Why Medicine (Pre-order)

Vinyl edition is limited to 100 copies.

Why Medicine, the new album from Portland songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Adam Selzer, is both stark and luminous, confronting the weight of trauma, silence, and survival with unflinching honesty. Across twelve songs, Selzer weaves stories of abuse, generational wounds, and fragile belonging, circling the ways people cope through armor, faith, medicine, or denial. Yet within the darkness are fleeting sparks of light: the sound of a choice, the possibility of change, the faint persistence of grace.

Rich but restrained arrangements frame the album like bookends of memory. Strings, pedal steel, Mellotron, gospel organ, clarinet, and trumpet drift through Selzer’s guitar work, creating a sound that feels both intimate and expansive. Vulnerability becomes a form of freedom, and survival itself an act of connection.

With Why Medicine, Selzer turns inward after decades of producing and recording for others. The result is his most vulnerable and expansive work to date, fearless, tender, and unafraid to ask what we hold onto when life becomes unbearable, and what we reach for in order to heal.