store owner and pop music aficionado Rob Gordon, spends part of his time on screen reorganizing his record collection following a tumultuous breakup—he’s sorting them autobiographically. 

He elaborates, as he holds up a copy of Fleetwood Mac. “If I want to find the song ‘Landslide,’ by Fleetwood Mac, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in my Fall of 1983 pile, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.”

If I think about the band Ida, I do go back to Dubuque, Iowa. But not Will You Find Me. Rather, I think about their sixth full-length, Heart Like A River, released in February of 2005. I bought it on compact disc a few months later, in the late spring, shortly after I had graduated from college. 

For all of the CDs, or LPs in my life that have come and gone, and in some cases, returned a second time much later on, I have managed to hold onto my copy of Heart Like A River—its cardboard packaging having been weathered over the last two decades. 

I return to the band Ida—specifically Heart Like A River, and now, a number of their other albums, in the autumn. Always in September and October. There is a gentle, beautiful melancholy to so much of their work. They are an autumn band. They make autumn records, regardless of the time of year they were originally released, or when I originally purchased them. 

Maybe we’re too young.

And there are similarities, of course, between Heart Like A River, and Will You Find Me. Ida, as a group, even as they continued to grow, and evolve, with each configuration and album, retained a very specific sound. And there were songs on Will You Find Me that did resonate with me after I purchased that first copy of it on CD, two decades ago. But it was not one, at that time, I returned to it with any frequency. I don’t know what became of that CD. Lost somewhere in a shuffle, perhaps. Traded in somewhere for a small amount of cash, amongst other discs I was attempting to unload. 

Maybe I wasn’t ready for it at the time. 

Maybe I was too young.

*

Until reforming near the end of 2023, as part of the archival label Numero’s twenty anniversary celebration—which ultimately revealed the group’s partnership with the imprint for the exhaustive 25th anniversary edition of Will You Find Me, and subsequent “reunion” tour in support of it, Ida had more or less inactive for well over a decade, following the release of what would become their final album, Lovers Prayer, in 2008.

Ida, at its core, has been comprised of Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell, who founded the project in 1991, releasing their debut full-length as the duo in 1994, Tales of Brave Ida. That album, as well as 1996’s I Know About You and the following year’s Ten Small Paces, were all issued by the independent label Simple Machines. 

And it is documented, as much as it can be, in the essay that accompanies the reissue and expansion of Will You Find Me through the Numero Group, but it is implied that the band—then a quartet including Daniel’s brother Michael on drums, and multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Karla Schickele, was growing perhaps too large to stay independent, but were perhaps yet too small, or too idiosyncratic for the majors. Regardless, in 1997, they signed a deal with Capitol Records and began working on what would become the arduous process of recording Will You Find Me, which ultimately arrived three years later.

By the time the album was completed and turned into the label, the label personnel that had originally championed and encouraged the band were long gone. Capitol declined to release the album and let Ida go from their deal—Will You Find Me eventually, and quickly, found a home with Tiger Style, the label that would also release its follow-up in 2001, The Braille Night. 

And I suppose there is a mythology, or a lore, to Will You Find Me—it is not necessary, really, to a better understanding of the album, but it is genuinely interesting if you are, perhaps, like me and enjoy placing things within a much larger context. Because it is the sound, or the result, of a band that was given time and space to explore and grow. An attempt to find themselves, though losing themselves along the way. Even without the astounding amount of ephemera that accompanies the Numero reissue of the album, it is meticulous in its detail when you listen closely. It’s an album that was absolutely labored over—not overworked, but pretty close. It represents the space forming between the group’s quieter, or hushed, and gorgeous tendencies, and their interest in experimentation and self-indulgence.

It is a curious album, and sometimes it is difficult, in a sense.—a bold statement when it was released, certainly, and one made much bolder in this form. Reissued as a four LP set, or as five compact discs—expanded to include upwards of 89 additional tracks, if anything, this iteration of Will You Find Me effortlessly turns the album into a much larger, more poignant, and gorgeous moment in time. 

*

I am remiss to say that Will You Find Me is the sound of a band that is restless because I do not think that’s the case. It is, I think, more than anything, the sound of a band growing into themselves and becoming more comfortable with whatever shape that took. It isn’t an album that lacks cohesion, in terms of how it sounds, but there is a stark contrast in the dynamism it strikes between the more melodic, somber, and hushed sounds, with the growing interest in both dissonance, and large, noisy, cathartic swoons. 

The way the album sprawls itself out, looking for space both on opposite ends of this sonic spectrum as well as what occurs in the center when the band’s interests overlap, was certainly fostered by the way Will You Find Me was recorded—not only recorded over a long period of time, but committed to tape in 14 different studio, working with both Trina Shoemaker and Tony Lash, primarily, then seemingly last minute input and redirection coming in from Warren Defever once Daniel Littleton had reached out in desperation and frustration near the end of the album’s journey and expressing his dissatisfaction with how some of it had turned out, and his willingness to push things just a little further to get it over the finish line. 

