In the Key of K

This album has rock songs, punk rock songs, hard rock songs, heavy metal songs, a death metal song, a love song, several weird philosophical songs including one that has a random drum solo in the middle, songs about travel and loss, and an anti-consumerism christmas song. Some don’t rhyme and some don’t have choruses. There are quiet parts, loud parts, ups and down, terrible guitar solos, time changes, and tempo fluctuations. It’s a great time if you like weird stuff, dissonance, and monsters under the bed.

My new album, Volume 1, 1997, was written and recorded in a time when you thought about the album esthetic (to be fair, this is still done today but vast majority of marketing opportunities are geared towards selling one single at a time). I wrote a bunch of songs and started recording them and, as things coalesced, I started planning on how all the pieces should fit together. The idea is to create a listening experience that goes beyond the single–maybe making all the songs work together as one giant composition. There are no “hit singles” on this album. This isn’t pop music. I don’t want or need a producer to make things more listenable or editorialize my ideas. I’m not trying to write music for YOU. I’m writing music for ME. If you like it we can vibe together but I am 100% certain you won’t like it all. Even I have mixed feelings about some of my work. But, at the end of the day, I own it and love it, warts and all.

In 1997, as some of the songs began to take shape, I started to see what the songs were going to be when they were finished–this one is will be fast, this one slower, this one heavy, this one clean, etc. So I prioritized the order of finishing them once I selected the album order. The other songs were shelved for the next album (where I did the same thing, basically). It is not a novel concept that you should not get two fast punk rock songs in a row but spread them out and intersperse the ideas to create an experience. I don’t mind listening to an album where everything is the same tempo, the same intensity, the same way of singing but it often bores me and it is NOT what my music is or will be.

This album was conceived to be a cassette tape. When I used to listen to music on my walkman I would almost always finish one side before I stopped listening. (technically it should called ‘portable cassette player’–Walkman was a brand I never owned but back then we tended to call them all ‘walkman’ or we would just say ‘headphones’). When I arranged the songs for this album, I did it for my listening preference. So side one is more like one song with six parts. Similarly, side two was thought of as one song with five parts. The christmas song was originally a ‘hidden’ track not on the album insert and never really fit in thematically–it is an added extra for fun. I think it originally closed out side one but I can’t be sure because the original master tape is fragile. Fewer than 50 copies of this were ever made back in the 90s but if anyone has the tape let me know where the christmas song was! It was randomly added because there was enough space on that side of the cassette and I considered it a throw-away song.

Side one:
Sticks to Stones
Sleep Well
160
Love, Love, Love
NS
Moving On

Side two:
The Dog’s Thorne
Mood Swings
Verse to Verse
The Reign on the Parade
Single File
I Love Christmas!

I took the album asthetic to the extreme on my album Deliver (published in 2007 but it is currently out of print) all of the songs sort of intertwine as stories within stories and each one is in a different key–in that case the album order was chosen so that the keys move in chromatic order. It was the CD era with early streaming. There are also numerous layered contexts and hidden messages and meanings all over that album. For this album, ten years earlier, I didn’t do nearly that much. The technology wouldn’t allow it and I wasn’t thinking in that way yet.

Deliver needs some vocal editing before I can re-release it. Which will be a challenge because the hard drive with the master recordings was erased after it was mixed and mastered. Here is where AI can do some good. I’ve tested a few tracks with Moises and they separate really cleanly so at some point I will hopefully re-release it. Needless to say, I am not a great vocalist but it is fun and part of the vision. I’m in a place now where I can take time to do it the best I can.

Over all, Volume 1, 1997 is as much of a mess as 21 year old me at the time–that is to say, very messy.

Link tree to all places!