What are we doing?

Stray Sparks is what we call it when we - Emily Watkins and Andy Fry - make music together. We met while making Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s debut album The Dust of Retreat. After years of touring and two full-length records, we got married and decided to make our own record. After all, Emily had a cupboard full of songs, and Andy, having produced and engineered a bunch of other projects at the fabled Queensize Twin Air studios, was ready to start something new.

In the summer of 2011, however, after a near-death experience and a month in the hospital, Andy was diagnosed with Sarcoidosis. Like countless others who find themselves managing a long-term chronic health condition, we recognized that everything in our life together had to change. And we had to accept that we might not ever be able to make music again. Gradually, though, Andy’s health improved, we made a studio in our home, and resumed work.

As Andy’s Sarcoidosis went into remission, his father’s health declined and we shifted our focus to caring for him full-time. A few years later, his father passed on under the sparks of fireworks on the night of July 4, 2017. Around the same time, Emily got pregnant and spent the next 10 months in a nauseous fog that only lifted with the birth of our amazing daughter in early 2018.

Through all of this, we wrote and recorded whenever we could, with the help of our friends along the way. The end result is our debut, Gravity, a collection of songs that evolved with us over the course of a tumultuous decade.

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