Ten Days
My album comes out in ten days. If you follow me anywhere, you’ve seen the posts. I hope they’re super annoying by now.
But the frequency and energy of my posting comes from a place of excitement. This record was just a monumental effort to put together and to get out into the world. Almost none of that is because of the global pandemic and economic instability we’ve been chilling with the last few months.
Rather, the delays and the struggles were wrought from my own self doubt and a seemingly endless stream of new ideas for the same songs. Once you’ve played something that you’ve written enough times, it grows dull and the parts that were once exciting to play sound shitty. You come up with ways to change it and make it interesting again, almost like that coat of varnish on homemade furniture. It adds enough to the underlying structure to feel fresh. Every musician that I know does this. I consider it the first step in writing a good song (which I very much hope to do someday).
Over the course of 2018 and 2019, I wrote a bunch of music.
Alot of it was terrible.
And I tried my best to chronicle some of that process on my instagram and in this blog. I was sitting in my office, and playing on the same acoustic guitar, with which I had written the last four albums, and I was sounding tired. The words were reflective of some of my most difficult internal struggles and yet, the instrument wasn’t matching up with those feelings.
The dichotomy was difficult and resulted in me setting aside a bunch of songs and just not playing them enough to get past the initial draft.
Then, as luck would have it, NPR had a contest thing and I was encouraged by my buddy, Broderick, to submit a video. We did this:
And it was a BLAST. I was playing with a relatively new electric guitar that I’d just picked up, and was enamored. I have wanted a Fender Jazzmaster ever since I found out that Brand New’s Jesse Lacey played one. The sound I was able to get from it filled the hole that echoed so loudly and terribly in the songs I’d been writing.
So when working with this new energy and learning how to goof around on an electric guitar, I listened to ALOT of good stuff on a pretty steady rotation. I wanted to share some of the songs that got me through what was a truly difficult couple of years and inspired big chunks of this album. I hope you enjoy these artists as much as I do. The Front Bottoms in particular were cathartic and a welcome reprieve as I drove around aimlessly for many depressed evenings.
Thanks for listening to me, and I hope you dig the album. Pre-save it here: https://show.co/Qxt4E6p
That link unlocks the music video for Lumineers, the first track on the album. I’ll have another blog about that video and stuff soon.
ANDDDD
Here’s the playlist if ya want to give it a listen. These tracks helped me a ton, maybe you’ll dig em.
In ten days, I drop the record. I’m very thankful for you all.