Later that year, in the fall, Sundquist, several years sober and married with three children, got to talking with Christopher David Hanson, an accomplished guitarist and vocalist who invited him to record at his basement studio on the Birch Lake north of Babbitt. “It’s the Music Mecca,” Sundquist said. “It’s right on the lake, where the ideas flow and everything is organic, as much as we could be.”

With Hanson’s help as recorder and producer, Sundquist brought his family and friends including Burkes, Papin and Palmi, in addition to vocalists Eli Little and Rob Wheeler, his son, Mikko, and even Hanson’s dog, Minnow — to the remote studio to help him fine-tune songs that he worked on for years as well as new songs he wrote as COVID-19 began spreading across the state in mid-March.

During that stretch of time, he found solace in the music of Bob Dylan, The Band, Jack Johnson and Sean Rowe, an alternative singer-songwriter from New York. He opened himself up to his fellow musicians who helped him tweak his older ballads of small town life and create newer messages about nature and positivity that he had strayed from in the past.

“The ether opened up,” Sundquist said.

Many of the new songs are slower-paced than his earlier ones. A lot of the metaphoric-style lyrics deal with his sobriety. “The newer songs on the album have messages for people in recovery, because I’m in recovery myself,” he said. “I wrote a lot of songs about the challenges we meet in recovery and some of the struggles that people have, including myself. I write about seeing the hopes and challenges they have.”