The events leading up to the release of Keenan O’Meara’s debut album, Bathe in the Everlasting Light, out now, is an oddly prophetic and deeply spiritual journey. 

For starters, the album’s creation was anything but romanticized. There was no grand epiphany that led to lyrical breakthroughs, no moments of O’Meara sitting by the piano or holding a guitar, waiting for inspiration to strike. Rather, it was made in a refreshingly honest time of balancing creative endeavors and a job in construction, but letting the love for the art outweigh the demands. “One thing I’ve heard a lot is that I don’t need time under deadline,” O’Meara says, tracing back to a songwriting group that reshaped how he works. “It’s kind of like an impulse-driven enterprise. You do it because you want to do it.”

But, that’s not to say he didn’t find the endeavor fulfilling. When it came to the actual songwriting, O’Meara turned to collaboration from artists like his partner, Meg Lui, as well as Hannah Cohen, Sufjan Stevens, and Sam Evian. The group would write one song a day, upload it, and critique each other’s work. “I would get off the job site and I’d try and write a song in an hour,” he says. At the time, O’Meara was still balancing music with construction work, a life split between physical labor and the quieter labor of songwriting. The routine forced something out of him that didn’t rely on perfect conditions. “You sometimes fall victim to only doing it when you want to do it,” he says. “But I just had to find through that process that writing all the time, whether I felt like it or not, yielded some of the work I’m really proud of.”

The group functioned less like a traditional collaboration and more like a songwriting machine, with inspiration seemingly radiating out of each writer working in proximity to others they respected deeply. “The prospect of having all these great writers on there was really intimidating,” he admits. “It made me confront songwriting in a way that I hadn’t before.” But instead of paralysis, what followed was output. And though not all of it was meant to survive beyond the exercise, enough did to become the beginnings of Bathe in the Everlasting Light. 

And while the pressure of keeping up with his collaborators may have helped create a sense of urgency, it also helped O’Meara overcome his propensity towards perfectionism, as he was forced to keep simply finishing the song as the end goal, rather than getting lost in the weeds of making the “perfect” song. “I used to have so much neuroticism about writing,” O’Meara explains. “But this taught me that you just have to carve out time and pull songs out of the ether.”

That phrase, ‘pulling songs out of the ether,’ feels close to the thematic crux of Bathe in the Everlasting Light, even if the process behind it was far more grounded than mystical. The record is built from repetition, constraint, and habit. But what emerges from it is something more philosophical: an album constantly thinking about time, mortality, and what it means to exist between moments.

“At that time, I felt like I was between big things,” he says. “Almost all of the record is about death in some way.” But “about death” is not quite the same as being defined by it. O’Meara is careful with that distinction, circling the idea rather than sealing it. “A lot of it was just playing with my own anxiety about death,” he says. “Trying to make something out of my own neuroticism about it.”

But after the album was completed, life seemed to hand him an emotional gut-punch in response. Shortly after recording had finished, O’Meara’s mother suddenly passed away. His father was diagnosed with and began treatment for cancer. He and his partner welcomed their first child. And suddenly, O’Meara found himself standing on the corner of elation and pain, suddenly confronted with the very themes he explored in his album, almost as if Bathe in the Everlasting Light had been anticipating the future itself. “It sounds like I wrote [the album] about these last five months,” he says. “It’s very strange how it works like that sometimes.”

If the record feels prophetic in retrospect, it balancesalso feels grounded in something more conceptual than autobiographical: a way of using fiction, mythology, and abstraction to approach subjects that are otherwise too direct to hold.

Take, for example, “God’s Last Hunter,”  as song wherein O’Meara builds fictional worlds that behave like emotional stand-ins. Places where morality, violence, and guilt can be explored without collapsing into literalism. “I like to make a practice out of taking components I find objectionable in myself,” he says. “And I like to personify them.”

That instinct to turn internal tension into external story runs through much of the album’s lyrical world-building. Mythological references sit alongside suburban detail, not as contrast but as overlap. “I find joy in marrying banal, boring concepts with really big, historically powerful ones,” he says. “Like mythology that’s made its way through an eon or two.”

But, despite the mythology and moments where the album even dips its toes into the fantastical, there is a more practical philosophy of writing at work. One shaped as much by exhaustion as by inspiration. Though, despite it all, the thought to deprive himself of the chance to create new music never so much as crossed his mind.

“I just never thought to abuse my own creative impulses,” he says, reflecting on writing after long physical workdays. “But it was great.” His approach is (somewhat refreshingly) not romanticized, but it’s honest. O’Meara isn’t afraid to put in the hard work, and understands that staying power is half the game. “Everybody I know who I admire embraces and lives in that space,” he says. “They just are working all the time.”

That emphasis on process extends into how O’Meara thinks about collaboration and creation, not just for his own work, but for others. He doesn’t view his collaborators as a nice addition to the album, but rather, integral to the work. “You realize there’s a lot of creative work out there that took a lot of people to be a part of,” he says. “There’s just often a large amount of people making contributions.”

And while this album had its own fair share of people making contributions, its core feels inherently true to O’Meara’s artistic voice. Bathe in the Everlasting Light carries that accumulated structure that went into its creation inside it. A record shaped less by a singular breakthrough than by collaboration, and letting inspiration reveal itself gradually. 

But for the moment, O’Meara seems less interested in defining the record than in accepting what it already is. “I’m very proud of this record,” he says. “And I’m very excited for people to hear it.”

Bathe in the Everlasting Light is out now.