March 2020 will be remembered as the month the music stopped. John Calvin Abney was set to tour with his long-time collaborator, John Moreland, to promote his latest record (LP5) when the pandemic shut everything down. That’s when Abney holed up at his current home in California’s Bay Area to begin writing the songs that would become Familiar Ground. He says, “I had written some of the songs before everything went down but some of the songs really took form as I had this surplus of time and lack of tour so I ended up having a lot of mental space and physical space to delve into writing. I also got to workshop some of these songs and hone their edges.”