Within that rich fabric, Will You Find Me is comprised primarily of songs that are about both loss and love. Early on in the development of the album, Daniel and brother Michael’s father passed away—a jazz pianist, he becomes an off-stage character in the narrative, musically inspiring the slow and dissonant opening track, “Down on Your Back,” and later appears in the jagged “Past The Past.” The romantic arrangements within Ida, too, inform moments within the album as well—Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell had been romantic and creative partners and were married shortly after the album was completed; Michael Littleton, at the time, was involved with Karla Schickele. 

So within the world of Will You Find Me, both in how it was created, and how it sounded, in the end, there is often an unflinching and honest tenderness—the gentle “The Radiator,” placed within the album’s first half, being one of the album’s most romantic or earnest in the sentiments in depicts, as well in its fragile, whispery arranging.

One of the album’s shorter tracks, “The Radiator,” could feel like a sketch, or perhaps a little unfinished—there’s a very sparse or skeletal nature to how it unfolds both in the vivid snapshot that the lyrics depict, and in the instruments that float along underneath. Held together, primarily, by the clean-toned and intentional plucks of the electric guitar, with the slightest atmospheric whirring coasting through, and a charming melodica solo arriving within the space between the verses.

The fragmented nature of the song’s writing comes in the fact that there is no chorus—just two verses that slowly, and gorgeously, depict a specific kind of quiet, or hushed intimacy, between two people.

With lyrics penned by Littleton, the song itself is sung by Mitchell, which also adds a layer to the intimate nature of “The Radiator.” “I could watch you sleep for hours without noticing that it’s getting late,” she begins. “But last night, I just wanted to wake you up—hear the city hum underneath the pink moonlight.”

“Well, I drove all night to see you,” she continues. “And I beat the sun, but not by very much. The radiator was hissing in the kitchen. We sat on the fire escape—your hand was in mine.”

It is brief, of course—all of two minutes—but within that two minutes, what I have come to understand, given the larger context of the world surrounding the album, and its making, there is a lot to give consideration to.

There is the tenderness, or glimpse into something seemingly private, between the couple. There is also the geography that is referenced within “The Radiator.” The talk of the city humming. The titular radiator hissing. A quiet moment taken on the fire escape of the building.

Ida was founded in New York City—and there is a very urban feeling to the original artwork for Will You Find Me, with the photograph of the four band members sitting on top of what is presumably an old apartment building, with the city’s expanse in the distance behind them. The recording of Will You Find Me, and subsequent albums took them away from the city—the promotional material for the Numero reissue describes the collection as capturing the band between Brooklyn and Woodstock. 

Parts of the album were recorded around 100 miles outside of the city, at Dreamland, in West Hurley—and the pastoral nature of this setting is the what the art direction of the reissues focuses on, with many of the photos finding the quartet surrounded by trees, or a nearby body of water.

This intentional shift does, subtly, reveal more about the creation of the album. The freedom and room to experiment and evolve in the moment. The sound of a band trying to find itself within a balance of these gentler sounds or fragments, in the frenetic pacing of the city and the rigor of their career thus far, and the want for something larger sonically, and how to achieve that. 

Using the freedom and space, and in what the band wished to grasp towards with Will You Find Me, and how that influenced the album as a whole, doesn’t mean that everything has to extend itself towards cacophonic heights. “Georgia,” for example, tucked within the album’s final third, is among the album’s most inward-turned in sound, with Mitchell’s lyrics delivered in soothing, lower tones that barely rise above a whisper.

Something that doesn’t loom exactly, but does certainly hold a strong influence—maybe even more so than the geography of where the band came from and where they were heading—over Ida, and Will You Find Me, is the idea of family, or at the very least, incredibly tight bonds.

Ida, at its core, is a family band, between the Littleton siblings, and at this time when they were functioning as a quartet, the inclusion of romantic partners. But as it is detailed within the liner notes for the Will You Find Me reissue, the members of Ida often played with other groups—they were extremely close with the members of the ramshackle indie rock outfit Tsunami, with Littleton and Tsunami vocalist Jennifer Toomey forming a side project in the mid-1990s, Licorice. 

I tell you all of that to tell you this. Lyrical analysis played a role, certainly, in music writing and criticism 25 years ago, but it was not as easy, or readily available, to learn what a song was about. Ida is not the kind of band that has their lyrics annotated on a site like Genius, but with the band’s reunion shows in support of the Will You Find Me reissue, Daniel Littleton and Elizabeth Mitchell have been doing press, and spoke with music writer Will Hermes for his Substack, New Music + Old Music. In the conversation, Mitchell explains the inspiration for the delicate “Georgia.”

The song begins with the gentle strum of the acoustic guitar, before it is joined by bittersweet sounding chords ringing out from the piano, with the thunking of an upright bass, and a distant, very deliberate rhythm brushed out from the drum kit arriving after the first verse. Musically, “Georgia” moves like a slow dance—almost but not quite a waltz, and a little fumbly, because at times it seems like the quiet pings of the snare drum are at risk of falling just slightly behind, or ahead, of Mitchell’s vocals, and the swooning melody of the piano, but the band does keep it all together, and they do so beautifully.

Mitchell explains, in her conversation for New Music + Old Music, that “Georgia” was written about the discovery of an unknown relative—Georgia, a sister of her grandmother. She was epileptic—“But at the time,” Mitchell elaborates. “Doctors didn’t know how to treat epilepsy or really understand it, so she was sent away to an institution when she was….nine or 10 years old, and then nobody spoke of her again.”

