In [25] August 2019, Gnade released a collection of acoustic demos entitled The Goddamn Marching Tide and toured behind the songs with the writer Nathaniel Kennon Perkins.

The Reader was horrible,” Gnade says. “There was very little arts coverage. The bands they’d write about had all been irrele­vant for 10 years. Everything in it was geared to people who had a bunch of money. Meanwhile, there was this amazing art scene that was getting no attention. We wanted to put together something that would really support that underground scene. Like, ‘Hey, there’s this cool punk show happening in the sewers. You should go.’ “

Q: Do you feel any pressure when working on new projects and how have you learned to deal with that? Do you ever feel like you have a responsibility to your audience? A: The main thing that I want from what I’m doing—besides wanting to keep doing it, because it’s necessary to my survival and it’s how I find therapy—is I want people to read my books. Success for me is just knowing that as many people as possible are reading my books, and that they have either enjoyed or are taking something good from the books is a big reward. Not since I left Portland. Once I discovered moonshine everything else dropped by the wayside. I also don’t really have time to drink. My rule is don’t drink until the work is done but lately the work is never done. It’s been a busy year. There’s a lot I want to do before I die.

After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different takes place in San Diego taco shops and rundown beach apartments, on the amusement park boardwalk at 3am and in cars bound for Tijuana and drunken glory. .Like Proust's baroque autobiographical fantasies, this is a book rich with details and life. A native San Diegan, the 44-year-old Gnade grew up in Pacific Beach, where he and his fellow latchkey kids explored abandoned houses, ate their dinners at 7-Eleven (nachos and Funyuns with ice-cream sandwiches for dessert) and survived the tortures of their middle- and high-school years with varying degrees of success.The main throughline is that all my life I’ve been looking for safety, or the feeling of being safe, not just physically but emotionally. The big storyline in those books is a search for safety, looking for something that makes you feel like you’re protected, like you’re inside a big castle wall. That’ll probably change as I get older and come up with new ideas, but life has just seemed like tragedy after tragedy for the past few years. I personally am looking for a little rest, and to not be so beaten in the face all the time by existence. JR: This Is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You is an autobiographical novel set partly in San Diego. Can you talk about your San Diego roots? When the most important person in James’s life moves to New York, despite being surrounded by people, a deep loneliness presides. It’s a loneliness that we have all felt in the past years, living in a world where our social circles, however tight-knit or wide-spread, were suddenly ripped from us and replaced by electronic facsimiles of our friendships. It’s clear that this novel was written during the COVID-19 pandemic and gives voice to the sudden universal mourning present in these last few years for a life that will never be the same.