This Is What It Feels Like emerged organically, not through a formal plan. By the time Matt Bauer and Jordan Whitlock openly discussed collaborating on a full-length record, they had already written over half of the songs that would become the album. These songs shared a common emotional thread, evoking images of oceans, gardens, light, distance and longing. From there, the album emerged naturally from that shared current and their shared love of writing together.

Written and produced entirely remotely, with Whitlock in San Diego and Bauer in Los Angeles, the record carries the imprint of physical distance and emotional closeness intertwined. They exchanged demos and melodies, rewriting lyrics in response to one another’s ideas. Instead of working side by side in a studio, the songs were given space to breathe. Each artist had time alone with what the other had sent, allowing instinct and personal memory to shape their response. That back-and-forth became the pulse of the album.

From the very first collaboration, “All I See Is You,” the partnership felt immediate. Bauer had held on to the instrumental for years, sensing it was waiting for the right voice. Within 24 hours of receiving it, Whitlock returned a complete vocal and lyric, “All I See Is You,” a tidal refrain of devotion. The track came together almost effortlessly, and in that ease they recognized the beginning of something special. It set the emotional tone for the album, expansive yet intimate.

Distance itself became an unspoken collaborator. Without sitting in the same room to define what each song was about, both writers drew independently from their own experiences of connection, fear, hope and uncertainty. That subtle misalignment, two perspectives circling the same emotional truth, gives the record its sense of openness. The lyrics rarely dictate meaning; instead, they gesture toward a feeling. In “Do You Think Of It Sometimes?” longing is suspended in a question left unanswered. In “Take My Hand,” reconnection is framed not as certainty but as possibility: We could reach the sun again.

Imagery of the natural world threads throughout the album, functioning as both metaphor and grounding force. Oceans rise and recede. Gardens bloom and wither. Light refracts through water and hands. In “Heaven and Here,” there is “nothing between heaven and here / only the words I couldn’t say,” a line that captures the record’s central tension between transcendence and the difficulty of expression. “Higher” dissolves the boundary between two people in warm rain and golden light, while “A Flower Blooming for No One” explores beauty existing without witness, a meditation on creation for its own sake.

“Bloom” stands as one of the album’s most delicate achievements. Originally a near-bare voice memo without a click track, Whitlock sent it to Bauer not knowing where it could go. He responded with a sweeping string arrangement that slowly lifts the song into quiet catharsis. The lyric, Love me till I’m blooming / and I will love you back, feels emblematic of the collaboration itself – patient, trusting and mutually transformative.

There were also unexpected evolutions. A simple violin drone passed between them became an improvised vocal that eventually split into separate pieces, “Roses” and “There’s Still Tomorrow.” These moments of discovery of songs that neither would have written alone speak to the core of the project – listening closely, relinquishing control and allowing something new to form in the space between.

At its heart, This Is What It Feels Like is an album about connection across distance. It lives in fragile moments, like the fear of losing touch or the quiet acceptance of uncertainty. More than anything, the record embodies freedom. Both artists approached it as a space to create without restriction, writing from a deeply personal place and trusting that honesty would resonate. The result is a body of work that feels suspended between earth and sky, intimate yet expansive, grounded yet reaching. It tells the story of two artists discovering a shared voice across miles, and in the process discovering what it means to make something simply because it feels true.