It Doesn’t Have to be Good

Day one. The blank page. 29 tracks ahead of me. 696 hours in which to drag music out of the aether. Sigh. I don’t have a strong recollection of the instrumental portion of this track. It’s made up of mostly usual suspect synths like Pigments, Omnisphere, and Hive, and clearly sounds like one of my “just keep throwing things in there until it’s soup” recipes. Another Completely Successful Exercise in Planning and Self Restraint. … Continue reading

That’s a(nother) Wrap

Amazing. It’s almost April and I’m just now getting around to writing this wrap-up post. The reasons are valid, but unimportant. Notably, we didn’t have a post-February Zoom call, and I normally wait until after that so I can incorporate any feedback into my summary. I missed chatting with everyone about our voluntary shared trauma. But here we are. The February highs and lows are rapidly fading. I’ve gotten some sleep and done some critical … Continue reading

Mare Tranquillitatis

Having finished yesterday’s track relatively early in the day, and with just one song left in the month, I decided to take the night off and enjoy the evening with Mary. As a result, this is the first day all month that I’ve woken up and still had a blank slate in front of me. After asking Mary for any final genre requests, I decided … Continue reading

Theme from a Sitcom You Never Saw

Because I write in a wide variety of styles, I get a lot of “you should do a [$GENRE] song!” Sometimes these are intriguing challenges, and sometimes I have to politely say, “hey, yeah, maybe,” while internally knowing that it will never happen either because I don’t have any clue how to do it, or because I know that the end result probably isn’t going to be as satisfying as the person thinks it will … Continue reading

I Cannot Breathe

To really go into where this song came from would require me to be very overt about explaining its meaning. Because I feel I was relatively successful in creating lyrics that had multiple interpretations, I’m not going to go into it, but suffice to say that my emotional state was one of feeling angry, frustrated, and helpless. Channeling these emotional states is one of the blessings of music. It’s a cathartic process that sometimes exorcises … Continue reading