The song, evocative in its lyricism, and quiet in how it unfolds, became Mitchell’s attempt to keep her presence alive. And it is rather vivid in the moments it does depict—“Cutting that milkweed, bending down low in her navy blue dress,” but it is also rather haunting and certainly bittersweet given the circumstances surrounding the titular character. “I’ll never know which one I resemble the best,” Mitchell concedes near the end of the song. “Oh, Georgia, you have been missed.”

*

Maybe we’re too young

And for everything from the past that I do ultimately retain, for whatever reason, it is difficult for me to remember the specifics of why, when I purchased a used copy of Will You Find Me, two decades ago, I was unable to connect with it. But what I have realized, certainly now, through the reissue of the album, but also when I purchased it a second time—the double vinyl reissue from the band’s former label, Polyvinyl, released in 2016, is that something that may have kept me at an arm’s length, because it does now, is the slow motion dissonance it begins with, in the opening track, “Down On Your Back.”

Admittedly, the complicated vocal arranging of the song is impressive, but there is a harshness to the way the layered voices, and the stinging plucks of the acoustic guitar collide off of each other, which does prevent me from really enjoy it—but I see why it is the opening track. It serves as a prelude of sorts, before the album really opens up, and it does with a sense of swaying splendor on the second track, “Maybelle,” which gorgeously skips along with a real sense of intimacy and immediacy. 

And I have written, sometimes perhaps too often, and certainly entirely too much, about what I consider to be the differences between a love song, and a song that is about love. Because there are similarities of course—a place where those things do overlap. But they are also inherently different. A love song implies the beginning of something—perhaps the chase. The desire. The want. The moment leading up to something much bigger. An admiration and adoration. A song that is about love requires the writer, and the singer, to explore different kinds of love, yes, but also the different facets that come with loving another.

As it swirls and collects momentum, and from the moment you hear Littleton and Mitchell intertwining their voices in a soothing harmony—truly one of the most impressive things about Ida as a band—it is apparent that “Maybelle” is a song that is about love.

It isn’t an interpolation exactly but “Maybelle” does draw inspiration and serves as a response, or continuation of the traditional folk and country song, “Are You Tired of Me, My Darling”—in particular, the arrangement from The Carter Family. The title, here, referencing Maybelle Carter, the matriarch of the musical family.

“Maybelle,” the longest song on the album, does take its time—not even a slow build really, but a very intentional introduction of every layer, or element. It opens with the faint sound of a quivering electric guitar, before the pacing picks up with the dexterously plucked acoustic, and dances around with a just as dexterous glisten of an electric guitar, with the impressively tapped out rhythm, and pulses of the bass guitar, coming in just underneath—joined, later, by the contemplative chords of a piano. And it all just really swirls and swirls around—unrelenting seems like the wrong word, because that implies a kind of intensity, or aggressive nature, which is certainly not the case. But it dazzles. And there is a kind of theatricality to when the instrumentation eases up slightly, and the delivery of the vocals, with both Mitchell and Schickele singing together, and Littleton coming in later, quietly repeating what they have just said. It is a song that you can, in the way it continuously spirals around you, and in its beauty, is like a shaken snow globe, the bits floating around within the liquid, and never sinking back to the bottom.

The song itself, in its lyrics, is seeking a kind of assurance. It is sweet, yes, to wish to hear these things and to be assured of them, but there is an edge of urgency to the need, which is what certainly lingers after the song has found its way toward its conclusion.

“Look at me,” Littleton and Mitchell sing together. “Am I still the one you wanted me to be? When we were talking did I hear you say that you still love me?”

“Everything was clear, I wanted you to see,” they continue, once the second verse arrives. “But don’t answer with a word—only with your eyes.

The real question, though, or the more palpable need for reassuring, arrives in the chorus—and for as earnest and swooning as “Maybelle” is, in that it is a song about love, the surprising thing is that these questions go unanswered. “What if we could do it all again,” Mitchell and Schickele sing in a hush. “Would you still look right through me then? What if you could make another life—would you still have me by your side?”

In contrast, though perhaps not a surprise though, given that there were two couples within Ida during the recording and writing of Will You Find Me, but there are lustier, or more outwardly sensual moments found on the album. Though maybe from the title, “Turn Me On,” it should not come as much of a surprise.

Tucked at the very end of the album’s first half, “Turn Me On” finds Ida opening up a lot more musically, or at least exploring different textures—it is among the songs on Will You Find Me that include a lot of noises, or atmospherics, woven through the fabric, and it is, as a whole, a song that leans a little bit on the darker side at least in tone. It’s not ominous by any means, but there is a kind of creeping, writhing feeling to it, which does support the lust and visceral longing within the lyrics.

It opens with a thick, chugging bass line, and the warmth of an electric piano, with a sparse, clattering rhythm undulating underneath it—the bass line, and the R&B inspired electric piano work are the focus, in a sense, as the electric guitar shimmers, and a dissonant, feedback-adjacent fluttering tears through the atmosphere.

