Apologies

Story time! It was February 2022 and I'd dropped out of college. I was very sad. I spent many nights in the basement making songs on my guitar and laptop. One of these nights I literally had the first idea for the title track and I tried to write the entire whole thing and there was a glimmer of "album..! maybe either of these songs could be a monumental track from the next big project..." but I got frustrated and not very far at all so I decided to make a totally different song about all the sad things in my life making it hard to feel fulfilled. Here it is:

Eli Orion · The Microphones Are Watching

I think the vision for Everything You Didn't Want to Hear was far outside my wheelhouse at the time, and upon reflection, it's super gratifying that I made that song (and the whole project) work as well as it did... proves some kind of progress and improvement for me.

Obviously, later on that spring, the slog_ thing and my 100 days debacle mark important moments but I think that night was really the conception of Everything You Didn't Want to Hear. I have realized that not only is freewriting words important, but so it is musically. And, though I'd done a lot of that on instruments, I began to do more on the computer as well.

Over the next few years, as I continued to accrue material for the album, I also collected these songs where I just went with the gut and thought later. The coolest stuff from the album (Diesel, Rewind, etc.) came out of that process. These are the more intimate, never-album-readiness-finished songs. The collection is called Apologies and it is only on SoundCloud.

Eli Orion · Apologies

I promise this is the second to last time I'll talk about the past—there's one more piece of the puzzle left for September. But by the time you see this, I'll be wrapping up tracking on some songs you might hear this winter.