Meanwhile, At the Hall of Justice...

Today's songs that I would like to share with you both come from prior albums. If you follow the news at all, you might know why these songs seem appropriate. If you don't keep up with what's happening in the world, maybe you should. Just don't confuse hysteria inducing propaganda with actual journalism. One is meant to uncover the truth, while the other only serves to obfuscate it.

If something feels true, sometimes it just means that you're being manipulated. Here is a website that specializes in fact-checking. It's kind of all they do, so if they were to cease being accurate with these things, then it would be rather self-defeating in terms of their business model. (Please note that I don't mean to endorse this site so much as simply point people toward an objective truth. Think of this as a good place to start.) 

The first of today's songs is called Gravity, from my 2019 album Better Days. It's about a certain family of grifters who seemed hell-bent on destroying our democracy. Here is the Spotify link, but you should be able to find my songs wherever you get your music.

    They'd better start bracing for impact

    Because it's a long way down

    Don't think they're going to stay intact

    They'll break when they hit the ground    

    And they are going down... like gravity

The second is called Panic Attack. It comes from my 2017 album Mechanical Bull, and here it is on Spotify.

    No one knows what's supposed to happen next

    So we just keep our fingers crossed and keep hoping for the best

    But I know if we unite

    Then together we can fight

    Everything we know is wrong

    We don't have to play along anymore

As an added bonus, here are two articles that I wrote in 2017, which might provide some additional context. I like to believe that in the United States, no one is above the law. 

You can also hear my newest album, Petrichor (2021), in its entirety at the link below:

If you like what I'm doing, please share it... and don't forget to add my music to your playlists. This is how my songs find their way onto automatically generated playlists and streaming radio stations.  

Thank you for listening to my songs and reading my blog. You're the real rock stars. I'm just a guy who writes words, sometimes with musical accompaniment.  

Anybody Want a Peanut?

Some of my favorite rhymes from Petrichor (2021) are as follows:

"...here, it meant" and "...experiment" from Rat Race.

"...like seeds in the breeze from a dandelion" and "...make mead from weeds and we fly on" in Dandelion Wine (If Only...).

    and

"...these plastic flowers have magic powers" from Plastic Flowers. 

    [embedded links on this post all go to Spotify]

That is all. Thanks for listening.

Untested Songs

Happy Friday to my fans, casual listeners, and people who fell into some kind of internet wormhole and ended up here. Welcome to what I do.  

I was just reflecting upon the fact that I have never played any of the songs from my past two albums in front of a live audience, because I wrote them both during quarantine. Also, a lot of these songs are structured around instruments other than guitar. As a solo artist, that makes playing them live a little more complicated, especially if you consider that I usually ride my bicycle. I'm basically limited to a single instrument that I can strap to my back, which is pretty much always a guitar.

However, Black Ribbon Day, for example, was built around a banjo riff. In fact, it happens to be the first banjo song for which I ever wrote lyrics. It's about the day that the people of the Baltic states symbolically declared their independence from the USSR by holding hands between their capital cities. It is my second most streamed song on Spotify, next to Original Miles--also from Embers (2021).

Petals in the Grass, from Petrichor (2021) is built around the bassline. As you can likely imagine, it sounds quite a bit different when I play it on acoustic guitar. This song is based on the first 16mm film that I ever made. It was a 2 1/2 minute silent, black and white movie about a guy pulling petals off a flower, cross-cut with a woman walking toward him. She loves me, she loves me not, etc. By the time she almost reaches him, he tears off the final petal and the woman disappears. Fin.

In film school, I knew some people who majored in being pretentious. I might have been one of them. 

Enjoy the music, as well as the weekend. If you like what I'm doing, please share it.

Thank you for supporting independent art. 

Screen Dreams

The songs that I would like to share with you today are two of my favorites from Petrichor (officially released last week). These songs happen to have been written and recorded one immediately after the other over a period of about three days, all part of my most prolific week of songwriting to date. With both tracks, I recorded most of the music before I even started to work on lyrics. That's a little different from my usual approach, but in this case, it seems to have worked. See what you think.

The first song is called Dandelion Wine (If Only...). It's about making the most of what you've got. When I wrote the song, I imagined that I was at a wedding that took place at a park and that I hardly knew anyone there--but the more I daydreamed, the more I enjoyed myself. I've never actually had dandelion wine, nor do I really even drink wine, but in my mind's eye, I was sipping it from a disposable cup, wearing a dark brown suit that blended in with the wooden wall behind me.

The second song also basically started as a music video from within the strange depths of my imagination. It's called Rat Race. For this one, I pictured an office worker in a makeshift rat costume, accompanied by lots of shots that reveal the cubicles to be set up like a maze. Meanwhile, the "experiment" is being watched over by executives and mad scientists who seem to care very little for the subjects. In terms of the aesthetic, I'm imagining the 1990s American kids' show Beakman's World. 

If anybody out there does want to make a video for any of my songs, I'd love to see it. 

In fact, as a former film student myself, I would like to offer any of my sixty-five available songs for use in student and non-profit/low-budget films. As long as the filmmakers aren't promoting hatred, bigotry, or anything of the sort, I am happy to share my music for use in motion picture soundtracks. For what it's worth, I also have hours of unreleased instrumental stuff that I've recorded over the years.

Contact me by way of this blog if you have a project for which you might like to use one of my songs. Basically, pitch the premise to me, and as long as your movie isn't promoting ignorance, intolerance or exclusion, then there is a very good chance that I will be fine with it, in which case I can even send you a high-resolution copy of the song along with a limited agreement for its use. 

Furthermore, if you know of any aspiring filmmakers who may want to use my songs in their work, please send them a link to this blog post. I would also be willing to score a film or video project with original music if offered reasonable compensation for my work. 

As always, thank you for supporting independent art. If I might be able to do the same through the use of my music, then I am more than happy to oblige.

The Bottomless Pit

When I finished working on Petrichor, a part of me felt compelled to keep working on music, so I started remastering a couple of my old songs, just for fun. I wanted to see if I could make them sound better, as I probably know a bit more about mixing and mastering than I did four years ago. 

Once I realized that the answer was yes, I stopped, as I knew that this was a bottomless pit. Yes, I can make these songs sound better, but where does it stop? As I was remixing one of the songs, I started thinking about recording a new vocal track for it. I think my voice has improved somewhat over the past four years, and I've certainly learned a few tricks along the way in terms of my production process. 

However, I think that once it's out there in the world, it is what it is. 

Besides, if I let myself fall into this pit, it wouldn't be long before I was starting each song from scratch and adding new parts to the composition. If I was to do that, then I might as well bring in other musicians and sound engineers to help. At that point, it becomes another project altogether.

Every album that I have written and produced over the past four years was not only a record of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century, but also a time capsule of my abilities as an independent artist. It is what it is, which is all it could be at the time, and so it shall remain. 

I prefer to look forward, only looking back to see what I can learn. 

To that end, I think that a person can more or less gauge how much they have grown as an artist and technician based on how much their older work makes them cringe. I still like all of my songs, mind you, but while I do enjoy playing them, I admit that some of the recordings are easier to listen to than others.

In many ways, my first three albums were a time-stamped record of me figuring how how to do this. Every subsequent album has been more of the same, but I like to think that the production value improves with each one, at least incrementally.     

See what you think... but if you do, start with my newer stuff. Petrichor just came out last week and is available to stream or purchase wherever you get your music. Personally, I think it's some of my best work yet.

Thank you for supporting independent art.