Just in scope, or the heights that Ida wishes to push the song towards, “Turn Me On” is certainly one of the larger, in part because of the big, climactic, exciting moments they keep building up to, but also, there is a looseness to certain elements. For as tight and meticulous as the rhythm, there are these enormous, distorted strums of the electric guitar that give the song a very “alternative” or “indie” sound of the time. More than anything, the small flourishes of experimentation, and the sharper edges to a song like this, do showcase that Ida can do very gentle and beautiful songs well, but there are also genuinely interesting and compelling results when they give themselves more room to work.

Will you find me?

Will you find me.

It is presented on the front of the album without punctuation, and the titular phrase is uttered within the pulsating second verse. And, again, like the seemingly rhetorical expressions and assurances asked in “Maybelle” before it, there are places here where a question is asked, or there is an urgent pleading, though it is not met with a response.

And for as often, and perhaps it is too often, I find myself giving consideration to the difference between a love song, and a song about love, I also find myself thinking about longing. Or want. Or a kind of unhinged, propulsive desire. Which is where “Turn Me On,” or at least a bulk of it, comes from. “Stripped as you are, you come to me,” both Littleton and Mitchell muse to one another. “I won’t deny you anything. While you need it—I’m a faucet.”

“You’re the velvet in my mouth,” they continue within the second half. “You, I cannot be without. You make it so good. Love is so good. When it comes, and you give it back.”

It is impressive, certainly. All of it. The jittery, urgent way it lurches forward into these enormous moments, and when Littleton and Mitchell are shouting, and still layering their vocals, above all of the noise, conveying the lust, and longing, within the lyrics, it does become a remarkable moment on Will You Find Me, truly showing the dynamism and kind of fearlessness in exploration the band had while working on the record.

Ida explore the use of distortion, and dissonance, and creating a looser kind of vibe, leaning into a ramshackle alternative rock sound early on in the second half of Will You Find Me, on “Past The Past”—the noise, and fury of the song’s arranging contrasting the surprisingly bleak lyrics. It is without a doubt the darkest song on the record, though in the same conversation with Will Hermes, Littleton explains that even though there is an ominous shadow in his writing here, it is ultimately about searching for and clinging to something hopeful.

There is a downcast, mournful feeling to the progression of electric guitar chords, right from the beginning of “Past The Past,” with a surge of feedback already rippling as the song begins, which as it courses through the song, the further along it goes, it does become the most interesting part, as is the percussion from Michael Littleton—bashed out with a confidence and intensity, as the cymbals clatter each time with real intention, and the continued way the band tries to find the right balance between the dissonance, or harshness, an the moments where that does recede. 

And it is easy to forget, or at least to overlook, that not every song has to have a linear, or direct inspiration, or meaning. These are narratives that are crafted, and can and often are pulled from different places, or experiences, and Littleton elaborated on this for New Music + Old Music, explaining that it is in part about his father’s illness and eventual passing, but also reconnecting with people he had been in bands with when he was growing up in Annapolis, Maryland, before relocating to New York. He elaborates, also, there is a specific line that was inspired by the image of seeing Mark Eitzel, friend of the group and the founder of the storied alternative outfit American Music Club, hailing a cab.

Regardless of the specific inspiration, or story behind “Past The Past” as a whole, or taking it verse by verse, it opens bleakly, and that’s where it stays, even though you can tell it is trying to noisily claw its way toward something hopeful by the end. “After you gave up on the world,” Littleton begins, his words howling over the distended sounds of the electric guitar. “For the first time, I understood. Your words were as good to me as gold, but it’s all getting old already.”

There is a conflict at the center of the narrative within “Past The Past,” which Littleton addresses in a more somber tone, with the instrumentation quieting slightly behind him. “I care bout what you see, even though you try to take the best of me apart, and punish me for trying.”

It is dark, yes, and Littleton, along with Mitchell, shouting out the lyrics beside him, over the ferocity of the arranging, stretches the bleakness almost to the very end, before reaching out for the sliver of optimism. “I listen well to you rage and search your face for a spark—for something shimmering in the dark.”

*

In the film High Fidelity, John Cusack, as the film’s protagonist, record store owner Rob Gordon, spends part of his time on screen reorganizing his record collection in the wake of a tumultuous breakup. We, as audience members, are supposed to be amused, or genuinely interested or invested in his sorting of them autobiographically.

Time has not been kind to the film High Fidelity—the implication is that we are to root for Cusack’s portrayal of Rob Gordon, but the film, across its runtime, is a minefield of problematic behaviors and a horrible toxic masculinity that, now 25 years after its original release, is nearly impossible to stomach.

I tell you all of that to tell you this—in the film, Cusack elaborates by holding a copy of Fleetwood Mac, and says, “If I want to find the song ‘Landslide,’ by Fleetwood Mac, I have to remember that I bought it for someone in my Fall of 1983 pile, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.”

The past beats inside me like a second heart.

I, too, often think of important records in terms of where they fall in my lifetime. Specific moments. Seasons. Months. Who was I then. How have I changed in the interim. What has kept me listening, or returning to it?

When I think about Ida I think specifically about Dubuque, Iowa and my final semester of college—a time of uncertainty, but I do not think of Will You Find Me, but rather the band’s sixth full-length, Heart Like A River, which celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year.

