Everything will circle back around

Hey all! As of my writing this, it's been a month since the album came out. If I were to fit a mold in certain ways I don't want to right now, I might say something like, "I know the me from two years ago with a couple demos on his laptop and a couple big dreams would be so proud if he could see this music now," but I'm glad it took all the effort it did to get this music where it is now, and I wouldn't ever want to see what the music I'm conceptualizing now will look like in two years. I'm trying to make things for the process. Cause I love making things. And revealing the product (finished album, tight performances, etc.) is fruitless. The fruit is not the product. The fruit is getting to look back on all the work that went into it not knowing where it would go and say it went somewhere yay.

But like idk speaking of two years ago...............

In February 2022, I dropped out of college. I felt directionless. But somehow I managed to make this sketch of an extraordinarily carefree fun song, which I released as "slog_1," the first in a series of what I decided to label "song-logs." Without nearly any motivation it was super hard to finish things, and these pieces were meant to keep me feeling okay with not finishing or polishing stuff, and instead just going and making the thing and then once I got tired of it saying "ok it's done here it is, internet." The following slogs 2 and 3 descended into exponential despondency as I became increasingly depressed.

In March 2022, I took all my music off the internet (most significantly an album called Memory Sea which is still up in some places but not on streaming cause I want to keep only my best work there and I kinda made that project a long time ago with a lot less experience than I have now). I felt like all my work writing and recording music meant nothing because people did not care about it or enjoy it. That's kinda screwed up, right? I should want to make things because it feels good not because people look at it and say "that is good. keep making." I'd really lost any sense of self and I think I valued others' opinions of me too much in comparison to my own. I'm still fixing that balance and, often, I realize I'm valuing my own perspectives too much these days.

In April 2022, I started to feel like something had to change. I'd begun to regain some inspiration, but I wasn't ready to focus on anything long-term yet. I continued the "slog" series with a piece inspired by the "dariacore" genre, which had begun to blossom within the online scenes I followed. The next two were covers.

In May 2022, I decided I wanted to finish things. I started this video series to try and motivate myself to create with some consistency cause everybody says that's where the best inspiration comes from and they were right. Some of my best songs, and foundational pieces of this album (Rebound Baby, Who Needs?, Deserve) came out of this process. Upon jumping into this project, I had no conception of the energy, time, and CPU it takes to edit long-form content. It took me until the beginning of last summer. So obviously, by the third installation, I'd given up. Momentum had been found, though, and I didn't need the videos to keep me rolling on the goal of an album. I promised myself I wouldn't release the vlogs, though, until the album was out. And now it is. So here's my cut-short attempt at weekly vlogging!

Oh, and remember slog-1? I finished it. It's called Right Track. This is a pretty full-circle moment, considering that draft was the first thing from the album I put into the world and this video is the final piece of the story. Ok here it is: