Jacob Klein makes music under the name i give my friends flowers — a project born out of a simple conviction: tomorrow isn't promised. Having spent the better part of a decade as a producer and engineer, Jacob has lived and worked in Nashville, Pittsburgh, New York, and Asheville. Those years of hard work and attention have culminated in a body of work entirely his own.
The songs that make up "A River Runs Through Me" — and the larger album, "DOGSTAR 1," to follow — were written across some of the most formative years of his life.
Hurricane Helene, the "1,000-year flood" that tore through Asheville and the surrounding region in the fall of 2024, destroyed homes, businesses, and ecosystems, upending a community Jacob had only recently begun to call home. In the aftermath, doing mutual aid work and checking in on neighbors and friends, he found himself confronting something he hadn't expected: how much interior devastation he'd been carrying quietly, and for how long.
That devastation had roots that went back further. Jacob had spent the pandemic caretaking for his grandfather, an experience that left a permanent mark, and lost countless friends to the drug epidemic in Pennsylvania along the way. Not long after, he made the leap to move to Asheville and start fresh — only to learn, soon after arriving, that his young dog had a terminal illness. He left the job he'd just landed to spend her final months by her side. When she passed, the relationship he'd built his life around for a decade didn't survive the grief that followed.
From the ashes of this years-long experience, a first EP with his brother and close friends became a kind of shared exhale — a way of processing loss together before any of them fully had the language for it. i give my friends flowers was born in 2023 with a small, independently released EP, "Now, Forever." But as Jacob started finding his footing again, his brother made the decision to move away, pushing Jacob to find a more solitary creative path forward, and resulting in a new home studio in West Asheville.
In September 2024, Jacob had just finished a new EP, "In Case of Emergencies Draw a Door." Days later, Hurricane Helene hit, and everything that had taken years to rebuild scattered again. Friends and collaborators moved away. There was so much work to do, both internally and in the community around him — releasing that music didn't feel right. In the months that followed, Jacob found a rescued piano and began writing. What started as an attempt to simply document a hard year became something else: an exploration of how to let grief, memory, and change move through you. That idea became the spine of "A River Runs Through Me" — the belief that we don't get to choose what runs through us, only what we do with it.
Jacob tracked and produced the EP between Pittsburgh, Asheville, and the New River Gorge, working with longtime collaborator Harrison Wargo (of BADBOXES) and finishing parts of it in the room where he'd first fallen in love with music — in his parents' house outside Pittsburgh. He leaned on the writers, filmmakers, and artists who'd carried him through hard times before — Haruki Murakami, David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Hockney, Pink Floyd — as reminders that a song or a story can make us feel seen, give us courage, push us forward when we need it most.
"A River Runs Through Me" arrives July 17, led by single "Pollen," with the full-length "DOGSTAR 1" following on August 21 and a companion record, "DOGSTAR 2," on Halloween. Together they form the first real chapter of a much longer story — one about what it means to continue choosing love, dedication, and creation, when the ground continues shifting beneath you.