Both Heart Like A River and Will You Find Me, and their milestone anniversaries, were on my mind at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025—in terms of albums to revisit and give consideration to. 

The rollout to the massive Numero Group reissue of Will You Find Me began in September of 2024, with the group releasing digital EPs—eight of them, in total. Some of them were tracks from the original album, paired with alternate mixes or isolated elements; others, like “AZ U R” and “Black Thumb,” are outtakes or demos from the album’s sessions.

I stop short of saying that the potential for 89 additional tracks from this era of the band is too much ephemera, but it is daunting. The collection is well assembled, yes, but it is also exhaustive in a way that, in terms of appreciating and giving thoughtful listening to, is incredibly intimidating. 

Will You Find Me, as a reissue, is available on a 4xLP collection, or as five compact discs—because of the limitations in space, and the cost prohibitive nature of vinyl manufacturing, 34 of the additional tracks are included—and how those were selected, I am not entirely certain. 

In terms of sequencing, and space, the inclusion of the additional material begins immediately after Will You Find Me’s final track, “Don’t Get Sad,” with the dub remix of “Shrug,” placed at the very end of the collection’s third side, and then picking up on it’s fourth with three original songs, and two covers, including a somber, earnest take on the Mark Eitzel penned American Music Club tune, “What Holds The World Together,” with Elizabeth Mitchell singing from a more smoldering, whispery range in her vocal performance. 

Per the press materials for Will You Find Me, the supplemental tracks have been organized thematically, and given their own subtitles—selections from Could Be The Door, and The Reservoir, are included in the vinyl pressing of the reissue. Side eight is dedicated, specifically, to a somewhat whimsical idea from the band—covers of songs that all begin with the word “Don’t,” alongside two covers of traditional folk songs, including the aforementioned inspiration for “Maybelle,” “Are You Tired of Me, My Darling.”

This additional material of course does help build the world surrounding Will You Find Me, though it does, specifically within the CD and digital versions of the reissue, become weighed down with the inclusion of too many isolated elements—vocals only from a handful of songs, or certain instruments or sections. The expansive nature of the collection is daunting, certainly, and even within the abbreviated version of the additional material included on the vinyl, there are some standouts worthy of your listening time.

The aforementioned American Music Club cover, “What Holds The World Together,” is amongst them. Mark Eitzell, both in fronting the band and with his solo output in the 1990s and early 2000s, was both an astoundingly vivid and articulate songwriter and an impressive vocalist simply in terms of the range, depth, and humanized quality of his voice. The original is a true product of its time (1994), simply in terms of arrangement and the way it was engineered. Eitzell and the group at this time know how to make it swell just enough throughout and save the bombast and soaring for the end. But there is a sparseness and a somberness that Ida casts over, only allowing for a few moments that stir, or rise, with Mitchell’s voice softening some of Eitzell’s imagery and phrasings slightly.

“Black Thumb,” another cover, is the other highlight from the fourth side of the vinyl reissue—originally written and preformed by Lori Carson, from her 1997 album, “Everything I Touch Runs Wild—the cover art of which I recognized immediately from the amount of time I would have spent in the “Entertainment” department of stores like Walmart and ShopKo, flipping through the compact discs, during this era.

There is, truthfully, a sleepiness to Carson’s original, and in an Instagram post from Daniel Littleton, when the band’s cover was issued as a single in advance of the reissue’s arrival in full, he explained that Ida opened for Carson in 1996, were fans of her work as a whole, and were quite taken with this song when she performed it each night. Like the band’s take on the American Music Club song, here, there is a sparseness and a shadow of melancholy—performed on the piano, with the low rumbling of a cello slicing through, and it is one of the few songs to feature Karla Schickele on lead vocals, unaccompanied by anyone else from the band. The sleepiness, and kind of folksy, easygoing nature from Carson’s version is replaced with a song that walks the line carefully between theatrical, or dramatic, and extremely delicate.

The covers presented on the final side of the vinyl reissue, many of which begin with the word “Don’t,” unfortunately feel a little gimmicky—I think that’s the point, but they are also very underdeveloped in how they sound, so these are additions to the set that are truly for the completist, though the woozy, lo-fi take on The Beach Boys’ song “Don’t Worry Baby,” (as a point of clarification, the “Old New Style Mix” is what appears on the vinyl tracklist) which finds just the right mix of whimsy, or a kind of playfulness, with the slightest sense of somberness. 

The vinyl sequencing does not get too far into including the different isolated elements, or myriad alternate takes and mixes of the songs from the album—from side five, though, well into the additional material on Will You Find Me, the “Piano and Strings” version of “Maybelle” does away with the sense of urgency that comes from the removal of the quickly tapped out rhythm, and the intricate acoustic guitar work, allowing the song to unfold at a completely different pace, and giving it an even gentler, more sentimental aesthetic. The same can be said for the “Minimal Mix” of “Shotgun,” which also mutes the drums and guitar, and outside of allowing the gorgeousness of the harmony vocals to sound more robust, it draws attention to the virtuosity coming from Bernie Worrell’s electric piano performance. 

