Logan Lynn: Yes, both the producer Bryan Cecil and I wanted to make a dance record. We had worked together on my cover of “The Last High” by The Dandy Warhols from January of this year. The idea of doing some vintage disco dancepop take on that song was deliberate and we wrote “I Killed Tomorrow Yesterday” at the same time so we were already planted in 80’s dance party mode. Obviously I’m a child of the 80’s and 90’s and that comes out in what I listen to and what I create. Bryan wanted it to be authentic, like a time machine and I wanted it to sound like what I grew up imagining my records would sound like someday.

We ended up doing exactly that so it seemed like a perfect time to step away for awhile. The record is about me being totally disillusioned and leaving. Not sure if life imitated art or vice versa…but I’m much, MUCH happier ever since I did the whole career suicide bit in August. The overall concept was to have a big, spectacular going away party. “Fall Into New Arms” was chosen as the last track just in case it was literally the last song I ever put out. I’m not saying that it will be…but I could live with that.

Catch Fire: What exactly does “career suicide“ mean? What happend in August?

Logan Lynn just wants a new hoodie. Sitting outside a North Portland cafe, blue hood yanked over a navy baseball hat, he points to a missing zipper pull—and later, more tellingly, to letters on the hoodie’s front, “F-R-E-D.”

“It just needs to say ‘not what I thought it was gonna be,’” he says, half joking.

It’s been that kind of decade for the Portland musician, who took to his website Thursday, July 29 to announce his self-proclaimed “career suicide,” an indefinite hiatus from the music business. With characteristic candor, Lynn wrote: “As I near the 10-year-anniversary of my debut record,… I have come to some conclusions not only about the journey I’ve been on since then musically and in my personal life, but also the journey I intend to be on moving forward with both.

One thing that is painfully clear to me and everyone who knows me in real life is that I AM MISERABLE. I have been for some time. I’m sick of being broke, mismanaged, overworked, screwed over by the folks who are supposed to be looking out for me … you know, all the hits.”

A few days later over iced coffee, Lynn pulls even fewer punches, with himself and others. “The more time I have to think it over, the more comfortable I am with the whole idea,” he says, in what begins a conversation about demons, downloads and the decision to withdraw from what he admits is an enviable, even courted spotlight—at least from the outside.