When Bacon began writing Exile to Neptune in 2020, she had just lost three dear people in the three months before the pandemic began. As grief excavated long held hurt, a realization dawned of how deeply she'd been dissociating for most of her life - as if living on Neptune, "as far as away I could be / from the pulsing bright light / from the heat" of the hurt. The house banger “We Are Okay (If I’m Perfect)” introduced a new sound and songwriting process, but after eight songs in quick succession, the project stalled. It wasn't until early 2023 on the heels of separation from her long time partner that she realized she needed to live the rest of the story before she could complete the project. 

A Complex PTSD diagnosis came in 2024 - and opened not only an entirely new solar system of understanding and longing for healing and peace, but also a flood of songs. (Complex PTSD is considered distinct from PTSD in that it occurs after repeated or chronic exposure to trauma over a period of time, usually, but not always, in childhood. For more information, see here.)

On Election Day 2024,  Good Hart Artist Residency Director Sue Klco called to invite Bacon to re-apply after a failed application in 2020, so she pitched a plan to complete the Exile project and a companion novella. The application was accepted and residency set for January 2026. 

Bacon spent all of 2025 on twin paths of discovery: how to understand everything she could about CPTSD (her own, and the condition more broadly); and how to make electronic music (switching from Logic to Abelton, sequencing drums, and understanding production techniques). She went deep into therapy, online courses, and 1:1 instruction. 

When January 2026 arrived, she drove four hours in the snow north to Good Hart, Michigan, set up her studio in the gorgeous residency house for two weeks, and the firehose turned on. 10-12 hours a day, songs, sounds, and words poured out. She’d spend a quiet morning reading poetry (H.D.’s Helen of Egypt, and Anne Carson’s If Not Winter), work on the album for 8-9 hours, and when the music felt dry, she’d go back downstairs, open her computer and fall under the spell of the companion novella that explored the same themes from a fictional lens while listening to Radiohead's In Rainbows or the late NACKT’s “Ambient Awakening” DJ sets. 

A journey emerged in the songs, and it became both memoir and melodrama, veering between the drones of ambient pop, a bright house banger, and lots of grime and low-end, dipping in and out of metaphor to titrate the process of recollection. She spent long hours swapping between sounds on a borrowed Korg MS2000B, looking for ideas on her first love: the bass (“Death/Danger” was written on bass), and moving snare hits up and down the grid til her bones rattled right on some intuitive scale. Other than her gracious hosts (Sue and Bill Klco), her only contact with the outside world during most of this time was with collaborator, and then-partner, Sanju Sebastian (aka saahnjoo), who would get mixes from Bacon at midnight and talk through them smoking cigarettes on two bitterly cold ends of a cellular connection. 

By the end of two weeks, there was an album and a novella. It wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t done, but it was made. Cathartic tears fell the whole drive home, as she white-knuckled through a snow storm and listened to the rough mixes. 

While the process so far had been a massive step forward creatively, and completing the work on her own served an important philosophical and spiritual need, Bacon has learned through hard-won wisdom that there’s power in knowing when to bring other people in to finish a project. “Find the right people, get them in the room, and then let them do what they’re good at” is the motto she lives by in collaboration. There were two right people at this stage: the first was My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Nova who provided insight and feedback on the early demos that helped Bacon rework, cull, and hone the vision and the sounds both. 

Next, it was Detroit/Portland OR producer and ambient artist Mat Larimer. From the first listen, when Bacon sat on his studio couch crying and shaking with fear to bring someone into such a vulnerable and roughly hewn project, Larimer seemed to understand the gravity and sacredness of the work. That this wasn’t just an album; it was art and it was work. Larimer’s guest production stitched breaks in the seams of songs, and his mixing brought the disparate tracks into relation, making it truly an album.  

The album is a witness to awakening, crisis, grief, and the long road that follows crisis where healing can start to unravel and rework the strands of a nervous system if we let it. Songs such as “Threads”, “What Did They Hope For?” and “Emotional Flashback” may be hard to listen to. They were hard to live. But true to Bacon’s entire body of work as an artist, the story never ends in the worst moment. There is always a reaching towards understanding (“Could I Have” “All I Ever Wanted”), seeing the worst from a new angle (“See?” “Carry” “Good”) and creating something enduring and medicinal for anyone who might share these struggles (“Give It Grace”). (Annie Bacon fans will also notice two versions of “When Will I Learn” The song was originally written for this album, but covered as an Americana tune on the Annie Bacon & her OSHEN album Storm.)

And no project of Annie Bacon’s would be complete without the participation of community: Without any context, she invited friends to send her a short snippet of their voices to add to the album’s closer “Good” (Sebastian also adds a piano solo) After 14 tracks of profound solitude and isolation, the voices of loved ones cut through the interstellar distance and lure us all back to the warmth of care and possibility. 

It’s an invitation we can accept over and over. Just as healing is a process we walk through again every day, rewiring ourselves with care and grace.