There are five total on the expanded version of the reissue, but only one of the “Capitol Demo Reel” tracks winds up in the vinyl edition of Will You Find Me—“Past The Past,” which in this form, is surprisingly less angsty in how it unfolds, and feels alive with a kind of buzz that the final recording of it isn’t lacking, per se, but in this early iteration, there’s this “in the room” sense of it from the fact that it had not yet been completely labored over as part of the album’s recording and mixing process. 

Like “Shotgun” and “Maybelle,” which appear throughout the supplemental material in various forms or versions, “Shrug” makes a handful of appearances, including a very crude demo recording of it pulled from a four-track machine. It moves at a little slower pace, and has a little less confidence, as if Littleton and Mitchell are just finding their way through the song, singing over a cautiously strummed guitar, and a chintzy, dusty drum machine beat. 

*

Maybe we’re too young.

The second time I bought a copy of Will You Find Me was in 2022—nearing the autumn, which is the time of year I associate the most with Ida’s sound—specifically Heart Like A River, I found myself working a day job where I was admittedly miserable, every day, for the six months I managed to last, but it was a job that allotted me some independence in the sense that I could listen to music, or to a podcast, or voice notes from Alyssa, who at the time, was a new friend, and would quickly become my best friend.

But as I muddled my way through the days, from spring, through the summer, into the early part of the autumn, I did find myself listening, through a single AirPod, Ida albums I was not familiar with—their debut, Tales of Brave Ida, or Ten Small Paces, which includes the band’s charming take on a Secret Stars song, “Shoe In.”

And I am someone who still, and perhaps should not, or should less than I find myself doing, prioritizes physical media, so I found myself combing Discogs for affordable, and available copies of Ida’s canonical works—purchasing some of them on CD, but buying both their debut, and Will You Find Me, on vinyl.

Reissued through Polyvinyl, the label that the band had a relationship with for its final two albums before going on seemingly indefinite hiatus until 2023, the double LP pressing of Will You Find Me did allow me the opportunity to revisit the album, and find a better understanding of it. A bulk of the album, this second time, when I was perhaps not too young to appreciate it—for what truly works, and the flaws it does have—was new to me. But there were things about it that were familiar, including the songs that I did enjoy that first time around. Or, rather, songs that resonated, or were truly memorable. 

There is something hypnotic, slinky, and a little eerily cool about “Shrug,” placed midway through Will You Find Me’s first half. I remember that it was a track I did find genuinely interesting in the past, specifically in the way it opens up and becomes quite dizzying in the cacophony it creates, the further along the song slithers. And upon revisiting the album, for leisure, and in truly sitting down with it analytically, now, with the third copy of it that I have purchased in my lifetime, there is an allure, or a sensuality to it that had not registered before that does make it quite compelling.

A lot of the songs on Will You Find Me do not follow the traditional verse/chorus/verse song structure, but rather, are verses that follow a similar melody in how, and where, the words fall within to the instrumentation. “Shrug” is like that—just two verses, vivid, though ambiguous in their imagery, relying heavily on the overall vibe that the song is working to cultivate. 

Musically, “Shrug” really slinks and slithers in the most literal sense. And it is among the moments on Will You Find Me where the ending of one song collides with the beginning of another—the dissonant and eerie tone that surges at the end of “This Water” is carried through to the start of “Shrug,” as the seductive rhythm from the drum kit comes tumbling in. The song, even as the percussion drops out for a moment as Littleton and Mitchell sing the opening lines together, quietly, finds a groove right from the gate—leaning into a kind of slow-jam adjacent style of R&B with the warm twinkles of the electric piano that flutter throughout, alongside the low rumble of the bass, and the different, intertwined layers of electric guitar and atmospheric sounds.

And for as seductive as “Shrug” is in the beginning, musically and subtly in its lyricism as well, it does reach a place where it becomes more about the atmospheric nature. Roughly at the halfway point of the song’s sprawling and dizzying five minute runtime, “Shrug” becomes far less focused on the seductive, slinking nature it opened with, and casually wanders in to a much more expansive and experimental territory in terms of the layering of noise and dissonance, all while the steady rhythm of the drum kit remains underneath. It is inherently a little self-indulgent, but it is also wildly compelling to hear, just in the way the band builds and sustains this completely instrumental second half to the song, allowing it to get just enough away from them before pulling it all back in and sending it off gently towards a conclusion.

“Shrug,” lyrically at times, works like a run-on sentence, or an overlapping conversation—truly a fascinating way for the words to unfold, all quietly sung by Mitchell and Littleton together. “What is this weariness that waits for you—shrug—you press your ankle against my arm,” they begin, in a line that takes a little time to understand where the pauses should be, if there were any. “This is the pressure that I love—you always recommend it,” they continue. “Could be the door. Could be the phone. For any intent or purpose, you’re not home. You’re up against the wall. No real impression, like breath on glass.”

The eerie sensuality recedes within the second verse, but there is still a cloud of ambiguity that hangs over the writing, though it does offer some extremely vivid phrase turns, as well as one of the more lingering and poignant observations from the album as a whole.

“I’ve got the apple in me, too—people are bluer than they ever imagined they might be. Looking through boxes in the basement, who were you then,” the two continue. “Your restlessness is emptier than the room we used to live in. Here’s wishing you the best—the rest is always better left unsaid.”

