I've been weird. I'm in europe. I'm in a tiny room with the shades closed and i was inbed all day. i tried to learn things and make things and was mostly unsatisfied. I couldn't get a job this summer. I got my wisdom teeth pulled and saw people when they asked me to. I organized everything. No further loose ends except the really long term stuff like career and aspirations. Hopes and dreams.
I got a reminder today to write something reminding this platform i exist. i'm mostly off instagram now and i've mostly tried to ease myself back into a state of absorption instead of like secreting goopy content all over the place. but this is like the real end of the album stuff: deleted scenes. Also selling these super special cds which were fun to make i have a video on youtube scheduled for soon about that.
So like six months ago I talked with my friend Henry about the album and we recorded it...
Talking about myself is most of what I've been doing with this Eli Orion project for a very long time now, and I know doing things for other people is more fulfilling so I'd like to try to do that after I'm like done done with the rollout stuff I have planned (we're almost there I promise). But first here is an hour of me talking about myself.
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:
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.
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.
I’m not a kid anymore and it’s scary to experience my mind, body, and soul solidifying. Not that literally everyone else hasn’t experienced the exact same feeling. But I guess that’s why I wrote this song: an epilogue to the book of Everything.
I returned to my family home in December observing most of my behavior through a lens of addiction. Most of my interactions with the world (food, phone, people) were out of a desire to escape the general helplessness I felt. Obviously engaging in this way leads to further loss of control over one's life. But it's really easy not to be the one in charge.
I returned to school in January and committed myself to get these goddamn songs out, whatever the cost. I stayed up working on visuals, web design, and content. I slept weirdly and permanently lost some of the definition to my eyesight from such extended periods at my laptop. I felt my hairline receding. I barely ever went out of my way to see friends. My unwise priorities caused me even more stress than before, but I was in control.
Idk how to continue this story so I'm just gonna say I'm eternally grateful to:
Everyone who helped me share my music with people this year: Hana Ramos, Isaac Corby, Tyler Busse, Blake Young, Tyler Donnelly, Tashi Litch, Ben Lewis, Quintin Fernandez, Cassidy Anderson, Henry Hale, and Maika Lansing
My friends who don't care that I'm always very obnoxiously telling everyone to listen to my stuff—I get to share life (obviously including but not exclusively limited to music) with you
Anyone who discovered what I make without knowing me and liked it enough to stay and listen for a while
Whether letting go of harmful habits or the stress of personal expectations (developing a fulfilling career, releasing high-quality music, maintaining meaningful relationships, etc.), laying down all baggage to take steps in a new direction appeals to me, especially in moments when everything’s so incredibly heavy.
This is a very special song to me. Like a Christmas carol. Like a sequel to Deserve..
I don't plan to be very active online from August-January. So this is likely the last you'll hear for a while. I have done a lot of prep to make this release special. I mean I guess if a couple videos count as special.
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:
On the afternoon of May 17th, 2024, I went for a walk in the rain. I may have skipped an important lesson in my Data Structures class about some kind of Binary Search Tree. But there were like real trees outside in the rain when I was walking.
No actually there were cars and streets and stoplights but it was still fun and worth it. I walked a few feet down the road to Eroding Winds, where I met Seth and handed him a couple Compact Discs I'd received in the mail. I then walked a few thousand more feet down a few more roads to Odd Note, where I met Amos and gave him a couple more Compact Discs.
I got these little selfies with them on my digital camera. Pretty fun!On the evening of May 17th, 2024, my album, Everything You Didn't Want to Hear, was officially set loose upon the internet. This has been my most core life project for the past few years, and I've taken on a big push to show it to people this spring. It brings me such joy to share these songs with people and to know that sharing these songs with people brings them joy. And that's some funny grammar basically.
On the evening of May 18th, 2024, my band, The Everything, and I played an hour-long set of these tunes in a basement of our house for a great turnout of friends and peers and people I'd never met before (wow!), opened by Danny Ricc with his band Crash Box, an indie pop act about which I am "stoked".
On the afternoon of May 26th, 2024, my band The Everything, and I played a 30-minute set of these tunes in the rain on stage at LUaroo, Lawrence University's student music festival. I also played with a few other bands, notably Lyle's Tree, a rock band led by my bandmate Hana Ramos. And we both agreed that weekend we felt very present during our shows—how fulfilling! For sure a top-5 musical performance ever for me.
And that's actually pretty much it for now. I still have one more song unreleased, waiting for you guys: a special treat this summer once I've gotten through all the music videos and other content about this album that I want to share. And then it's on to the next. I'm in MN this summer. I'll record a song or two and go to open mics and the gym and get better at coding. I go to Amsterdam this fall. I'll practice my instruments a lot and learn about the world and society from new perspectives. And I'll come back in the winter. The Everything have some very special plans in store in the coming year. But that's a story for another day. Thanks for sticking around. We'll be in touch sooner than you might expect.
