We Are All That We Need

When I wrote this song, I knew that it was time to start putting together another album. 

https://www.reverbnation.com/zachsands/song/32385533-we-are-all-that-we-need

You could call this my quarantine anthem. 

I might be done mastering this album...

As always, you can hear my most recently polished tracks here. Press the play button beneath the album title to play the tracks continuously, otherwise it will only play one at a time. No advertisements, either.

I'll come back to it in a few days. If I still think it sounds good, then I will officially be done producing this album. I'll also burn another CD of it and make sure it passes the car speaker test. 

Thank you for listening to my music. If you like it, please share it. That's why I wrote it.  

Lyrics

I updated my lyrics page to include the songs from Embers (2021) as well. You can find lyrics to all five of my solo albums here.

Cumulatively, over the past five years, I have written and recorded fifty-four songs, totaling almost twelve thousand words. No wonder I forget a line from one of my songs every once in a while. I suppose that's why we practice. 

UPDATE: I'm now up to sixty-five songs and about seventeen thousand words... due in part to the fact that I like a good challenge.

Mastering

I am still mastering the new songs, but I think they're coming along. As part of my production process, I upload new versions as I go so that I can then listen to them on different devices. The other day, I had the entire album sounding great on my headphones and monitors, but then when I burnt a CD of it to play in my car, it was really bass heavy. That same mix, when I played it through the shitty little speaker on my tablet, all that was coming through clearly was the mids. 

As someone who is self-taught in all of this stuff, this is more or less my understanding of the mastering process: keep fine-tuning the songs until they sound as good as possible (within the realistic limitations of DIY home recording) through whatever speakers I play them through. I read a long time ago that this was how Frank Zappa did it. His theory was that once an album sounded good through even the worst system, then he knew that it was done. While I've admittedly never really gotten into Zappa's music, I've always thought that this approach made a lot of sense. 

In any case, if you want to follow along as I continue to master these songs, I'm uploading new versions usually at least once a day, sometimes more. You can witness firsthand the evolution of this album here, as I continue to take it as far as I can with the equipment I've got. Frankly, mastering seems like a misnomer, since this is one of those things that I don't know that you can never truly master, considering that the process and the products are themselves part of a constantly evolving enterprise. I will say, however, that the more I do this stuff (while, of course, learning as I go), the more pleased I tend to be with the ultimate result. I hope you like it, too.   

Songwriting in the Time of Covid-19

Like most of you, I am more than ready for this pandemic to be relegated to the history books. However, as someone who also recognizes the need to follow safety protocols for the good of civilization, I've pretty much been holed up for the past ten months, only leaving the house for necessities. 

Before the pandemic, I used to perform about once a month at a place down the road from me that hosted an open mic. Every once in a while, I would headline a weekend show. Now, of course, the idea of sharing a microphone with anyone is something akin to sharing a toothbrush. No thanks.

 

In fact, most of the songs on my previous four albums were written to be performed in solo acoustic sets. As such, they were almost all guitar-driven and relatively simple. While the album versions of many of these songs might be a little more complex, they are all still very recognizable in their simplest form when it's just me and my acoustic guitar on stage.  

The pandemic has influenced my approach to songwriting on my newest album, as the circumstances have permitted me to think more broadly in terms of the instrumentation that I employ in my compositions. Not every song had to be reduced to a chord progression on acoustic guitar and still make sense. In this regard, you could say that being stuck inside opened up some doors for me.

Black Ribbon Day and Parallel Lines started as banjo riffs. Original Miles and We Are All That We Need were both written on piano, and Quicksand is the first song that I've ever written on baritone guitar. I also have one song in dropped D, and another where the G string is also brought down to an F#. 

In contrast, on my 2019 album, Better Days, I gave myself strict parameters to work within: everything is in 4/4 time, it's all played on the same guitar (even the bass lines, thanks to an octave pedal) and there are no lead parts or miscellaneous instruments thown in. There were other self-imposed limitations, but you get the idea. 

On Embers (official version coming soon), I gave myself no such barriers. Consequently, the album as a whole is probably the most genre-defying work that I've done, as each track is really presented in its own style. I let the songs tell me what they wanted to be, and this album is ultimately the result. 

You can hear the unmastered tracks here. Once I finish mastering them, high-resolution versions of all the songs will be available via online distributors such as Spotify and Apple Music to purchase or stream.

Thanks for listening.