Maybe we’re too young.

It is one of the band’s older songs—originally appearing in a much more skeletal form on their debut, and reappearing here in a much more soulful and developed iteration is Will You Find Me’s finest track, the smoldering, swaying “Shotgun.”

I think the thing that is most arresting about “Shotgun,” here, and what makes it the song that I did remember vividly from my first time listening to Will You Find Me, 20 years ago, is the melancholic way it is arranged, but even within that melancholy, the band finds itself in an undeniable groove immediately, and with how the big, open piano chords, and the bluesy guitar riffs intertwine, along with the layered harmony vocals, it is arresting in just how understated and gorgeous it is, and how easily it swoons with just the right amount of flair and theatricality, and keeps you nodding your head pensively until the final moments. 

The vocal arranging across Will You Find Me, and really any Ida album, has always been extraordinarily impressive. “Shotgun,” though, is a high-water mark in terms of the dynamism—the whisper-quiet way that the opening verse is delivered, juxtaposed against the belted-out, drama and intensity of the second verse. There is also a very surprising, and welcomed, starkness, or dark nature to the lyrics—they are vague, seemingly personal, or autobiographical in some way, and are extraordinarily in the way they hang in memory long after the song’s come to an end.

“Like glass shattering in a clean break,” they begin. “This is the art of a mistake.”

“And we were like kids with a shotgun,” Mitchell and Littleton continue. “Blowing up words, til there were none.”

“I thought that I could destroy it,” the second verse begins, the intensity in their voices growing quickly. “Aimed, shot, and fired—missed the target. But you keep coming back, hand me fractured words, through the lens of time. And some things can’t be burned, even when they yearn to die.”

“Shotgun” is one of the few songs on Will You Find Me that follows the traditional verse/chorus/verse structure, and here, there is a hypnotic pleading offered. “Maybe I’m too young. Maybe I’m too young. Maybe we’re too young to be playing with this gun,” they sing, alluding to a kind of caution, and a kind of danger, but a sense of allure that they are unable to shake.

*

And it might be a bit much, to have purchased the same album three times—the most recent being a rather lavish boxed set. But I am fascinated with anything that even has the smallest amount of mythology or lore surrounding it, and while nearly 100 tracks or additional material adjacent to the Will You Find Me-era of Ida is a lot, and is intimidating to stare down, I find it all compelling. I find the backstory surrounding the album’s funding and laborious recording process to be compelling. I find the toll that it took on the band’s dynamic, in a sense, to be genuinely interesting, with Daniel Littleton departing the band before the album had even been released.

Maybe we’re too young.

And it might be a bit much, to have purchased the same album three times. But each time, it has allowed me to understand Will You Find Me a little more, or find more about it to appreciate as a listener. And this time, this third time, that I found myself with the album, what I came to appreciate was the way it ends.

Will You Find Me concludes with “Don’t Get Sad,” which the title alone is, for someone like myself, striking, but it is the penultimate track, “Encantada,” that I considered to be one of the best of the 14 songs included on the album.

Like they do elsewhere on the album, “Encantada” blends the band’s penchant for atmospherics, and rippling noises, with a gentle kind of beauty. The song opens with a tear of harshness, and a warbled sound effect lurching its way through the soundscape—per the liner notes to the reissue it is the string arrangement to “Georgia” run through a piece of equipment from the 1930s, before the clean and crips tones of the acoustic guitar are heard. And as a whole, the song—which truly is constructed to have the kind of finality of a closing track, knows exactly what it is doing in terms of how it is structured, and when things occur, and how they resonate. 

Something Ida has always done well is bittersweet and melancholic. “Encantada” is perhaps the most reflective, and pensive, in how it unfolds—specifically in the progression of the acoustic guitar, and the way the piano comes in over the top of it, and the way it all swells briefly along with the vocal melody. It is really small moments like this that make the band, and this album, things to behold.

“Encantada” is one of the rare songs for the band, and on this album, where only one member sings. Or at least it is more noticeable that only one member is singing with how prominently placed the vocals end up being in the mix. Elizabeth Mitchell is the only voice we hear for the song—somber but strong, and impressively extending a note and stretching her voice within the song’s final moments.

There is, as there is in a number of other instances on Will You Find Me, a poetic ambiguity to Mitchell’s writing here. Like you are on the cusp of something being revealed to you but she keeps us just enough in the dark. “Don’t do it again—don’t lose your head too quickly,” she begins. “You could pick up the phone. Don’t leave me all alone,” she continues. 

“I won’t look for the worst before I’ve even heard what you’re trying to say,” she sings, her voice ascending slightly in tandem with the slight, emotionally evocative swoon in the melody between the guitar and piano. “But words just get in the way.”

After a dreamy electric guitar solo, serving as an instrumental bridge, the song ends with a consolation, and a question.

“I know that it’s late. We’re much too tired to make sense,” Mitchell concedes. “But I’ll hold you up. Will you hold me up?”

Will you hold me up.

Will you find me.

*

There are myriad places where across Will You Find Me where the songs both blend and collide into one another—elements from the ending of one will be delicately carried over into the next; or, a song will conclude abruptly, with the next in the sequence beginning just as startlingly. Both of these techniques in terms of production and sequencing result in something fascinating. 

