DOGSTAR 1: Jacob Klein Turns Grief Into a Map Back Home

The album imagines being stuck in a version of the world that looks almost right but is not quite true.

This album comes from a year that just kept taking things away. DOGSTAR 1, the new record from i give my friends flowers, is the sound of one person trying to hold on to something steady while the ground keeps shifting under him. It is heavy in places. It is also, somehow, warm. The project belongs to Jacob Klein, a producer and engineer who has spent over a decade working behind the scenes in Nashville, Pittsburgh, New York, and Asheville. He grew up around two very different worlds: his father's audio shop and his mother's garden. You can hear both of those instincts in his music.

"There is a technical ear here, someone who knows how sound moves through a room. But there is also patience, the kind you learn from watching things grow slowly instead of forcing them."

The backstory behind this album is a lot to carry. Klein spent the pandemic caring for his grandfather. During that same stretch, he lost friends to the drug epidemic that has hit Pennsylvania hard. He moved to Asheville hoping for a fresh start, only to learn that his young dog was dying. He stepped away from work to be with her in her last months. Not long after she passed, a relationship that had shaped a decade of his life came apart too. And then, just days after he finished a new EP, Hurricane Helene tore through Asheville. Klein spent that time helping neighbors instead of releasing music. He picked up a rescued piano and started writing instead. That is the soil DOGSTAR 1 grew out of.

It uses metaphors like a dog that will not answer to its name, a friend's wedding vows that feel like they are looping, a childhood home that feels one step off from how you remember it. Klein moves through this world guided by the people and animals around him, slowly turning a search for home into something closer to acceptance. Not everything can be fixed. Some things can only be carried differently.

Musically, the 12 songs move between indie soul, lo-fi folk, dream pop, and touches of alt hip-hop. It is built for quiet, in-between moments like late drives, open windows, the kind of night where you are not really doing anything except thinking. The album reportedly folds in a reading of an Allen Ginsberg poem, a sample of real beach wedding vows, and a relationship slowly falling apart over mellotron strings. These are not small touches. They are the kind of details that only make sense once you know the story behind them.

Klein recorded parts of the album in Pittsburgh, Asheville, and the New River Gorge, eventually finishing pieces of it in his parents' house outside Pittsburgh, the same place where he first fell in love with music as a kid. That detail says something about the whole project. This is not an album chasing trends. It is an album trying to close a loop, returning to where things started in order to make sense of everything that happened in between.

He did not do it alone. A group of collaborators, including Julian Klein, Harrison Wargo, Gabriel Lotfy-Nassar, Kyle Baumbach, Julius Tunstall, Evan Isaac Black, and Mike Johnson, helped shape the record, and it was mastered by Chris Gehringer at Sterling Sound. Klein has also pointed to influences like Haruki Murakami, David Lynch, and Pink Floyd, which tracks with the album's dreamlike, slightly bent sense of reality.

A companion video for the song "pollen," directed and animated by Chase Hudson, works as a kind of doorway into this world, following animated versions of Jacob and a companion named Sparrow as they move through shifting spaces looking for their true selves. In the end, DOGSTAR 1 is not really about the disasters that shaped it. It is about what a person does after: how grief, if you let it, can turn into something closer to growth instead of just weight you carry alone.