Happy Friday to my fans, casual listeners and random stumblers upon this site.
Today's songs that I would like to share with you are my personal favorites from each of my albums. Click on the song titles to open them in Spotify or click on the embedded links to play them through YouTube. If you use a different streaming service, you should be able to find these songs there as well.
In today's songs that I'd like to share with you, the album recordings were all played primarily on my teenage kid's $250 Casio keyboard:
Original Miles is by far my most played song to date on Spotify, with over fifty thousand streams and counting. It comes fromEmbers (2021), the album that I released in January. Both the main electric piano part, as well as the bassline, were both played on the aforementioned keyboard, pictured above.
Next is Holiday, from Petrichor (2021), which I released in June. Same story in terms of how it came into being. In case you were wondering, petrichor is the word for the smell of fresh rain. It's kind of an ugly word for what it is, but it seemed an appropriate name for this album. If Embers is about destructive endings and nebulous beginnings (which it is), then Petrichor is nature washing away the dirt to expose the intrinsic beauty within.
Finally, here is Haunted (2021), also from Petrichor, and also played almost entirely on that same keyboard.
Art is what you make of it. As an added bonus to support this idea, here's the no-budget feature-length documentary that I made about fifteen years ago:
(Special thanks to Ryan Walker for carrying a lot of the weight in editing this thing.)
As always, thank you for supporting independent art. If you like what I'm doing, please share it. Then go make your own art with whatever you've got. Everyone has something to contribute to the discourse of what it means to be human, and I tend to believe that we're all better off because of it.
Other than the time a couple of months ago that I played a few songs for my friend and his two kids, I have not played a live show since before the pandemic. In an effort to help rectify this, I played a set of original music in the back room of my mom's house the other day. These are all stripped-down acoustic versions of fifteen songs spanning all six of my self-produced albums that I have released in the past five years:
I hope you like it. If you do, please share it. Thanks for listening.
[Note: I am not left-handed, nor does South America look like that. I thought that I could correct the mirror effect on my phone's front-facing lens after I uploaded it to YouTube, but this was not the case.]
I just spent most of the afternoon entering all of my lyrics and metadata into genius.com, which is supposed to make it available to link with Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services. I think it takes a little while before it connects the lyrics with my songs, but hopefully at some point in the near future, when streaming my music on various platforms, you should be able to make the lyrics appear with whatever song you are listening to. That's the idea, anyway.
In the meantime, here are a few songs for which I am particularly proud of the lyrics.
Next, we have Gravel Roads, from my 2017 album Weather Patterns. The rhyme scheme of the first part of the second to last verse is actually identical to that of the first verse:
Got a photograph, a worn out map, a compass on the dash...
Finally, here is Rat Race, from my most recent album, Petrichor (2021):
If you find your way out of here, it meant
There's no controlling the experiment
Thanks for listening. If you like what I'm doing, please share it.
Today's song that I would like to share with you is called Quicksand, from the album Embers (2021). It's about depression, and how it's something that we all fundamentally experience alone, which only makes it more difficult to endure.
I don't expect you to understand
How it feels to be swimming in quicksand
The underlying message is this: no matter how bad things may seem at a particular moment, whatever it is, eventually it will get better. Everybody's life sucks at one point or another, but then, before you know it, things aren't quite so shitty anymore. Sometimes you have to be patient with yourself, though, as to struggle against the quicksand can prove to be self-defeating. You also have to be careful not to pull other people in there with you.
This was the first song that I ever wrote on baritone guitar. To be perfectly honest, I'm not thrilled with the way that the vocals came out on this one, but I think it's about the best I could do with what I've got. Part of it was not knowing how to mix the various tracks properly, as it's got a lot more low end on here than I do on most of my songs and not much to fill in the upper part of the sound spectrum. One of the pros and cons of DIY recording is that I tend to learn by doing.
Continuing with a certain theme, today's B-track is called Don't Forget Who You Are, from my 2017 album Good Night, Fahrenheit. It's about the things we wish we could say to the people that we'll probably never see again, and about how old friends are always with us, because they helped shape the people that we become. This also happens to be one of my favorite songs to perform live.
Don't forget who you are... is unforgettable to me