The ghostly warble that you hear at the start of “Encantada” returns as the song comes to an end, and it sustains itself very eerily into the start of the final moment, “Don’t Get Sad.”

“Don’t Get Sad” really takes its time collecting itself—the unsettling looping sound continues to oscillate for nearly a minute before any other instruments introduce themselves, with the interplay of a melodica and a violin, weaving back and forth before we hear the cleanly strummed tone of the electric guitar, and Littleton’s voice singing the titular phrase.

Structurally, within Will You Find Me, if you look at the opening track, “Down on Your Back” as a kind of prologue, “Don’t Get Sad” serves as an afterword of sorts—with “Encantada” being the album’s final, truly stirring moment. Here, the song does ascend slightly away from the strums of the electric guitar—Mitchell’s voice joins Littleton’s in a gorgeous harmony and the violin does quietly come back in underneath them, before, after a little more time, we hear the faintest tap of a cymbal, finding a rhythm somewhere in everything as it meanders. 

It’s then that it feels like “Don’t Get Sad” is gathering more momentum, or will ascend out further, but it doesn’t—it quickly resolves and returns to a mournful, contemplative place with the weaving of the melodica and violin, and the strum of the guitar, until there is silence. 

Again, Will You Find Me isn’t a bleak album, though there are moments that are much darker than others. “Don’t Get Sad,” in serving as an afterword for the album, it does offer up a lot of hope, or want for optimism—and it is fitting, really. The sentiments of the song. Arriving now. 25 years after the fact, and coming into a tumultuous world where we are perhaps in need of hope, or optimism, more than ever before. 

Arriving now, when it is difficult, and sometimes impossible, to grapple with the sadness that we feel within—what to do with it. Or if it will ever recede. 

If it’s going to feel like this forever, or if there is something for us to look forward to in the distance.

“Don’t get sad on me now,” Littleton begins. “I may not have a lot of comfort to spare, but I hear you.”

For as gradual and intentional as “Don’t Get Sad” is as it unfolds, the way it swells slightly does seem to come on quickly, with the blended vocals and melody giving this surprising sense of triumph. “Put on your coat and your had and your gloves and go out walking,” Littleton and Mitchell command. “Take one had out of your glove on the street when your walking. Look straight ahead—don’t turn around when your walking. Nothing can hurt you now.”

There is the assurance that comes, then, after the encouragement.

“Your love isn’t gone, it’s just moved on,” they attest. “It’s inside you now. It feels so heavy,” the pair continues, and repeat three of those lines before swapping out the fourth with the final glimmer of potential as the song ends. “You’ll find it somehow.”

*

The spring doesn’t feel like the wrong time to be listening to Ida, or to Will You Find Me, but it is also not the season that I truly associate with the band or their output. Because if I were to sort my music autobiographically, and I were to think about my tattered cardboard case holding a well-worn compact disc copy of Heart Like A River, I would have to go to my spring of 2005 pile, and think about how much time I spent with that record as spring turned into summer, and I was faced with the uncertainty and unease of my life after finishing college with no real prospects on what to do next.

Ida, as a band, and certainly specific albums in their canon, can unlock these specific moments, or memories, but I have ultimately brought them through time with me. To buying Will You Find Me a second time and coming to a better understanding about it. To siting down with their other, harder to find records that I was not at all familiar with. 

I return to Ida every autumn. With regularity. Even before the air has become colder and the leaves begin to turn. There is a bittersweet, beautiful longing quality to their work—the harmonies, of course, play a role in that, as do the often sparse and melancholic arrangements. 

Will You Find Me, as a 25th anniversary reissue, is exhaustive—not even the CD or digital editions of the collection that do include the 80 additional tracks, but the selections featured within the additional LPs of the vinyl pressing are the kind of thing that is a completist’s dream in terms of ephemera. 

For a number of years now I have given consideration to the notion of the “life of an album” versus “how an album lives.” Because those are two different things to me. The life of an album, regardless of when it was released, deals in the currency of immediacy. How well does the album sell. How well is it regarded critically. How long can you support it on a tour before it is time to begin the cycle again. How an album lives, though, is more important because it involves what comes after all of that. How often you return to it. How often you may find yourself in it. How it makes you feel. What memories it unlocks for you. How has it potentially grown with you through time.

There is of course a history behind what you hear on Will You Find Me. That is something to take into consideration and knowing now more about the laborious and meticulous nature with which it was recorded, I will think of that, and the weight that it holds, when I listen. I am remiss to say that Ida, even in their active years and certainly now, are a “cult act,” but they are a band that, overtime, found their following, and even in the years where they were no longer recording or performing, certainly others discovered their music along the way. 

Will You Find Me has lived a number of lives and will continue doing so.

Both in the music housed within and the way it is presented physically, this is a stunning, gorgeous, and thoughtful collection. It isn’t a difficult album, but it does require patience. Something that I did not have in 2005. Bands and albums find us when we are ready. Bands and albums stay alongside us and grow with us, as we mature, when the time is right. Will You Find Me, itself, is a beautiful moment in time, and this reissue expands on that moment captured, giving it so much more and often rich context. 

Will You Find Me is out now via Numero.