Phantom Lake: Northern Gothic 3 is the final installment of the trilogy which began in 2002 with Northern Gothic and Box of Secrets: Northern Gothic 2 in 2007. For this album Laura Weller introduced the idea of writing songs inspired by childhood in a neighborhood called Phantom Lake. Jeff Kelly also drew from youth, remembering the grey skies and endless evergreens on trips to Lost Lake, near Shelton, Washington, as well as many vacations to the Washington coast. These are the same landscapes that populated the songs on the previous Northern Gothic albums. This is a dark album. It is about obsession and sorrow and murder and too much whisky. The characters that permeate these songs exist in the shadows, often in the margins of society. These lost souls of the northern gothic world of Phantom Lake remind us of what it is to be human.