Surviving a Nuclear Winter

In 2007, the Lonely Forest survived a year that would break most
young bands. The band had recently won EMP’s annual Sound Off!
competition and released an impressive six-song

EP produced by Jack Endino. They were starting to win the hearts of
fans and critics alike. But just as they were starting to take off,
things took a hard turn. Guitarist Tony Ruland abruptly left the band
and wound up in the hospital, while singer John Van Deusen checked into
an outpatient rehab program for drug addiction and depression.

“I have a very addictive personality,” admits Van Deusen. “My
experience with drugs hasn’t been anything too intense. But anybody who
knows me knows when I like something, I do things in extremes.”

While writing the band’s debut full-length, 2007’s Nuclear
Winter—a concept album, set in the future, about a man in
outer space watching Earth be destroyed—Van Deusen says he was
“smoking a lot of weed” and he was feeling tempted to try other
drugs.

“The temptation that someone would feel about a really seductive
woman is what I felt about any drug,” he says. “Like drugs I never even
tried, which is one of the reasons why I was like, ‘Holy shit, this is
not good.’ If it had gone on any longer, it would’ve destroyed me.”

Van Deusen’s close friends and family thought that his drug habit
and depression were on the road to becoming a serious problem. So at
their urging, he voluntarily started going to Skagit Recovery Center, a
rehab center in Mount Vernon, four times a week.

Meanwhile, Ruland had entered the hospital. Van Deusen, along with
bassist Eric Sturgeon and drummer Braydn Krueger, hadn’t even known
Ruland was ill—he’d been hiding it—until one night in
October when the three of them were playing a show at Neumos and their
former bandmate called them from his hospital bed.

“It was alarming, because the message was all broken up,” says
Sturgeon, recalling that night. “It said, ‘Dude, I’m in the hospital,’
and he said the doctors said he wasn’t gonna get better.”

“I almost died,” says Ruland. “I had ulcers. I was throwing up a
bunch of blood and was in the hospital for two weeks.”

Ruland did recover and was released from the hospital on November 7,
the same day his first nephew was born. The date is now tattooed on the
inside of his left forearm.

“As much as it sucked, it was the best experience of my life,”
Ruland continues. “I learned so much about myself. My dad died from
cancer when I was nine and a half, and I was in the same hospital he
was in when he was really sick. It was a total mindfuck. But I had this
really crazy moment where I realized that everything was gonna be okay.
I was like, ‘I just need an answer—either I’m gonna die or not.’
And then immediately I felt this relief, this calm.”

The following summer, Ruland rejoined the band, and the Lonely
Forest began work on their sophomore album, the recently released We
Sing the Body Electric!. It’s a strong, passionate pop record, its
songs as vulnerable and raw as they are laced with memorable hooks, and
it’s by far the band’s best work to date.

Many of the album’s lyrics were written while Van Deusen was making
trips to Skagit Recovery, and addiction, drugs, and temptation are a
constant theme throughout.

On “Tomato Soup,” over a tinkering piano and sweeping orchestration,
Van Deusen sings, “My hands are shaking at the possibility of using.”
On “Julia’s Song,” he croons, “I’m caught in addiction, Jules, together
we are/Like lost battered ships sailing toward the same star.” The
brief album opener is just a choir repeating the line “I hear a
voice/It’s faint and weak/Two pink pills to fall asleep.”

“The lyrics are about something else for John, but to me they feel
very optimistic in a totally different way,” says Ruland. “I was
getting to play music with my band again, I was still breathing air, I
have this new beautiful nephew, everything’s new and great, and I
couldn’t be more excited about life.”

“I think it was important that these things happened,” Van Deusen
says, referring to their year of adversities. “It felt like it was very
detrimental, but we discovered something.”

“Something clicked in all of us,” says Ruland. “Now we know what we
want, and we’re bloodthirsty for it.”